No Singing in the Navy

Salty and sweet like a lollipop lost at sea, Milo Cramer’s musical cheerily (and queerily) follows three seamen on 24-hour shore leave, forbidden to warble. This tuneful picaresque includes harmonizing crabs (in a bucket), a closeted, Claggart-like captain who croons, and a lonely lighthouse who gets the power ballad. Forget nonbinary bisexual polycules, kids, we’re neck-deep in the polymorphous waters of object sexuality. Drown in delight at Cramer’s waves of goofy wordplay and cute ditties. “Silly sailors,” Bailey Lee, Ellen Nikbakht, Elliot Sagay steer us expertly from giddy abandon to a gut punch of grief. Playwrights Horizons through April 26

Spider Rabbit

Tony Torn revives the spirit of ethereally weird downtown performance artist Taylor Mead, who premiered this Michael McClure monologue in 1971. Torn describes the piece as “an absurdist, anti-war, gargoyle cartoon that feels increasingly relevant over 50 years later.” Imagine Aunt Gladys and Longlegs had a hate child who grew up to be a children’s birthday party clown. Fearless Dan Safer directs and choreographs Torn for an hourlong descent into madness that will sear your brain. The Club at La MaMa through April 12

Mexodus

Two dudes, a sound looper, a bunch of instruments, and a reservoir of talent big as Texas. Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson take us on an epic journey of 19^th-century Mexican immigration—just not in the direction you might assume. A Black slave escapes and the only path to freedom and a new life lies south. Part buddy comedy, part Latinidad Pride house party, Mexodus is a blast. Not since Hamilton have I seen a show fuse folk and hip-hop to such powerful theatrical effect. Dynamic choreography by Tony Thomas and richly atmospheric staging by David Mendizábal. Daryl Roth Theatre through June 14

Becky Shaw

What I noticed: “A black social comedy about class, upward mobility, and ethics. It asks: Can one be rich and good?”… “Gina Gionfriddo’s script is packed with witty banter and darkly funny aphorisms—as well it should be. After all, these characters are descendants of Congreve’s carefree rakes, Sheridan’s scheming libertines, and Wilde’s quipping fops, not to mention Philip Barry’s sophisticated socialites yearning for freedom.” … “What a delight to hear well-tuned repartee and a clockwork comic plot from a writer with a sense of pedigree.” Helen Hayes Theatre through June 14

Death of a Salesman

What I noticed: “I suppose you can screw up Salesman, but you’d have to work very hard with terrible actors. And this cast is extraordinarily good.” …. “The production suggests that Joe Mantello was taking notes at Ivo van Hove’s abstract yet muscular staging of A View from the Bridge. Mantello sets the action inside the loading bay of a dusty, abandoned warehouse. Scenic designer Chloe Lamford’s massive columns fill the cavernous Winter Garden stage, nodding to the ghost of industrial America. Will this concrete pile be reclaimed as an AI data center? An Amazon shipping facility? An immigrant mass detention camp?” Winter Garden Theatre through August 9

The Lomans of Brooklyn are a tribe of liars, thieves, and lechers. The men talk big about the American Dream, the virtues of hard work and strong character, but in reality they’re creeps who despise their jobs and bosses, who view women as mouthy servants or whores to conquer. The mother of the clan is a fretful, cowed enabler. Contempt flows freely between father and sons.

Pardon the scornful tone. Like you, perhaps, I grew up in an all-American family under the shadow of booze, bullying, and boredom. No one in the Loman household is a drunk or abuser, but they’re all hollowed out by the pressure to succeed. If the men are tragic, it’s because they’re not ruthless enough to bluster and fantasize all the way to the White House—to pick a random example of success. Willy Loman’s last drop of decency saves him: a Hail Mary to monetize a wasted life.

