Death of a Salesman on Broadway: What to Know Before Seeing the New Revival

Is it possible to proclaim one American play the greatest ever written? Arthur Miller’s 1949 masterpiece Death of a Salesman has been mounted on Broadway seven times, including Joe Mantello’s current revival starring Nathan Lane as the tragic title character, Willy Loman. A family drama that transcends its post-World War II setting, Salesman has endured both as a heartbreaking commentary on the souring of the American Dream and as a star vehicle for actors as varied as Lee J. Cobb, George C. Scott, Dustin Hoffman, Brian Dennehy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Wendell Pierce and now three-time Tony winner Lane. Here’s a look back at the play that sealed Miller’s reputation as a dramatist for the ages.

Birth of a Playwright
Born in Harlem in 1915, Arthur Miller grew up with a demanding father, owner of a women’s clothing business that went belly-up during the Depression. The model for Willy Loman, however, was young Arthur’s Uncle Manny, a Brooklyn-based traveling salesman who constantly belittled his nerdy nephew while boasting about his handsome, athletic sons. At opening night of Miller’s first hit play, 1947’s All My Sons, Manny ignored Arthur’s achievement to once again brag on his own children. Shortly thereafter, he committed suicide. It took Miller just eight weeks to write a play inspired by the delusional Manny; Miller’s point of view was reflected in the character of Bernard, the “not well liked” sidekick of Loman sons Biff and Happy. (Spoiler alert: Bernard grows up to argue a case before the Supreme Court; the shiftless Biff and Happy become, in the words of their stalwart mother, Linda, “a pair of animals.”) Top Broadway producer Cheryl Crawford turned the script down, believing audiences wouldn’t respond to such a depressing storyline. Fortunately, producer Kermit Bloomgarden and All My Sons director Elia Kazan had a different reaction.

Attention Must Be Paid
“Of all the plays I’ve directed, Death of a Salesman is my favorite,” Kazan declared in his memoir, A Life. Given the fact that Kazan had helmed A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway the season before, he added, “I don’t mean it was the best play; I do believe [Tennessee] Williams wrote better. They were both concerned with morality—Tennessee more open about his sins and his problems, Miller more guarded.” But Kazan, who had grown up with a tyrannical father who was—yes—a salesman, was moved by Miller’s depiction of Willy Loman as a man worthy of an audience’s concern: “He is ridiculous and he is tragic all at once.”

After rejecting Bloomgarden’s plea to remove the word “death” from the title and rename the play Free and Clear (a reference to the Lomans’ mortgage), Kazan cast 37-year-old Lee J. Cobb as the 60-year-old Willy. Though no one knew it at the time, a precedent had been set for younger actors taking on the physically and mentally demanding role. (At 70, Nathan Lane will be the oldest person to play Willy on Broadway.) Key to the success of the original production was the eerie set design of Jo Mielziner, combining the spectral bones of the Lomans’ Brooklyn home with space for Willy’s imaginary conversations with his long-dead older brother, Ben. According to Kazan, Streetcar’s Blanche DuBois inspired Miller to move beyond realism in presenting Willy’s state of mind. The play opened on February 10, 1949, and ran for 742 performances, winning both the Pulitzer Prize and Best Play Tony Award. Crawford, observing grown men in tears on opening night, greatly regretted rejecting the play.

The Many Faces of Willy
Two years after the Broadway opening, Salesman was adapted into a 1951 film starring Fredric March and Broadway’s original Linda, Mildred Dunnock, both of whom received Oscar nominations. Although March had been Miller’s first choice for the Broadway production, the playwright was displeased with the actor’s “borderline insane” movie performance, according to the Arthur Miller Society. Cobb and Dunnock reteamed for a 1966 TV movie co-starring George Segal as Biff, James Farentino as Happy and Gene Wilder as Bernard. In 1975, Salesman returned to Broadway in a revival directed by and starring George C. Scott. The volatile Oscar winner was deemed “exciting beyond words” by New York Times critic Clive Barnes, but Miller wasn’t thrilled with the overall production at the Circle in the Square Theatre.

Dustin Hoffman became the next Broadway Willy in a 1984 revival in which his scrappy performance was sometimes overshadowed by John Malkovich as a brooding Biff. Hoffman’s take was in line with Miller’s original vision of the character as a small man, in the mold of his Uncle Manny. The production was preserved in a CBS movie, but critic Frank Rich noted that the Hoffman revival “was not popular in the industry” due to the star’s insistence on playing only six shows a week. At around the same time, Miller himself directed a historic production of the play at the Beijing People’s Art Theatre, translated by and starring Chinese film star Ying Ruocheng.

