Happy is stuck in a dead-end clerk's job. I get the feeling that I am not getting anywhere," he admits to his brother. Biff is unemployed, confused and sees little future for himself. A suddenly jobless Willy must also confront the reality that, despite his lofty expectations, his adult sons, ex-high school football hero Biff and younger brother Happy, are also finding it difficult to gain a foothold in the tight job market and build successful careers. "There is only so much to go around, as we are discovering. "There are many parallels to today," says Nichols, whose career highlights include eight Tony Awards for his theater work on Broadway, as well as an Oscar for The Graduate. Willy, he tells USA TODAY, is still with us. The 60-something salesman, after being on the road for more than 35 years, yet still unable to keep up with payments on the refrigerator, washing machine, vacuum cleaner, roof and life insurance premiums, is later fired by his boss, Howard, who simply tells him: "Willy … there just is no spot here for you."ĭeath of a Salesman, circa 2012, is very much about the here and now, director Mike Nichols says. "The competition is maddening," Willy, played by Academy Award-winner Philip Seymour Hoffman, rails to his supportive yet worried wife, Linda, in the current Broadway revival of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Death of a Salesman.
NEW YORK - On stage recently at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York, a 4.8-mile cab ride from Zuccotti Park, the symbolic birthplace of the Occupy Wall Street movement, Willy Loman, the aging, broke and down-on-his-luck salesman introduced by playwright Arthur Miller in 1949, is howling in protest about just how hard it is to get ahead in America.
0 kommentar(er)
