The best onstage production of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” in a generation is also, conveniently, the one that settles two long-running perceptions of its two Tony-nominated thespians.
The first is about Nathan Lane — and, as it turns out, the 70-year-old veteran offers the clearest read on where he is in this career moment and what it means to finally be taken seriously as a dramatic performer. “I punched a hole in the box and got out,” he says of the comedy-and-musical typecasting others built around him. “There are people who will never let go of the fact that I had some success in musical theater or comedy. No matter what I do, whether it’s Hickey, Roy Cohn or Dominick Dunne in the Menendez miniseries, they’re never going to let me forget I made them laugh.”
For most of his career, Lane has been told — in both kind and unkind ways — that he is the funniest man in the building. He heard it through every comedy that made him a star, none louder than his Max Bialystock in “The Producers” in 2001.
He has spent much of the last quarter-century trying to prove there was more.
The evidence has been mounting: Theodore “Hickey” Hickman in Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh,” in Chicago in 2012 and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2015; Roy Cohn in Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Angels in America” in 2018; and now Willy Loman, eight shows a week at the Winter Garden Theatre alongside an ensemble that includes Laurie Metcalf, Christopher Abbott and Ben Ahlers.mOnstage, the argument is over. This Willy is not a comedian reaching for gravity. It is a full, unsparing performance from an actor who has been capable of it the whole time and was rarely asked.
