Desireé Black, Broden Irwin, and Erin Keller. (Photo provided)
“Death of a Salesman” stages this week at Basile Westfield Playhouse
By STU CLAMPITT
news@readthereporter.com
The last days of Willy Loman, a failing salesman who cannot understand how he never won success and happiness, covers some heavy ground. Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman, is an American tragedy. That is exactly why Director Kelly Keller wanted to bring this story to life. Main Street Productions’ scheduling system and the venue at Basile Westfield Playhouse, 220 N. Union St., made Westfield the perfect place to do so.
“I wanted to direct this because it is a classic piece,” Keller said. “Over the course of my career of directing, I started out with comedies, which felt really comfortable to me. And then as I’ve gotten farther into my directing, I’ve gotten from comedies into dramedies. I really just wanted to take on another challenge to try to do a drama that had some weight and some meaning to it.”
Tom Smith, Aaron Moon, and Susan Hill. (Photo provided)
Keller said Basile Westfield Playhouse was the ideal venue.
“When I was looking for things to put up at Westfield, this came to mind,” Keller said. “The size of the stage fits for the grandness of what we’re putting together and the magnitude of it. That was one of the challenges with this because the traditional set is to story and a lot of theaters in the area, you can’t do it at the Cat, I couldn’t do it at the Switch, I couldn’t do it at Mud Creek. It really needed something with a really high stage on it.”
The set was built by Mason Odle and JB Scoble from “Building for the Boards.”
“They’ve been building sets for probably five years now and they’re really starting to be the go-to place for theaters that want to build a set quickly,” Keller told The Reporter.
Aaron Moon, Mike Sosnowski, and Rosemary Grace. (Photo provided)
Keller said Death of a Salesman was not something he believes he could have done justice to earlier in his directing career.
“It just felt more natural to make people laugh than to try to figure out the details and the nuance of telling a story and keeping the pacing correct and really doing justice to something that’s been written by Arthur Miller,” Keller said. “I was really hesitant to take on something that was that heavy earlier on for me.”
Scheduling shows in Westfield is different than most other theaters.
“They pick plays a year in advance, so that gave me a lot of room,” Keller said. “Some of the other theaters, it might’ve been three months that I had to prepare, but I had 18 months to prepare for this. With a lot of the time leading up to it, I read various analyses of the script, ways of interpreting it, different takes from different folks, because there’s a million things out there written on breaking it down. It’s taught in school, it’s broken down in all sorts of ways. So I read a lot of stuff and did a lot of background before I picked it.”
Also, in an effort to make this production the best it can be, Keller added two weeks to the rehearsal schedule.
“The first two weeks we spent on just character development,” Keller said. “I really wanted to make sure that the actors that we cast had a really good understanding of the characters they were portraying. Then when they went into blocking and learning their lines, they really already had an understanding of who they are and what they need to develop. It is a big undertaking, but for me, I really wanted to do it right. So we took some extra time.”
Jim Gryga and Aaron Moon. (Photo provided)
Aaron Moon and Kristin Sprague Hilger. (Photo provided)
Keller has a cast of 13 for this show. With only one exception, all of them come to the stage with years – in some cases decades – of experience.
“There’s an actor who plays a very small part, Jenny who’s a secretary,” Keller said. “She came up to me as a super experienced actress and said, ‘Really, I wanna play this part.’ And I said, ‘Well, it’s super small. You’re gonna be in one scene for maybe 10 minutes.’ She said, ‘I don’t care. I love the story. I love the magnitude of the story. And I really just wanna be part of this effort.’ And that’s been the theme with the cast. Everybody’s bought into the necessity to do the story justice. I’m really pleased that everybody has just embraced it and really done a great job. Anybody that comes to see it will be super impressed with the quality of these experienced actors on stage.”
Keller’s only caveats for audiences are about the depth of the material and the preservation of the script as it was written by Arthur Miller.
“We’re leaving it as written, so there is some profanity,” Keller said. The story, it’s a tragedy, just like a Greek tragedy. Willie does commit suicide and he has infidelity as well. We’re leaving that in. We’re not being crass or vulgar with it, but we’re delivering the lines as written in the script to try to do justice to it per the original script. I know there’s a lot of modern adjustments to the script. We’re following the 1949 version.”
This classic stages Nov. 13 to 23 at Basile Westfield Playhouse, 220 N. Union St. Go to westfieldplayhouse.org/showstickets or call (317) 815-9387 for tickets.