On the night of the play’s 50th anniversary, February 10, 1999, a universally acclaimed revival opened on Broadway with a magnetic star turn by 60-year-old Brian Dennehy. Elizabeth Franz, who had previously played Linda opposite Hal Holbrook, gave a revelatory performance as a powerful woman deeply in love with her troubled husband. “It’s the only play I’ve ever done where you can feel the audience not just observing and listening to what’s going on, but filtering it through their own existence,” Dennehy told InTheater magazine, adding, “I did a lot of work trying to understand the ramifications [of Willy’s mental deterioration]—the mood swings, the physical gestures, the obsessive behavior.” The production (filmed for Showtime) won Tonys for Dennehy, Franz and director Robert Falls, as well as Best Revival. At age 83, Miller, who died six years later (on February 10!), was able to bask in renewed praise for his greatest creation.

21st Century Lomans
Buoyed by the success of the 1999 revival, two very different productions were mounted on Broadway a decade apart, in 2012 and 2022. Just before his 80th birthday, legendary director Mike Nichols tapped Philip Seymour Hoffman to play Willy alongside Linda Emond as Linda, Andrew Garfield as Biff and Finn Wittrock as Happy. Nichols chose to use the original 1949 set and composer Alex North’s haunting musical score, leading New York Times critic Ben Brantley to call the revival “an immaculate monument to a great American play.” Though the production won Tonys for Best Revival and for Nichols’ direction, by all accounts the experience of playing Willy weighed heavily on Hoffman, who died of a drug overdose less than two years later, at age 46.

The notion of a Black Loman family had been explored as early as a 1972 production in Baltimore and a 2009 revival at Yale Rep starring two-time Tony nominee Charles S. Dutton. But it took a well-received mounting at London’s Young Vic featuring the trans-Atlantic teaming of Wendell Pierce and Sharon D. Clarke to attract Broadway producers. “I call it the American Hamlet—it’s like climbing Mount Everest,” Pierce told the New York Amsterdam News in advance of the 2022 revival, which brought fresh attention to the ghost of Ben Loman via the casting of Tony winner André De Shields. Citing Ossie Davis, Roscoe Lee Brown and Earle Hyman as examples of African American stage stars who never got the chance to play Willy, Pierce, who received a Best Actor Tony nomination, said, “I do it in their honor.”

In the wake of the Pierce production, news broke in August 2025 of a forthcoming film adaptation starring Tony winner Jeffrey Wright and Oscar winner Octavia Spencer. This intriguing collaboration will feature a script co-written by Angels in America playwright Tony Kushner (editor of a collection of Miller’s later plays) and Chinonye Chukwu, best known for the films Till and Clemency. A production schedule for the film, to be directed by Chukwu, has not yet been announced.

Nathan Takes the Wheel
At this point, everybody knows that Nathan Lane is not only one of the wittiest men alive, he is also one of America’s finest dramatic stage actors. His Tony Awards encompass both the highest level of musical theater performance (for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and The Producers) and a devastating turn as Roy Cohn in the 2018 revival of Angels in America. The same person who plays society arbiter Ward McAllister with a honeyed drawl in TV’s The Gilded Age has also commanded the stage as salesman Theodore “Hickey” Hickman in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh. Speaking with Broadway.com 20 years ago during the Broadway revival of Butley, Lane called dramatic roles “a big mountain to climb, but when you get to the top, it’s very rewarding. It’s just very satisfying to stretch these muscles again and to work with such great language.”

Lane and his frequent collaborator, director Joe Mantello, have been eyeing a Death of a Salesman revival for 30 years, since they brought Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion! to Broadway. “It’s been a long and arduous journey to this moment, and frankly I thought it was never going to happen,” the star told The New York Times. His Linda, two-time Tony winner Laurie Metcalf, co-starred with Lane in the 2008 Broadway production of David Mamet’s November. The charismatic Metcalf could end the season with a pair of Tony nominations—one for lead actress for her performance in Samuel D. Hunter’s Little Bear Ridge Road, and the other for featured actress as Linda Loman.

Biff and Happy Loman will be played by Christopher Abbott (on stage most recently opposite Aubrey Plaza in Danny and the Deep Blue Sea) and Ben Ahlers (The Gilded Age’s footman-turned-clockmaker). Mantello has been studying early drafts of the play, before the published script described a set in line with Jo Mielziner’s 1949 house design. “I don’t think [Miller originally] imagined a kind of heightened naturalism,” Mantello told The New York Times. “It was much more abstract, and I’m interested in what he was thinking about.” At least one realistic element is headed for the Winter Garden Theatre: a working automobile, second home of any traveling salesman and the key prop in Willy Loman’s decline and fall.

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