Watching director Joe Mantello’s monumental yet intimate revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, it’s also hard to suppress thoughts of the not-yet-dead huckster running our country. In 1949, Miller could not have predicted an American economy perched so precariously on fraud, speculation, and antihuman tech. At least, not quite. There are signs of technology’s power to capture reality in a wire recorder that the young supervisor Howard (John Drea) demonstrates for a befuddled Willy Loman (Nathan Lane). In another scene, careworn spouse Linda (Laurie Metcalf), tells Willy the refrigerator needs a new belt. His bilious reply:

Once in my life I would like to own something outright before it’s broken! I’m always in a race with the junkyard! I just finished paying for the car and it’s on its last legs. The refrigerator consumes belts like a goddam maniac. They time those things. They time them so when you finally paid for them, they’re used up.

Nobody talks of refrigerator belts today, but you could sense the audience at the Winter Garden Theatre collectively wincing over endless upgrades, the inevitable shoddiness of online ordered crap, or shrinkflation—charging more for a smaller bag of chips. “In America,” the saying goes, “the moment you walk out the door the system is grabbing your money.” Willy and Linda pore over the household finances, trying to stay ahead of creditors as they outspend their budget.

How can one win, much less survive, in such a rigged system? In the damnably applicable Death of a Salesman, Miller opposes the pressure to sell against the pride to build. A romantic distinction, but one not without merit. Willy’s 34-year-old son, Biff (Christopher Abbott), longs for the wide open West; he dreams of buying a horse ranch and feeling the sun on his bare chest. So why has Biff slunk home to Brooklyn, back to the bedroom he shared with his younger brother, underachieving womanizer Happy (Ben Ahlers)? Biff couldn’t sell himself above a dollar an hour. His labor worth a buck, Biff feels utterly worthless. That’s the despairing conclusion he tries to force Willy to see in the play’s brutalizing showdown. Valuing yourself by a sick society’s standards will leave you poor indeed. The play’s final line is Linda’s “We’re free.” Free as liberated, or a commodity that can’t be sold?

The Salesman binary between selling and making can be reframed in more metaphysical terms: imaginary versus material, emotion and body, or ideology in contrast to action. Sides that don’t cancel each other out, but must exist in balance. You can’t lead a life of lies in order to acquire material wealth. I mean, you can; countless con artists and Silicon founders have. But there’s psychological payback—unless you’re lucky to be born a narcissistic sociopath. If I were to open Chat and dump in the text of Salesman, the press release, my review of the 2012 revival, a couple academic essays, and Miller’s own commentary, and told the robot to produce a 1,000-word review in David Cote’s voice, evaluating the acting, design, direction and relevance of the play today, what have I made? A fool of myself; worse, a fraud.

Then again, who cares? This is a theater review, after all. Am I so deluded to think I’m making anything? Am I not a parasite, absorbing information from generative artists, reorganizing data so I can extrude blocks of vaguely “original” text that blandly and superficially pre-digest the show you may never see? I’m bound to “hallucinate,” make stuff up that never happened onstage, misidentify actors and designers, or make weird claims about human behavior that only a soulless automated toaster would assert. This isn’t making, it’s selling: an image of myself, cribbed from the work of others.

Just some of the things you think about at Death of a Salesman in 2026.

Hey, this is a review, so let’s review.

I suppose you can screw up Salesman, but you’d have to work very hard with terrible actors. And this cast is extraordinarily good. Have you seen Laurie Metcalf in her many, many gigs on Broadway, most recently Little Bear Ridge Road? Have you marveled at that restless, live-wire quality she has, the spontaneity and intensity of physical business and vocal attack, the quicksilver shifting between anger, concern, and resolve that transmits to the balcony? It’s there in full force in Metcalf’s Linda, who is meek one moment and spitting poison the next. By the end, at her husband’s gravesite, Linda has no more to give, she’s a shell. She can only take the mortgage to the house, which has been paid off, and bury it next to Willy.

