Color-Conscious Casting and Death of a Salesman
Khris Davis, Wendell Pierce, Sharon D. Clarke, and McKinley Belcher III in the 2022 Broadway revival of Death of a Salesman
Photo by Joan Marcus
Although the 2022 production of Death of a Salesman is the play’s fifth revival on Broadway, it is unique in at least one respect. For the first time in Broadway history, Death of a Salesman features a Black Loman family. It is not, however, the first major production of the play to feature a Black Willy Loman, nor even the first to feature a predominantly Black cast. Many earlier productions starring Black actors are documented in archival materials at The New York Public Library, both at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and in the Billy Rose Theatre Division at the Library for the Performing Arts. Each production was conscious of how its casting choices informed the story.
Clark College, 1963
One of the earliest productions of Death of a Salesman with a Black cast was staged by actor, director, and producer Frederick O’Neal. It was produced at the historically Black Clark University in Atlanta in 1963, just 14 years after the original Broadway production. O’Neal, then best known for his role on the popular television series Car 54, Where are You?, played Willy Loman.
From the Frederick O'Neal papers (Box 23, Folder 6), Sc MG 427, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library
O’Neal’s program notes for the production do not address the effect the casting has on the story, but they do situate the play in the history of theatre. He observes that in the first decade of the play’s existence, it drew “considerable criticism from the theatre and the public alike.” O’Neal’s own audience, like many audiences distant from New York at the time, may not have been especially familiar with Death of a Salesman before it entered the high school curriculum and the community theatre repertoire. O’Neal also seeks to guide his audience in watching a kind of theatre that was not yet in the mainstream. He writes, “One of the most difficult aspects of the play—for the spectator accustomed to Realistic forms of drama—is Miller’s use of Expressionistic stage technique. In Roger Furman’s setting for the play, designed after the original by Jo Mielziner, a number of locations have been gathered into a single visual frame [...] Miller writes that he has attempted to employ modern perspectives in science; like Einstein, he has ‘collapsed time and space.’ Death of A Salesman is an image of a man’s ‘way of thinking’ about his life, as he approaches that place-out-of-time called ‘eternity.’”
Perhaps this program note and the scenic design were in Atlanta Journal critic Paul Valentine’s mind when he concluded his generally positive review in this way: “Death of a Salesman is sufficiently timeless and placeless to transcend the immediate considerations of skin color.” However, Valentine may have missed the ways in which O’Neal did particularize the production. The program notes that “the play takes place in a suburb of a large city at a time between 1930 and 1950,” but it seems O’Neal had an even more up-to-the-minute setting in mind. Ted Simmons, writing for the Atlanta Constitution, noted “the changing of the University of Virginia to Georgia Tech on Biff’s sneakers struck a jarring note, and was an unnecessary touch.” Georgia Tech had become the first school in the region to voluntarily integrate two years prior to the production. (The University of Virginia had also admitted a handful of Black students by this time, but without the enthusiasm that would have made the campus a welcoming place.) Georgia Tech, then, would have represented for Clark audiences an opportunity for social mobility, and Biff’s choice to give up on it after witnessing his father’s adultery would likely have been especially poignant.
Baltimore Center Stage, April 1972
The first major professional production of Death of a Salesman with an all-Black cast was produced by Baltimore’s Center Stage in 1972.
Promotional mailer for Baltimore Center Stage in 1972 (Billy Rose Theatre Division. MWEZ n.c.+ 25,875)
The production was directed by white director Lee D. Sankowich for the company, which was at that point only nine years old. The creative team seems initially to have considered the casting irrelevant to the piece, though an important opportunity for Black actors. Arthur Miller’s program note is both celebratory and—from the perspective of a reader in 2022—a little cringeworthy in its white saviorism:
“I am happy to know that a production of Death of a Salesman with a black cast is at last being performed in this country. I have felt for many years that particularly with this play which has been so well received in so many countries and cultures that the black actor would have an opportunity, if indeed that is needed anymore, to demonstrate to all his common humanity and his talent. I hope that from here we will go on to casting talented actors regardless of their color in the parts they can play.”
New York Times Critic Mel Gussow, however, seems to have felt the effect of the casting on the production, and wrote in language that echoes much of the discussion of the 2022 Broadway revival, “As for the play, with lines unchanged it becomes, in part, an insightful drama about the superimposition of white standards on repressed black people”
Oberlin College 2008 / Yale Repertory Theater 2009
Around 2008, two productions of Death of a Salesman with mostly Black casts were produced by two major University theatre programs—Oberlin College (2008) and Yale Rep (2009).
