Willy Loman and Me

I may have to drop Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman from my Drama class. I’ve included it every semester for the past 15 years, and it generally works well in helping students learn about character, motivation, empathy, and plot, not to mention tragedy. But three years ago, a problem emerged that I hadn’t anticipated: I turned 60. Which, as one of my students pointed out in discussion (not in connection to me), is the age of Willy “I’m tired to the death” Loman in the play. (Coincidentally, the original Broadway production opened on February 10, 1949, three days before I was born.) Making it worse, each semester, as Willy stays forever 60, I grow older year by year. And my students continue to describe Willy in their discussions and papers (with no conscious reminder to me) that he’s “an old man,” or “a very old man,” or “a very old, sad, demented man.” I have to check myself from correcting their misperceptions (“He’s only been horribly overworked, burnt out” or “60 is the new 50”). And I hesitate anymore to read my students’ evaluations of the class (“I liked the readings, but the teacher is a very old, sad, demented man”). I have, though, made sure to emphasize in our discussion of the play the one positive thing that Charley finds to say about Willy in the Requiem: “He was a happy man with a batch of cement.”