The brassy actor’s performance in Death of a Salesman is the crown jewel in a life spent on stage. He says it could be his last Broadway role
“It’s, like, 10 minutes. I pee, I have a cup of tea, I put the jacket back on and I go out and fight my way to the death.”
The way Nathan Lane describes spending the intermission of Death of a Salesman – the nearly three-hour play in which his character flails and ultimately fails through an epic depression – reflects the actor’s own spirit: practical, lightly fatalistic, artfully hyperbolic and very, very funny. Today he is in fine form, nestled into a corner table in New York’s classic Upper West Side haunt Cafe Luxembourg. When I ask him if Salesman marks his first time performing at the Winter Garden Theatre, he responds without missing a beat: “Yes, except when I took over in Mame.”
Lane has an easy charm that he has magnified into five decades of award-winning performances, from off-Broadway beginnings to his Tony-nominated turn in 1992’s Broadway revival of Guys and Dolls. The brassiness that the actor brought to The Birdcage and The Producers – as well as scene-stealing cameos in 30 Rock and Sex and the City – has remained Lane’s eternal flame, even as he has moved into more dramatic roles in the past decade. Death of a Salesman’s Willy Loman is a beast of a role, though. The peripatetic lead of Arthur Miller’s 1949 tragedy must embody both the dissolution of an average family and the catastrophic failure of the American dream. Like his character, the man can only laugh for so long.
