Kevin McCorkle makes for a masterful, deeply affecting Willy Loman in The Process 360’s 70th-anniversary intimate staging of Arthur Miller’s Death Of A Salesman, now playing at North Hollywood’s Secret Rose Theatre.

By the time we meet Willy, the lifelong salesman has become at age 60 a mere shadow of who he once was—or perhaps better put, of what he only believes he once was: a “well-liked” man at the top of the traveling sales game.

A nearly broken wreck these days, Willy has taken to talking to himself in remembered conversations with his long-suffering wife Linda (Jules Bruff), his now 30something sons Biff (Freddy Giorlando) and Happy (Bradford James Jackson), his well-to-do neighbor Charley (Frank Crim) and Charley’s equally prosperous son-and-heir Bernard (Adam Matthew Duarte), and most significantly with his deceased older brother Ben (Jeff Jeffers), who achieved a rags-to-riches success in Africa that Willy has been unable to replicate back home.

Not surprisingly, Willy’s bizarre behavior has begun to prey on Linda’s mind, as has Willy’s recent car crash, a one-vehicle collision that may not have been as accidental as she would like to think.

Adding to Linda’s family concerns are younger son Happy’s inveterate womanizing and all-around lack of achievement (a case of like father-like son), and Biff’s return to the family nest having long ago failed to fulfill the potential he showed as a high school athlete.

Talk about a recipe for American-style Greek tragedy.

It’s hard to imagine the effect Death Of A Salesman must have had seventy years ago with its repeated back-and-forth transitions between present and past and reality and fantasy unlike anything Broadway audiences had experienced up to that point, transitions director Björn Johnson accomplishes close to seamlessly on the wide Secret Rose stage.

That’s not to say that Miller’s follow-up to 1947’s All My Sons has aged quite as well as that game changer, especially where language is concerned, dated turns-of-phrases making scenes involving its younger cast members in particular sound just a little bit “off.”

 On the other hand, few Broadway protagonists have ever come close to the complexity Arthur Miller gave Willy Loman, a man who managed to sell his sons on a greatness more imagined than real, and who must now face the consequences of that delusion, and following in some pretty big footsteps, Road Theatre Company member McCorkle is as dynamic as he is devastating, a human train wreck you can’t take your eyes off of.

Bruff gives Willy’s endlessly patient wife moments of wifely grit and maternal warmth, but it’s hard to buy the radiant, still youthful actress as the worn-down shell of woman nearing sixty Linda has become.

The perfectly-cast Giorlando and Jackson, on the other hand, make for a terrific pair of night-and-day opposite sons, and Giorlando’s devastation at discovering the man his father really is proves heart-wrenching.

The Death Of A Salesman cast is completed Crim’s warm-hearted first-generation Charley, an unexpected but effective choice given that his son is played by the fine, Cuban-American Duarte; Cheryl Dooley, tough and tender as Willy’s favorite road stop; Jeffers’ larger-than-life Ben; Steve Andrews, doubling impressively as Willy’s compassionless young boss Howard and as good-natured waiter Stanley; and Brittany Dassa, Jamie Renee Smith, and Joanne Verbos’s in brief but nicely-drawn cameos.

A bare-bones scenic design (furniture on an otherwise bare stage backed by scenic painter Scot Renfro’s abstract big-city skyline) is dramatically lit by Michael Franco, Michèle Young’s late-‘40s costumes are her accustomed fine creations, Bruce Dickinson and Ina Shumaker merit snaps for their vintage props, and sound designer Peter Carlstedt adds appropriate effects and a period-perfect musical soundtrack by Death Of A Salesman’s 1951 film-adaptation composer Alex North.

Claire Mazzeo is stage manager and Austin Heemstra is assistant stage manager.

Death Of A Salesman is produced by Lisa McCorkle and Courtney King and executive produced by Adam David Gregory and its stars McCorkle, Giorlando, and Bruff. Ulysses Heyward is associate producer.

I can’t recall the last time Arthur Miller’s second most Broadway-revived play has gotten a professional L.A. staging, just one reason its four-week run at the Secret Rose proves newsworthy.

Still, if ever a play rested on a single actor’s shoulders, it’s Death Of A Salesman, and with Kevin McCorkle as Willy, they are magnificent shoulders indeed.

Secret Rose Theatre, 11246 W Magnolia Blvd, North Hollywood. https://m.bpt.me/event/4028750

–Steven Stanley
April 12, 2019

Tags: Arthur Miller, Los Angeles Theater Review, Secret Rose Theatre, The Process 360