Mrs. Loman

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Barbara Cassidy’s Mrs. Loman is an unauthorized sequel to Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman picking up when the family returns home from the funeral of Willy Loman. Described by the author as “a feminist critique” of the original 1949 play, it puts Linda Loman front and center in this continuation. Unfortunately, the first half is a rehash of Miller’s play and the second half is mostly not believable. A great deal of “Mrs. Loman” is not true to its 1949 time period but it is not an update either.

While the family and neighbors Charley and Bernard enjoy a funeral meal prepared by Linda, there is knock on the door and neighbor Esther Jones comes to pay her respects. While neither Linda nor her sons know her, Charley has met her before. Esther talks of her adult education classes at Brooklyn College and suggests that the widowed Linda may need something to occupy her time. As a result of this meeting, Linda and Esther become confidantes, smoke marijuana together, and begin a romantic relationship.

When older son Biff brings home a Black girlfriend, Linda has no problem with her race but his brother Happy does. However, Happy’s relationship with women is revealed to be both misogynist and sociopathic. When Biff finally gets a job, Happy considers it beneath him as he has to wear a uniform. When Linda talks of selling the house that Willy worked so hard to finish paying for, Happy has a hard time accepting this destruction of his dreams of inheritance. The play concludes with a very melodramatic ending, which, like that of Miller’s, puts an end to things as they have been.

The play is not very consistent with life in 1949. It is unlikely that middle class married women cursed, smoked marijuana, quoted Simone de Beauvoir or engaged in affairs with other women. While the program notes by the playwright describe Mrs. Loman as a “feminist critique” of the Arthur Miller play and reveals that the author feels that the original “does not provide for a full female character,” Linda’s studying philosophy at Brooklyn College does not make for a feminist statement. In fact, Beauvoir’s The Second Sex which Linda quotes from was not published in English until 1953 which means Linda could not have been studying it in an American class in 1949.

Although set in 1949 as a sequel to Death of a Salesman, Mrs. Loman is written from a decidedly modern point of view and perspective. Another device in the play is a character called “Contemporary Woman” who offers Linda advice which sounds like it is from decades later but also quotes from Sartre and de Beauvoir who are not au courant today. Is it likely that Biff would have brought home a Black girlfriend, a bartender, to meet his mother in Flatbush, Brooklyn, in 1949 and were there women bartenders at that time? Another flaw in the plotting is that Charley implies that Esther is the woman from Boston with whom Willy was having an affair when his route as a salesman took him there. Would she have moved to Brooklyn and sought out his widow?

Despite the problems in the plotting, director Meghan Finn has kept the events moving swiftly along, even when they are not believable for their time period. As Linda Loman, Monique Vukovic is at first the same woman that Miller wrote and then begins changing much too fast. The sons Biff and Happy, both losers, seem to have switched personalities from Miller’s original. Hartley Parker’s Happy has become the aggressor while Matt “Ugly” McGlade’s Biff is now the retiring one. Both Linda Jones’ Esther and Ara Celia Butler as Biff’s girlfriend give lovely performances, but they seem to have wandered in from another play. As written by Cassidy, Jerry Ferris’ Charley, the family’s successful neighbor, seems much diminished and unsophisticated while Joe Gregori’s Bernard, a lawyer who has argued before the Supreme Court, seems to have regressed in his relationship with Biff and Happy to what they were like as teenagers.

Christopher & Justin Swader’s setting for the Lomans’ living room, kitchen and childhood bedroom for Biff and Happy is perfectly satisfactory for the action of the play. However, what is referred in the script as “the magical area downstage” seems to simply be where the Contemporary Woman speaks to the audience, breaking the fourth wall, certainly a rare technique in plays in the late forties. Patricia Marjorie’s costumes are suitable but rather bland, except for putting Linda in bright red when she has her late awakening. The lighting by Brian Aldous does what is needed without being atmospheric or moody. Intimacy coordinator Max Mooney and fight choreographer Sean Griffin do fine work in the scenes in which their specialties are called upon.

Barbara Cassidy’s Mrs. Loman demonstrates the dangers in attempting to write sequels to classic works of literature by other authors. Even most dramatic sequels by the original authors have not worked very well (with the exception of Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park which does not use any of the characters from A Raisin in the Sun). For another author to attempt it now proves to be risky, particularly so many decades later when mores and roles have changed. While Mrs. Loman might have been an interesting idea in the right hands, in practice Cassidy’s new play is unable to successfully recreate its 1949 period. Of course, from statements he has written, Arthur Miller was more interested in his tragic hero Willy Loman (based on his Uncle Manny) than in his wife which is why Linda’s role in the original is given so little to do.

Mrs. Loman (through February 15, 2025)

Theatre Row, 410 W. 42^nd Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, visit http://www.mrsloman.com

Running time: one hour and 45 minutes without an intermission