How a 30-Year Friendship Helped Nathan Lane Find Willy Loman

Here, he arrives quietly.

But those who saw Nathan Lane’s seismic, Tony Award-winning star turn in The Producers know what a classic Nathan Lane entrance looks like. Bursting from the ensemble, he drops a newspaper dramatically and reveals himself, triggering the kind of applause reserved for stars audiences already adore. Then he launches into a raucous number with a perfectly fitting title: “The King of Broadway.”

There is none of that at the Winter Garden Theatre, where Lane is top-billed as Willy Loman in Joe Mantello’s revelatory production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. At the top of the show, headlights cut through the darkness as a vintage sedan slowly arrives onstage. Lane climbs out carrying Willy Loman’s sample cases, his shoulders slumped, his body seemingly worn down by decades of chasing a dream that never quite materialized. Before he speaks a word, the tragedy has already begun.

For many audience members, the contrast is intense. This is the man who became one of the defining stage stars of his generation during a 44-year New York theater career. He stopped shows with his charisma, legendary comic timing and uncanny awareness of how to keep audiences delighted. Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls. Max Bialystock in The Producers. Gomez Addams in The Addams Family. And that's to say nothing of Lane's memorable turns on film and TV.

Over the last 15 years, Lane has increasingly gravitated toward darker, weightier material onstage, including The Iceman Cometh, Angels in America and now Death of a Salesman. The full scope of Lane's career is staggering—on June 7, he's heading to the Tony Awards with his seventh nomination for Salesman, having won three trophies already for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, The Producers and Angels in America.

Lane has always balanced plays with musicals and drama with comedy, even if Death of a Salesman might ask more of him than any role before it. Look back to 1995, to the first time Lane worked with Mantello on Broadway, when he was part of the ensemble of Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion!, a sentimental play about gay men weekending together.

A transfer from off-Broadway, it became actor-turned-director Mantello’s Broadway breakthrough, while Lane found one of the richest roles of his early career in Buzz Hauser, an HIV-positive musical theater obsessive. The performance was hilarious, but it’s Buzz’s Act Two monologue that lingers. Buzz riffs on how people in musicals die beautifully—operatically, meaningfully—and how he longs for something messier and more truthful. Even then, the performance pointed toward emotional terrain beyond laughs.

At some point during the Love! Valour! Compassion! journey, Mantello turned to then-39-year-old Lane and said, perhaps casually: I’m going to direct you as Willy Loman someday. No big announcement or plan. Just a director seeing something in an actor that the actor may not have fully seen in himself yet.

“I wasn’t imagining this,” Mantello says now, seated beside Lane amid the stark world he’s created onstage with Tony-nominated set designer Chloe Lamford at the Winter Garden Theatre. “It was just an idea.”

It's moving to see Lane and Mantello together now, and think of all they've achieved since Love! Valour! Compassion! Lane became an overnight star far beyond Broadway the following year, when Mike Nichols' The Birdcage opened in movie theaters. Mantello, meanwhile, has spent the past three decades establishing himself as one of the contemporary stage's great storytellers, staging more than 30 productions. Along the way, he earned two Tony Awards and seven nominations for directing, in addition to two acting nominations, for the original Angels in America and The Normal Heart. 

In the time since Mantello shared his vision of Lane as Loman, Broadway has enjoyed three successful mountings of Death of a Salesman before the current triumph. Acting greats Brian Dennehy, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Wendell Pierce took on Willy, and Lane regularly eyed the role from the audience.  “I saw all of them,” he says. “Going back to when I was 10 [when Lane watched a CBS TV-movie starring original Broadway star Lee J. Cobb]. I could still hear Cobb saying some of this stuff. But I think I was trapped in my head in a more traditional production.”

The more traditional Salesman—the one built around a detailed Brooklyn home and familiar domestic realism—is far from what’s at the Winter Garden. Mantello strips much of that away, creating a world where time, memory and reality bleed together inside Willy Loman’s deteriorating mind. Then there were the giants who came before him in Willy’s shoes.

“I had to try to banish all of those ghosts,” Lane says of the actors who came before him in the role. “It was probably fear—the fear of everything that comes along with playing this kind of iconic role and you’re going to have to live up to the comparisons… or not.”

Mantello’s directive was simple. “I kept coming back to this again and again,” he says. “We must banish every other production that’s come before us. We must look at this as if it is a new script handed to us.”

Being both director and close friend, Mantello says, made the process simultaneously easier and harder. “There were things that I wanted my friend, who was the actor, to do,” he says. “I said, ‘I want you to try to do something you’ve never done before. I will be there for you. I will catch you. You know me. I will not let you fail, but I’m going to push you.’”

During previews, Lane had to learn how to pace himself through the play’s marathon emotional demands. “[Joe] used to say to me—and I assume he says this to his Elphabas…” Lane says, teasing the director best known for Wicked. “Don’t blow it all on 'The Wizard and I.' You’ve got to get to 'Defying Gravity!'"

Mantello throws his head back and laughs.

Lane admits he finds Willy Loman’s story almost distractingly devastating. “I tend to be very moved emotionally by this play and get caught up in it,” he says. “Joe used to say, ‘You can only play Willy. You can’t play the audience’s role as well.’” Lane adds that he heard the same advice was once given to Lee J. Cobb. “You can’t feel sorry for yourself,” he says. “You don’t have time because you’re driving to the end. And in each scene, you [as Willy] think, ‘I’m going to win.’”

The result is a production with relentless, almost terrifying forward momentum, especially in the second act. Tony Kushner saw the production and called it terrifying. “It just doesn’t let up,” Lane says. “It’s still grabbing people by the throat."

A groundbreaking work in 1949, the play remains urgently, uncomfortably alive. Beneath the capitalism and the crushed dreams, Miller always insisted it was something simpler and more devastating. “It’s a love story between a father and a son,” Lane says, “and in a crazy way between them and America.”

Lane knows he doesn’t make the journey alone every night. “I get to look into Laurie Metcalf’s eyes,” he says, “and you think everything will be all right.” As Linda Loman, Metcalf becomes the center of a household quietly collapsing around her. Christopher Abbott as Biff and Ben Ahlers as Happy complete the family, and Lane speaks about all of them with the gratitude of an actor who understands the journey is only possible because of who’s traveling it with you. "Look, this is a once-in-a-lifetime thing," he says. "I'm getting to do Death of a Salesman on Broadway in this spectacular production with people I love."

The Winter Garden holds just over 1,500 theatergoers. There's an incredible power to being in a room with that many people rapt with attention, sitting in silence, maybe even holding their breath together, many ending in tears during the show's final devastating moments.

“When people come back and fall into your arms weeping,” Lane says of backstage guests, “you think, 'We must have done something right tonight.'”

Lane has spent a lifetime earning laughs, ovations and a permanent place in Broadway history. Now, having banished the ghosts and silenced the comparisons, he takes his place among the great Willy Lomans, giving audiences something rarer: the chance to watch a great actor arrive at exactly the right role at exactly the right moment.

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