Speaking of whom, Nathan Lane continues his mountaineering expedition across American drama, following Roy Cohn in Angels in America (Broadway, 2018) and Hickey in The Iceman Cometh (BAM, 2015). Rationing his comic energies, Lane crafts a charming, keenly pathetic, occasionally droll Willy. The actor may not have resources as deep as his predecessors: the volcanic rage of Brian Dennehy, the bone-deep agony and weariness of Philip Seymour Hoffman, the wounded sense of injustice of Wendell Pierce. Still, I don’t know if I ever saw a Willy Loman I wanted to love as much as Lane. He’s the father who lost his way, and it breaks your heart. Showing signs of sundowning with erratic shifts of timidity to belligerence, his is an honest and lucid portrait of losing oneself. Willy as clownish carnival barker whose biggest sale was to his sons, who swallowed the pitch about being destined for greatness.

As those two unlucky young men, Abbott and Ahlers turn in kinetic, high-definition work. Perhaps Abbott could talk a little less with his hands, but he’s got sensational presence as brooding, disillusioned Biff. Ahlers counterbalances quite humorously as the skirt-chasing himbo Happy, which makes his humiliation all the more painful. The two have palpable chemistry; you believe their sibling bond.

Overall, the production suggests that Joe Mantello was taking notes at Ivo van Hove’s abstract yet muscular staging of A View from the Bridge. Mantello sets the action inside the loading bay of a dusty, abandoned warehouse. Scenic designer Chloe Lamford’s massive columns fill the cavernous Winter Garden stage, nodding to the ghost of industrial America. Will this concrete pile be reclaimed as an AI data center? An Amazon shipping facility? An immigrant mass detention camp? It’s a crumbling mausoleum that stands for an economy that has turned from manufacturing useful objects to monetizing attention and human misery.

It rather sounds like my mind was everywhere but at Death of a Salesman: my bitter upbringing; our shitty President; existential despair of the critic; Amazon; ICE; AI. Guilty. I once read that’s what great plays do: hold a mirror up to nature, perhaps even smushing the glass in our face.

Ah, but never mind me; I’m just here trying to sell you something.

Random Observations

• From the get-go in text and production, the emphasis is on sight. The retractable upstage metal door clanks upward, Caroline Shaw’s wistful chamber music plays, and Willy’s 1964 Chevy Chevelle Malibu rolls in (normally it’s a 1940s Studebaker; more on anachronisms below). Headlights briefly blind the audience (spare, aggressive lighting by Jack Knowles). Why did Willy abort his sales trip to New England and return to Brooklyn? He couldn’t focus on the road, although he says it’s not his eyeglasses: “I see everything.” (Irony Alert.) Recall that after he learned the truth of his parentage, Oedipus gouged out his eyeballs, and King Lear’s blinded Gloucester laments, “I stumbled when I saw.”

• Mantello exploits actor height to interesting effect. Lane and Metcalf are fairly average, but Abbott and Ahlers tower over them. Likewise, as the scarily suave Master of the Universe Ben—Willy’s absurdly successful brother—the strapping Jonathan Cake seems a giant. This verticality gap lends Willy and Linda a vulnerable, almost child-like quality. Mantello reinforces the visuals with a textual choice. In the published version of Salesman, Willy tells Linda he’s “fat,” that a coworker nicknamed him “walrus.” Using Miller’s near-final manuscript, Mantello opts for an earlier choice: “short.” Willy is mocked as “shrimp.”

  

• This is a ridiculously stacked ensemble. K Todd Freeman has buckets of charisma and wit as Willy’s empathetic neighbor Charley, a regular Joe who lovingly raised a son who became a successful lawyer, played with coiled, inscrutable charm by Michael Benjamin Washington. As noted, Jonathan Cake is sleek as a shark, a self-adoring millionaire with Africa diamond blood on his hands. In the smallish role of Letta, a girl that Happy chats up in a restaurant, the vivacious Mary Neely radiates main-character energy, all big bright eyes and cascading black curls.

• Hard to miss the modern touches. Willy pours a glass from an Organic Valley 2% carton of milk. As Howard fires him, the supervisor sips from a Starbucks-like paper cup with heat sleeve. Linda’s outfits (costumes by Rudy Mance) become notably contemporary in the second act, on the morning when Linda feels briefly optimistic for Willy and the boys. Sartorially transported to a happier future?

