While the first act may be a bit flat, the second act more than conveys the humanity and power of Miller’s great work.
All I know is that the Ti-Ahwaga production held my attention throughout and, in the end, left me emotionally moved by Willy’s fate.
Therefore, I lack the perspective to compare Ti-Ahwaga’s production with other stagings of the play, which has been revived five times on Broadway alone. Before seeing the Ti-Ahwaga production, I had never seen a live performance of Death of a Salesman (I had seen a television production). The Ti-Ahwaga actors, under the direction of James Osborne, turn in a solid and effective production that captures the emotion of Miller’s great play about self-delusion, Oedipal confrontations between fathers and sons and what constitutes success, or failure, in American life. The good news is that I didn’t need to worry. I dreaded the possibility of a very long evening. The non-profit troupe can claim the title as the oldest, continually active community theater in upstate New York, but tackling Miller’s masterpiece is a daunting task for any non-professional, community theater. So, I was more than a little worried while driving up Route 17 to Owego to watch the Ti-Ahwaga Community Players launch their season with a production of Miller’s classic play.
With Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller created one of the great dramas of the 20th century and one of the towering figures of American literature: Willy Loman, the doomed salesman of the title.