The Rep’s powerful “Death of a Salesman”

Positive mental attitude, the bedrock of sales psychology, is self-deception. Today’s lie will require another lie tomorrow and so on, day after day, building a debt of lies with compounding interest.

That’s Arthur Miller’s take on it, anyway. Friday night, the Milwaukee Repertory Theater opened Death of a Salesman, in which the bill comes due for aging drummer Willy Loman and the family that bought into 30 years of his salesman’s baloney. In Miller’s 1949 drama, Loman’s fictions have become so complex and mingled with memory than he can no longer distinguish them from fact — or keep them from coming to life in flashback visions that only he and we can see.

Lee E. Ernst, a great actor in one of the greatest roles in American theater, plays the man’s confusion, desperation and unhinged optimism with equal force. That’s the key to Willy Loman; when he vehemently declares one thing and in the next moment vehemently declares the opposite, he thinks he’s telling the truth in both cases. He can feel the tensions of his own contradictions tearing him to pieces, yet those contradictions are invisible to him. Decades of positive mental attitude have trained him to buy into whatever he needs to believe at a particular moment.

Loman isn’t lovable, and Ernst never tries to make him so. But he is fascinating, and Ernst makes him more so. In his speech and in his actions, Ernst’s Loman constantly probes and pushes, always hopeful that the quick fix is at hand if he can just wish for it hard enough and keep knocking on door after door. He is a ridiculous man, and some of his self-deceptions are absurdly funny. I did not remember comedy in this play; its presence surprised me, and so did its occasional warmth. Most of us will find some of the humor shot through with rueful self-recognition.

I’m glad that director Mark Clements let the comedy breathe. Without it, the play would be unbearable. The few laughs give relief amid the decline of a small man, and they remind us that even he had his good moments. They help us to care about him.

Willy’s conflict with his oldest son, Biff, lies at the heart of the play. Reese Madigan’s Biff doesn’t quite realize it when he arrives from Texas, but he’s home in New York to collect the overdue interest on the lies. Biff and Willy are on opposite trajectories and on a collision course; Biff is giving up his illusions and Willy is sinking into his.

Loman is the center of this play, but Biff drives it. Only Biff changes significantly over the course of the play, so he defines its progress and structure. Madigan’s subtle, intelligent reading made Biff and the play tick. Biff arrives full of unfocused doubt and anger; he knows things must change, but doesn’t know how or why. Madigan plays him tense, tentative, explosive. Willy and younger brother Happy (Gerard Neugent) seize on Biff’s confusion and sell Biff one last time. They send the former high school football hero on a fool’s errand of a business deal. The utter failure of that effort causes the scales of deception to fall from Biff’s eyes. Madigan plays a changed man from that point on, and you can see in his body that a spine has grown in his back. He takes run after run at Willy to try to drive home the obvious truth that his firstborn will not be able to parlay long-ago football exploits, good looks and a positive outlook into success.

Neugent shows us a younger-generation Willy, a version with all the self-delusion but without the marginally redeeming factor of genuine love for a woman. Within the family, Neugent’s Happy wants nothing more than to maintain peace-keeping lies. Outside the family, he uses his legacy knack for lying to become a smooth operator with the ladies. (At that, Neugent is wholly convincing.)

Miller wrote Linda as an adjunct to her husband and sons through the first two-thirds of the play. To that point, Laura Gordon’s Linda appears more often than not as an idealized figure in Loman’s hallucinations. Gordon breaks into flesh and blood to devastating effect near the middle of Act 2, when she rebukes her sons for leaving their delusional father behind in a restaurant when they leave with a pair of floozies. The whole play takes a turn in that scene, and Gordon’s intensity changed everything.

On opening night, the cast’s rhythm was just a little off at the start, and Ernst felt a bit big in scale compared with everyone else. About 15 minutes in, the actors found the groove as an ensemble, everything fell into place, and a gradual ratcheting up of tempo and momentum drew you in more and more as the play went on.

This is a big, complicated show with lots of players and many technical cues. I admire Todd Rosenthal’s exploded-view bungalow and Jeff Nellis’ lighting, which beautifully distinguishes “real” space from the arena of Willy’s mind. All elements of the show meshed, from technical aspects to a fine supporting cast comprising Jonathan Gillard Daly (Charley), Michael Kroeker (Bernard), Mark Corkins (Uncle Ben), Deborah Staples (The Woman), Guy Massey (Howard Wagner) and interns Ryan Krause, LaToya Codner, Stephanie Lambourn and Rukhmani K. Desai in smaller roles.

Death of a Salesman runs through May 8 at the Rep’s Quadracci Powerhouse Theater. Tickets are $15-$50, $15-$45 for seniors and students, and $20 for under-40. Visit the Rep’s website to order, or call the box office, 414 224-9490. Calendar here.

Please drop by and say hello 11-2 Saturday, April 16, at the UWM Kenilworth Open Studio, Prospect and Kenilworth. Music, dance, theater and visual art will be going on, and it’s all free. The building alone is worth seeing. I’ll be set up at a table, representing TCD for the duration.