Death of a Salesman. By Arthur Miller. Directed by Joe Mantello. With Nathan Lane, Laurie Metcalf, Christopher Abbott, Ben Ahlers. Winter Garden Theatre, 1634 Broadway at 51st Street. Running time: 2hrs 50mins. One intermission. Through August 9. Tickets here.

Today I’m tinkering with a review of the new Death of a Salesman, starring Nathan Lane, Laurie Metcalf, Christopher Abbott, and Ben Ahlers (and a knockout supporting cast). Joe Mantello’s regietheater-ish revival opens at the Winter Garden Theatre Thursday night. I read and watch whatever’s at hand to get inspired and shake ideas loose, including my last take on Arthur Miller’s masterwork, 14 years ago.

This review went live at Time Out New York on Sunday March 18 2012. Here’s the lede.

“You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away,” rages the soon-to-be cashiered salesman, far past his prime, with a head fogged in memories and a heart in shards. “A man is not a piece of fruit!” To borrow Willy Loman’s orchard metaphor, Philip Seymour Hoffman still has plenty of pulp: He’s 20 years younger than the character he plays in Mike Nichols’s magnificent, bracing revival of Death of a Salesman. Whereas firing aged workers is common enough in business, most 44-year-olds would not be hired for Willy on the basis of youth (admittedly, Lee J. Cobb was 38 when he originated the role in 1949). But Hoffman makes Willy his own: stamping the iconic figure with hangdog gravitas, slow-burning humiliation, fast-flaring passion and a genius for making each moment acute and dangerously raw. In short, Hoffman is stupendous; I can’t wait to see him do it again when he’s retirement age.

Gina Gionfriddo’s Literary Deep Cut

Running through June 14 at the Hayes Theatre, Gina Gionfriddo’s Becky Shaw is a black social comedy about class, upward mobility, and ethics. It asks: Can one be rich and good? A wealthy family’s finances are rocked by the father’s death. Max (Alden Ehrenreich), who was adopted into the family as a child, steps in to manage affairs. Max is a successful, no-nonsense financier. He’s a fixer: highly efficient and brutally unsentimental. To the grieving Suzanna (Lauren Petty) he advises, “Be sad, grieve. But do it with a big dick.” Despite having complicated feelings for Max, Suzanna marries a sensitive (and poor) writer/barista named Andrew (Patrick Ball). The couple tries to set Max up with one of Andrew’s coworkers, Becky Shaw (Madeline Brewer). Max is horrified by Becky’s tacky dress, social awkwardness, and reek of lower-class desperation. Their extremely bad blind date—interrupted by a mugging—sets in motion a major shakeup in Suzanna and Max’s relationship. Becky is the catalyst of the play, an unprivileged woman from the South whose status insecurity and romantic missteps have landed her in chronic poverty. But Becky has tenacity and wiles. Through a series of emotional manipulations following the night with Max, Becky resolves to raise her station in life, by any means necessary. Gionfriddo’s script is packed with witty banter and darkly funny aphorisms—as well it should be. After all, these characters are descendants of Congreve’s carefree rakes, Sheridan’s scheming libertines, and Wilde’s quipping fops, not to mention Philip Barry’s sophisticated socialites yearning for freedom. Becky’s very name is a conspicuous wink to William Makepeace Thackeray’s Becky Sharp, the social-climbing protagonist of his 1847 novel Vanity Fair. Thackeray’s Becky is an orphan. Max describes himself glibly as an orphan (though his feckless father’s still alive). That’s another literary type, the ambitious bastard or orphan (see Edmund in King Lear or Tom Jones). Gionfriddo’s Becky is self-orphaned, estranged from her family in North Carolina. Becky and Max are thus made for each other, despite his utter loathing of her. What a delight to hear well-tuned repartee and a clockwork comic plot from a writer with a sense of pedigree.

Flip Phones!

