It is beyond sad to lose the brilliant actor Philip Seymour
Hoffman. His performance in Death of A Salesman quite simply tore me apart. As
soon as he came on stage every detail of his artistry drew me into Willy
Loman’s misery. It ended up shaking me to the core.
The performance had particular resonance for me because the
character he played reminded me so much of my father. My father wasn’t exactly
Willy Loman. And I’m certainly not Biff, but listen to this:
My father came to this country from India in the late 1940s.
He became an aerospace engineer, married a brilliant and beautiful woman from
Korea, bought a house in the suburbs with a pool, and had five children. He taught
us to live as moral beings, to be the best in science and math, and to love music,
literature and the arts. But, as Willy Loman and so many others discovered in times
of economic change, the American Dream was illusory.
There was no happily ever after. When the space program cut back
in the 1970s Papa was out of work. He declared bankruptcy but was still burdened
with family responsibilities. We moved out of the house and my parents
divorced. And my father, the rocket scientist, could not find work except, as
he said in his last note to us, to build weapons, which he would not do.
A proud man, he always dressed neatly to pick up his
unemployment check. Like Willy Loman, my father became superfluous when his
particular set of skills was no longer needed.
In the play Willy Loman’s wife Linda tells their son Biff
“he’s been trying to kill himself.” She
had previously written to Biff about Willy’s accident driving off the road, but
she found out later a witness said he had deliberately smashed into a railing.
When I was about thirteen, I read a news item of a man who
had driven his car off a cliff but survived with only a broken arm. That man turned
out to be my father. I did not realize at the time that it was his first
attempt to commit suicide.
At some point my father came to the conclusion that he was
worth more dead than alive.
Like Willy Loman, he made the awful, deliberate decision to
take his life so that his family could have the insurance money. When I was
sixteen, he succeeded.
I’d seen the Dustin Hoffman and Brian Dennehy revivals of
Death of A Salesman. We all knew the story. Yet I hadn’t noticed how closely
this play tracked my father’s death. It took Philip Seymour Hoffman’s searing
performance to slash through the emotional fortress I had maintained for 38
years.
When you lose a parent at a young age and no one talks about
it, you can bury it away into adulthood as a deep, unexpressed and unexamined sorrow.
But the way Philip Seymour Hoffman captured the utter humanity of Willie Loman
and his plight elevated the play to the realm of art. He illuminated my father’s
own hard times, Papa’s love for his family, and his final lonely decision. As I
watched the play my tears flowed freely, without judgment or anger, but with
love and understanding for my Papa as a human being.
So thank you, Philip Seymour Hoffman, for performing with such
intelligence, compassion and truth. But now your children have lost their
father while young. I hope they find healing and peace. They have a difficult
road ahead of them.
