Mrs. Loman – 06 February 2025

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman tells the story of salesman Willy Loman sinking into a depression as the world outpaces him, eventually taking his own life. Barbara Cassidy’s unauthorized sequel, Mrs. Loman, picks up Miller’s story right after Willy’s funeral with his kids, Biff (Matt Ugly McGlade) and Happy (Hartley Parker), wife (Monique Vukovic), and friends, Charley (Jerry Ferris) and Bernard (Joe Gregori), returning home to the empty house to toast his memory. Enter Esther (Linda Jones) a “friend” (the fling Willy had in Chicago in Death of a Salesman), a vibrant disruption who sets Linda’s thinking onto a whole new level with philosophy, marijuana, and a kiss or two.

In Death of a Salesman, the children, Biff and Happy, are portrayed as the easiest to understand characters. Biff gets all the love and attention, and enjoys it, while the audience feels sorry for Happy, who can never quite measure up in his father’s eyes. In Mrs. Loman, Cassidy offers criticism of what different methods of raising children can yield. Biff has been coddled a little, but is a decent man. He’s impressionable and sometimes in need of a little guidance and support. He’s not fully internally motivated, but rises to the occasion for others, like his girlfriend Lena (Ara Celia Butler). Happy, on the other hand, has gone off the deep end into a world of misogynistic shock value where he enjoys hurting people, getting away with it, and telling the tale like it’s funny. Self centered and self assured, Happy seeks ways to sabotage Biff’s life as some kind of sick desire for payback for the ways he was not seen before. The dynamic is fascinating, but also frightening, as Happy has, in many respects, become a salesman trying to peddle himself and convince himself and others of his virtue and worth. In the process, he loses his honor and, towards the end of Mrs. Loman, his life.

The gimmick of Mrs. Loman is the fantasy of what Willy’s wife would do with all her free time after his death, since in Death of a Salesman her only character attribute is her devotion to her husband. Touched by the Contemporary Woman (Patricia Marjorie), who is possibly a representation of the playwright?, Mrs. Loman goes on an adventure of self discovery where she and her new best friend Esther (also Willy’s former fling), take a college course in philosophy, share a joint (and a kiss), and begin to critically analyze the world around them as conscious, aware feminists. One of the theatrical devices used in the play was the presence or absence of the Contemporary Woman in scenes where Mrs. Loman was observing or analyzing others’ behavior. Sometimes she was able to transcend her time and exhibit a modern set of values, while other times the insight had left her and she could only see through the lens of her time. Personally, I did not like Meghan Finn’s staging of this character beginning in the audience, stepping on stage, and hovering around the room. Though no doubt written into Cassidy’s script as a character demanding an actor, Contemporary Woman would have been more interesting as a light or projection concept; it certainly would have brow beaten the audience less and might have said more about the concept of enlightenment existing within Mrs. Loman and not around her.

As a play, Mrs. Loman challenges several stereotypes about women. It posits that it is possible to learn when one’s “an old woman”, compassion comes from understanding, respect is not an entitlement (even for one’s children), and just because one is born in a time does not mean that they’re incapable of transcending values that contradict everyone’s humanity. In almost every character, Mrs. Loman showcases the incredible capacity of people to change. Mrs. Loman gains enlightenment. Esther goes from Willy’s mistress to Mrs. Loman’s closest companion. Biff slips into mediocrity while Happy descends into madness. Bernard and Charley are relatively unchanged—and also uninvolved. Charley’s sexism is challenged in a poker game, Bernard’s weakness questioned a little when he is the most conventionally functional member of his generation….

But ultimately, the untimely death of a salesman leads to the untimely death of his son—at the hand of the enlightened woman who feels that she is running out of time to defend the whole world from misogyny. Brian Aldous’s lighting design and Mike Cassedy’s beautiful music composition carry us through a world that is both frozen in time and fleeing from it towards the future with reckless abandon. Mrs. Loman is a hopefully hopeless adventure through the murky waters of change and inability to change and sympathy and inability to sympathize, where the magic touch of the Contemporary Woman occasionally steps in to shift the audience’s inner compass of morality back onto Death of a Salesman. Did Willy Loman damage the people in his family? Would his absence have done more damage than his presence, or just different damage? Is there someone we can blame for Happy Loman’s death? Is it bad that the contemporary audience is glad to be rid of this disgusting rapist—because now the audience is celebrating death too? How can we untangle our feelings about these characters and their very different assumed potentials? Philosophically speaking, we’re too interconnected and invested to ever know the true cost of enlightenment—we are stuck with knowing that our enlightenment will never allow us (as represented by Mrs. Loman) to stop feeling that cost emotionally.

I attended this performance on a press pass from Spin Cycle.