So much has changed in the nearly two decades between Becky Shaw’s Off Broadway premiere and its Broadway debut. Most obvious has been the metastasizing smartphone, which grew ever smarter as we got dumber, willingly polluting our eyeballs with apps and feeds and reels and memes. Gionfriddo and her director, Trip Cullman, don’t opt for a lame system upgrade. Yes, there are mobile phones, but they flip open, and folks only use them to check time or make a call. Imagine: a plot that doesn’t require characters googling or doomscrolling.

Max in the Manosphere?

The two male characters in Becky Shaw would seem to be poles apart. Hard-hearted, judgy, coolly contemptuous, Max is a commitment-phobe; none of his relationships last more than three months. It’s not that Max doesn’t respect women; he doesn’t respect anyone. To him, people are either impediments or instruments. Andrew, the struggling writer whom Suzanna marries, is a gentle, empathetic liberal who cries at pornography (which gets a big guffaw). In today’s parlance, Max might call Andrew a “beta cuck.” Still, there’s a healthy streak of commonsense in Max that would immediately peg Manosphere influencers as the fraudulent trolls they are. Gionfriddo’s characters may be monstrous, but they’re monstrously layered.

Ageless, Astonishing Linda Emond

One must tread carefully when mentioning a performer’s looks, but I couldn’t ignore how glowingly youthful Emond—a treasure of New York theater—appears. Her character, Susan Slater, is Lady Bracknell with a Pilates trainer and a skincare routine. A widow who really doesn’t care if her late husband might have been gay, Susan is a brisk truth-teller who immediately takes up with a younger man. Susan’s only in two scenes—the first and the last—but Emond scores rollicking laughs through impeccable timing and a tone drier than the proper martini. “Learn to lie,” Susan advises Becky. “When someone with damage—as we have damage—courts a lover, we must be like the pedophile with the candy. Lure with candy no matter how frightful your nature and your intent.” This is practically Restoration comedy (see the first item above) and Emond lands her epigram square in the bullseye.

A Set That Speaks Volumes

Scenic designer David Zinn furnishes a dark-hued environment for many of the play’s early interiors: a three-star hotel room, Suzanna and Andrew’s low-rent apartment—modular spaces with black walls and a row of doors upstage. Then we get a big color and light change for the final scene: the stage revolves to reveal the sun-filled living room of Susan’s elegant home in Richmond, Virginia. We go from dour, abstract shadows to bright whites and naturalistic surfaces with an expensive-looking couch, rug, and tasteful bookcases. What are Zinn and lighting designer Stacey Derosier implying with this flood of well-lit, pristine paleness? Openness and honesty? Sunlight being the best disinfectant? Simply how attractive it is to be rich? The final scene is where tough truths are told—even if the truth is that lying is permitted.

There’s more, such as…

Patten’s sexy, exquisitely twisted Suzanna, Ehrenreich’s deft balance of nastiness and neediness, Ball’s ability to score laughs just from a flustered reaction. Madeline Brewster’s Becky is the secret weapon, a seemingly fragile waif with nerves of steel and a slow-spreading, predatory smile that sends chills up the bachelor spine. Becky Shaw is a breath of fresh satirical air for our oversensitive, overcautious times (a scene where Becky talks about her complicated past with Black men is masterfully cringe). Do you savor the stylish sadism of novelist Ottessa Moshfegh? Then hie thee to Becky Shaw. Gionfriddo’s thirtyish characters—technically, they’re Gen Xers—are wittier, tougher, deeper, and more surprising than most Millennial/Zillennial stage creatures today. (Except for those in Clare Barron’s horny grief comedy You Got Older—which you also should see.)

Even sound designer M.L. Dogg’s scene-change playlist is cool, stacked with Sonic Youth, Martha Wainwright, Dirty Projectors, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. It made me want to wormhole back to a party in 2008, a more self-reliant, less stupid time.

Who’m I kidding? We’ve always been a nation of Becky Shaws, driven to deception by fear of economic precarity, desperate to monetize our pain.