Attention must be paid: Death of a Salesman at the Citadel, a review, Theater News

The first sight we have of the most indelible character in the 20th century theatre is a man alone, trudging wearily towards us in the murk of an empty stage.

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He’s a man with baggage, lugging two heavy sales cases. And, as we discover in Death of a Salesman, they are heavily weighted with dreams, with hopes, with delusions about the world and his place in it.

In this fine Citadel production — which returns to the theatre Arthur Miller’s 1949 classic that was in the company’s very first season 60 seasons ago — Willy Loman, the archetypal travelling salesman, comes to life in a tremendous performance from John Ullyatt. And Daryl Cloran’s unusually stylized production locates the man in a shadowy world where reality, in contained pockets of light, lands on wincing human encounters.

These are infiltrated, more and more, by dreams and ghosts, theoretical propositions and might-have-beens. Beyata Hackborn’s design, where everything happens in front of a  weathered facade of a house, and characters vanish through invisible walls and doorways — the only concrete doorway, moved by the actors, looks like a guillotine — is eloquently tuned to the imaginative abstractions of the production.

A bedroom is just a dislocated bed; the Loman kitchen is a table and a fridge set down in slanted light shafts way off-centre in an empty, lonely stage. Even when  house facade is lifted, to reveal the sales office, a single desk that’s the scene of Willy’s penultimate humiliation — after 34 years on the road he’s summarily fired by a much younger boss — it’s a space disconnected from the rest of the stage. Which speaks volumes about Willy’s life — his porous memory, his increasingly threadbare mantra that all a man needs in life is to be “not just liked, but well-liked” As he says, in many variations, to his sons Biff (Nathan Kay) and Happy (Alexander Ariate), staggering in separate ways under the weight of Willy’s expectations, “the man who creates personal interest is the man who gets ahead. Be liked and you will never want.”

Alexander Ariate, Nathan Kay, John Ullyatt, Nadien Chu in Death of a Salesman, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price Photography

The swirl of reality and fantasy is the drama of Bonnie Beecher’s lighting, with its multiple inventive hanging light sources, lanterns, lamps, chandeliers. The past, hinted at behind the house, has a purple glow, but there’s no material dimension, no urban environment, there. It all contributes to the production’s sense of a man who’s gradually lost track of his own world, and of time. The music (by composer/ sound designer Joelysa Pankanea), played live on keyboards and bass by actors who come and go from instruments on either side of the playing space, echoes in a harsh, but strangely ethereal way: dissonant fractured jazz riffs. There’s a poetic kind of cohesiveness about Cloran’s stagecraft.

Like the design, the casting is original. Last time the Citadel staged Death of a Salesman, 15 years ago, Ullyatt played Biff. Now as Willy, Ullyatt, a superb and versatile actor particularly known for the physical energy and invention he brings to performances, fully commits to a character with neither. Willy seems to age, and diminish, before our eyes, rising to flames of anger that flicker out in confusion, struggling to stem a tide of despair under a blanket of hope.

Alexander Ariate, John Ullyatt, Nathan Kay in Death of a Salesman, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price Photography

On the surface Nathan Kay, a newcomer to Citadel stages, wouldn’t be everyone’s idea of Biff, the ex-football star who peaked in high school, and at 34, a drifter crushed under the weight of his father’s fantasies, can’t get anything going. But his performance will surprise, and move you. In one of the most harrowing scenes, in a restaurant with his bro Happy (Ariate as a charming, conciliatory wastrel), Biff in desperation tries, and tries, to break through the fortress of Willy’s delusions with “facts” about his failures in life. “I’m not bringing home any prizes any more,” he says. And Willy, interrupting constantly in an escalating panic of denial, won’t hear of it.

Nadien Chu and John Ullyatt in Death of a Salesman, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.

“The woods are burning,” he tells his sons, at a critical moment.  Ullyatt’s performance digs in, unearthing layer after layer of a man whose life doesn’t come in his size any more. “I just kinda feel temporary about myself.” At some distance, as the actor conveys, Willy does have a glimmer of a sense, quickly repressed, that what he’s selling — on the road and at home — nobody’s buying.

John Ullyatt in Death of a Salesman, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price Photography

Nobody, that is, except his staunchly loyal wife (and career enabler) Linda, in a fierce, blazing performance by Nadien Chu, who plays her as formidable, a force of nature. “Attention must be paid.” Linda is the family bookkeeper, so she knows, to a penny, the facts behind Willy’s lament that “I’m in a race with the junkyard” when it comes to aging appliances and cars. But what about aging salesmen? She buys into Willy, and therefore into his founding principle that personality counts above all else. She knows, and she doesn’t know, about the damages inflicted by dreams.

Cloran’s strong cast includes Anthony Santiago, excellent as the neighbour, prickly but kindly, who keeps lending Willy money under the table, and Tenaj Williams as Charley’s earnest son Bernard. And Willy’s brother Ben, an imposing sort of ghost who’s the mythology of success on legs — “when I was 17 I walked into the jungle; when I was 21 I walked out and by God I was rich” — is compellingly embodied by Andrew Wheeler.

In the end, in this beautiful 2026 Citadel/ Arts Club Theatre production, Death of a Salesman is a play about a father and his two sons. And beyond the ruthless way capitalism devalues and exhausts the little guy’s labours, there’s the existential question of meaning, inheritance, and love. Near the end, in a heartbreaking scene Willy says something about that. “Nothing’s planted; I don’t have a thing in the ground.” He lives, and dies, in hope.

REVIEW

Death of a Salesman

Theatre: Citadel Theatre/ Arts Club Theatre

Written by: Arthur Miller

Directed by: Daryl Cloran

Starring: John Ullyatt, Nadien Chu, Nathan Kay, Alexander Ariate, Anthony Santiago, Tess Degenstein, Jeff Gladstone, Christina Nguyen, Andrew Wheeler, Tenaj Williams, Morgan Yamada

Running: through Feb. 15

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820