‘A Salesman’ Lives On In Philip Seymour Hoffman

When Philip Seymour Hoffman took the stage on March 15 in the new revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, he became the fifth actor in 63 years to walk the boards of Broadway in the shoes of the blustery, beleaguered salesman, Willy Loman. In the last six decades, each incarnation of the play has resonated with a new generation of theatergoers.

There are lines in Arthur Miller’s 1949 masterpiece that sound like they could have come right out of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Miller knew plenty about the characters on Wall Street. He was born in the Bronx in 1915 to a wealthy family. Then his father lost everything in the stock market crash of 1929. Seventy years later, at his home in Roxbury, Conn. — not far from the cabin where he wrote Death of a Salesman — Miller told me the seeds of the play grew out of the Depression.

“I wrote it in ’48, ’47, which was objectively the start of the biggest boom in the history of the world probably,” Miller said. “But it was also a time when a lot of people, including me, expected that we were going to go back into what we had been before World War II, which was a depressed country. Harry Truman thought the same thing. … Most of the population was waiting for the other shoe to drop.”