Joe Mantello and the Unbearable Hope of Death of a Salesman

Joe Mantello has spent a long time thinking about Death of a Salesman. The director of the Tony-nominated Broadway revival, starring Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf, first encountered Arthur Miller’s masterwork as a teenager, and it went right over his head. It would take decades of professional and life experience before he fully understood its impact. Broadway.com Managing Editor Beth Stevens sat down with Mantello to discuss the thinking behind a production 30 years in the making.

Miller’s 1949 play follows the collapse of Willy Loman, mentally and physically. “My reading of the play, even from early on, was that it was very abstract and a kind of tough and merciless play,” Mantello says. Where past productions have anchored the story to the Loman house, Mantello dispensed with it entirely, putting audiences inside Willy’s deteriorating mind. “Removing the architecture of the house allowed those changes to happen in split second transitions.”

In place of the house, Mantello centered the production on a car, essential for a traveling salesman: a red 1964 Chevy Chevelle Malibu, not the Studebaker named in the script’s first pages. The Chevelle postdates the play by nearly two decades, and that’s no accident. “For a lot of us in American culture, the car is such a sign of upward mobility,” Mantello says. “When that car comes in, you know a little bit about him right off the bat. That’s just us trying to bring you into the world of this particular production.” It is a revival full of anachronisms, each one intentional.

Then came the casting. “[Nathan] is just the kind of actor that I love because he’s like a Rolls-Royce,” Mantello says. “He can do anything. The same with Laurie.” Mantello and Metcalf have previously collaborated seven times on Broadway. Lane appeared in Love! Valour! Compassion!, Mantello’s self-described “first really big directing gig” and the production where Mantello first floated the Salesman idea to Lane. The result is now the most Tony-nominated version of Death of a Salesman in history, with nine nominations including nods for Lane, Metcalf and Christopher Abbott, who plays eldest son Biff.

The family unit crackles. Moments of shared joy collapse into devastation with whiplash speed. Mantello points to a late Act One scene as the production’s emotional core: Happy’s “feasible idea,” a wild pitch for the Loman brothers to go into business together. “For a minute, you see them all aligned: ‘Yes, this is our way out.’ Then someone says the wrong thing and it shatters,” he says. The love is real, and the fantasy can almost hold. “But it is a family where to tell the truth means death.”

Next door, neighbors Charley and Bernard, played by K. Todd Freeman and Michael Benjamin Washington, both Black, exist in pointed contrast to the Lomans. The casting was deliberate. “There was something about making that family a Black family that I thought was an interesting element,” Mantello says. “K. Todd, as Charley, keeps offering [Willy] a job, and there’s this unspoken tension between them,” he notes. “You think, ‘What is that? Why?’” Mantello decided the answer was race. As always, he found his justification in the text. “I always want to make sure that I’m not imposing anything on the play.”

For Mantello, the answers were always in the script. 

Watch the full interview below.

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