THEATER CHRONICLE
OLD GLAMOUR , NEW GLOOM
It
would seem that the success of Arthur Miller's, or Elia
Kazan's,
Death of a Salesman
has been due largely to the feeling of de–
pression with which one makes for the exit. The idea is that anything
that can make you feel that glum must be good, true and above all im–
portant-and publicity aside, it must be admitted that this culturally
lace-curtain notion has a few things to support it these days at the
Morosco. These are, notably, a superb performance by Lee Cobb as the
salesman, a beautifully flexible and elegant stylization of a small Brook–
lyn house by Jo Mielziner, and a production so slick and fast that you
have hardly the time or the presumption to question it. Unfortunately,
however, it becomes necessary to question just what it is that gives the
play its brilliant down-in-the-mouth effect, since it would surely be hard
for any but its most insensitive admirers to deny that although they came
out from it stuffed full of gloom, they were strangely lacking in a sense
either of pity or of illumination.
They have seen a good, or good enough, man driven to suicide, a
family in despair, an illusion shattered, and a portrayal of American life
that should, it seems, have given them the sharpest pang of all; they
have been expressly invited to indulge the tragic sense and to carry away
a conception of man's fate as though from a production of
Oedipus
Rex,
and what they have carried away instead is just that curious, rank–
ling gloom. As the salesman's wife puts it after he has thrown himself
under a train: "I can't cry. I want to cry, but I can't."
If
an honest
poll could be taken it might well turn out that a large majority of these
admirers, including the critics, had been secretly telling themselves not
only after the play but during it that they were not really bored, just a
little tired that night. Or was it perhaps that the tragic sense with all it
has undergone from the facts of recent times needs now some entirely
different, some unimaginably new appeal, and this was too much to ask