Stephen McKinley Henderson (Charley) and Charles S. Dutton (Willy) in the Yale Rep. production of Death of a Salesman (Joan Marcus photographs, *T-Vim 2018-003. Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts)
Photo by Joan Marcus
The director of the Oberlin production, Justin Emeka (who is Black), wrote in his program notes of the team’s desire for the audience to recognize Willy Loman as a Black man (rather than a Black actor playing a white character), and of the effect this casting choice has on the story:
"In our production, Willy Loman is a charismatic, African American traveling salesman who lives with his family in a multiethnic Brooklyn neighborhood. Next door to the Lomans lives Charley, a Jewish immigrant who fled Poland during the invasion of the Third Reich, and his son Bernard. Charley and Willy's friendship originally emerged out of convenience -- them being neighbors and both being from marginalized communities in America. Over the years, as Charley and Bernard climb the socioeconomic ladder, Willy's respect for his friend is confused with resentment. Unable to prove himself in the mostly white business world, Willy has an affair with a white woman he meets while traveling. There is a persistent sense of danger in their secret encounters -- he is not just a married man cheating on his wife, he is a black man sleeping with a white woman in pre-civil rights era Boston."
The Yale Rep production, on the other hand, sought to universalize the story and showcase the talents of their cast rather than focus on the ways in which a Black Loman family affects the story. In an interview with Zeynep Pamuk of the Yale News, actor Charles Dutton (who played Willy), told Pamuk that he and director James Bundy, who is white, “had not envisioned a black cast” originally. In fact, “they asked Meryl Streep [...] to play the part of Linda Loman. But Streep and Dutton had scheduling conflicts, and they decided to cast Kimberly Scott [...], an [sic] black woman, for the role. Bundy then suggested making the Lomans a black family, Dutton said.”
Pamuk then quotes Bundy “‘There are situations that are purely white in the play,’ he said. ‘A black Willy Loman would be hung [sic] for hanging out at Slattery’s in Boston or get arrested for trying to defend a case at the Supreme Court, but you need suspension of disbelief in any play. You can’t cut scenes because of an ethnic situation.’ [...] Bundy added that the fundamental questions of the play still apply when black actors are playing all the roles. The Rep production is not about race in America, he wrote.”
Ford’s Theater 2017
In a 2017 production at Ford’s Theater, staged by white director Stephen Rayne, Black actors Craig Wallace, Fredrick Strother, and KenYatta Rogers played Willy Loman, Willy’s brother Ben, and Willy’s boss Howard respectively. Otherwise, the cast was white.
Kimberly Schraf (Linda) and Craig Wallace (Willy) in the Ford's Theatre production of Death of a Salesman. Carol Rosegg photographs, *T-Vim 2018-004. Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
Photo by Carol Rosegg
At first glance, this approach seems similar to the Yale Rep’s 2009 production in which the director described the actors’ races as mostly incidental. However, Washington Post critic Nelson Pressley felt the casting had particular resonances in certain moments, as he described in his review:
"Do the systemic capitalist pressures that Arthur Miller dramatized operate differently on this Willy Loman? Rayne’s production does not italicize the issue, but the show is not indifferent, either. [...] “Other men, I don’t know — they do it easier,” Willy confides to Linda. It’s almost impossible not to fill in the blank. [...] Here, you wonder whether Willy is craving greater loyalty from his black-run firm, and whether he’s resisting working for his neighbor (a jaunty, joshing Michael Russotto) because Charley is white."
Critic Jason Fraley noted in a piece for D.C. area radio station WTOP that Wallace and Kimberly Schraf, who played Linda, were partners in real life, adding another lens through which the actors’ real identities could be read into the characters they played.
Young Vic Production (2019)
The 2022 Broadway production originated at the Young Vic in London with Wendell Pierce and Sharon D. Clarke playing the same roles. Dr. Nicole King (in the Young Vic’s souvenir program) and Arminda Thomas (in the Broadway playbill) both discuss the history of the Great Migration of Black Americans and the diversification of Brooklyn in the early 20th century.
Young Vic program (*T-PRG Death of a Salesman, Billy Rose Theatre Division)
Both program notes emphasize the reading of the Lomans as a Black family in Brooklyn at a specific historical moment. While both writers acknowledge that Brooklyn was far from fully integrated in the late 1940s when this production is set, they do propose that we need not suspend our disbelief too much to accept the historical possibility of a Black Loman family. Casting Charley and his family as white eliminates the problem noted by James Bundy for his Oberlin production—that a Black man would not have been permitted to present a case before the Supreme Court in the mid-twentieth century. As Wendell Pierce told Stephen Colbert in an interview in October of 2022, the current production alters a “few slight things” in the dialogue to resolve the other difficulties Bundy noted.
If the 2022 Broadway production of Death of a Salesman is not the first to feature a Black actor playing Willy Loman, it is perhaps the first major production to feature a Black Loman family set in a specific, plausible historical moment.