HOFFMAN’S BREAK-ACTING

Fair Arts

Theater

ACTOR Dustin Hoffman is compact and battle-fit, yet he’s always nosing up against difficult barriers, probing, testing—stretching. Tense and selfcompetitive, Hoffman seems to love tinkering with his talent, screwing in new components, filing his nuances down to a toothed edge. After triumphing over falsies and panty hose in Tootsie, Hoffman must have felt primed for a new challenge, a new change of skin, and so into Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman he’s gone, plastering back his hair with gray and grooving his face with brown lines of worry for the role of Willy Loman. In Miller’s 1949 drama (which is being housed in New York on a limited run until June 10), capitalism is a heartless jungle where the walking wounded limp their way to the elephants’ graveyard with a suitcase full of rocks as a lone flute whistles through the leaves. But Hoffman isn’t a noble bloat of ruin, as Lee J. Cobb and George C. Scott were in the part. Hoffman’s Willy has kept up trim appearances, and there’s still an avid bounce to his heels. “A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man,” says Willy’s wife, Linda (Kate Reid), and Hoffman uses his own lack of height to express a smal 1 man ’ s nervous, fussing fatigue. Willy Loman’s name is, of course, symbolic—Loman, as in ‘‘low man on the totem pole”—and Hoffman frequently raises his arms in a protective spasm, as if warding off blows from tall phantoms. And when his forehead smacks against the truth, his eyes do a cartoon pop and stars seem to spin above his head. Yet Hoffman’s Loman is more than a comic ditherer shuffling through the kitchen in his slippers. He’s a baffled, chronic sufferer whose innards are pickled with hurt and fury. Pint-size as Hoffman is, his rages as Willy Loman carry enough blast to disperse the clouds. This baby has lung power.

Lung power is needed to blow away some of the sanctified dust that has settled on this play in the last thirty-five years. If Death of a Salesman is a classic of the American stage, it’s a square classic, full of homey wisdom and forlorn smoke curls of nostalgia. It’s hardly a subtle play, either; it makes its points with a rolling pin. One of the strange things about seeing Death of a Salesman now is noting how many of its furnishings and motifs have been appropriated by TV. The plain bare table and faulty icebox of the Loman kitchen ended up in Ralph Kramden’s apartment on The Honeymooners, and Loman’s method of shushing his wife was taken over by Archie Bunker on All in the Family (“Stifle, Edith, stifle. ..”). Under Michael Rudman’s direction, this Death of a Salesman moves with a quick pulse that at times comes too close to sitcom twitchiness, and there are slapdash lapses. True to the inflections of the text, Hoffman plays Loman as Jewish, but Kate Reid sounds Irish, and Ben (Louis Zorich), with his cream-white suit and corn-pone sonorities, seems to have wandered in from a different play—a play where the characters drink mint juleps on the veranda. As Willy’s carousing, lunkish son Happy, Stephen Lang is a bit too beefy and geewhiz. The production also has its cheering surprises. David Huddleston, a weighty actor familiar from movies and TV, is a comic wonder as Willy’s sane, put-upon neighbor, doing a hilarious little waggle with his arms when Willy tells him to put up his dukes and fight. There’s a largely unexplored vein of laconic humor in Miller’s work (it’s there in The Price, in the appraiser’s mischievous speeches), and Huddleston, droll and commonsensical, taps it clean. But even he can’t breathe conviction into the requiem, where he’s forced to eulogize Willy as “a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine.” Arthur Miller’s lyricism could make a lumberjack blush.

The play is at its most clashing and intense when Willy squares off with his troubled son Biff, played by the acclaimed young actor John Malkovich. He seems a touch too young to play the thirty-four-year-old Biff, and like Eric Roberts he has a tendency to stammer and syrup his vowels. But he does have the right air of vague, poetic bewilderment—his brow looks sensitive and exposed, a clouded pane of glass that the slightest pebble could shatter. Yet, like Hoffman, he has cavernous reserves of wind and anger. Although Biff says at Willy’s grave that ‘‘he never knew who he was,” Willy’strue tragic failing is that he’s the world’s worst listener; he and Biff talk constantly at cross-purposes, Willy always failing to clam up long enough to take anything in. Ironically, the one quiet moment in which they do achieve communion is the moment that splits them forever. It’s the scene in which Biff comes upon his father with the Woman in Boston (Kathy Rossetter) and realizes that the man he’s idealized from Day One is a lying adulterer. As Biff weepily collapses onto his suitcase, Willy tries to batten down his betrayed feelings, and the scene is all the more poignant because Hoffman is so much smaller than Malkovich—there’s no way this Willy’s arms can fully contain his son’s grief. The swell of Biffs unhappiness is too large to be sheltered by his father’s embrace. It’s this spilling over of inconsolable feeling that saves Death from being a museum piece, and lingers long after the mournful gnashings of the requiem have brought down the curtain.

Until I saw Dustin Hoffman’s performance, I didn’t realize that the key to Willy Loman was not all that bluster about ‘ ‘attention must be paid” or those Millerish outbursts of manly strife (father against son, brother against brother), but that little kickup he does in the kitchen about his infernal icebox. ‘‘Whoever heard of a Hastings refrigerator?” he fumes. ‘‘Once in my life I would like to own something outright before it’s broken! I’m always in a race with the junkyard! I just finished paying for the car and it’s on its last legs. The refrigerator consumes belts like a goddam maniac. They time those things. They time them so when you finally paid for them, they’re used up.” Dustin Hoffman in Death of a Salesman is not a man worn down but a man so wound up that he’s about to pop a few springs. “The pure products of America / go crazy,” wrote William Carlos Williams, and Willy himself is a faulty, lowbrand-name American product that goes kerflooie just as the warranty expires. The coup in Hoffman’s performance is that he shows us the soul of this damaged machine, the rattle of its inner workings. It’s breakacting he does, a herky-jerky isolation of character down to its rusting parts. Toting those suitcases loaded with stones, Dustin Hoffman has rescued Death of a Salesman from the shallows of its red-blooded humanism.

James Wolcott