Article by Alisa Soloman for AmericanTheatre.org 4/8/2025
They are among the most famous words spoken by a woman in a canonical American play: “Attention must be paid.” It’s Linda Loman, of course, in the last scene of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, admonishing her oldest son, Biff, to show his late father some respect. “He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog,” Linda insists. “Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.”
“Such a person” was understood in a number of ways when Salesman opened on Broadway in 1949. It could refer to an abstract “capitalized Human Being without being anyone, a suffering animal who commands helpless pity,” as Mary McCarthy put it, or a heroic striver playing by the rules yet beaten down by a punishing capitalist system, the hero of what Miller called a tragedy of “the common man.”
Building dramatic action around studying or staging a Miller play provides several of the feminist playwrights opportunities for direct, even bald, commentary on the original. Forgette makes great use of this ploy in her hilarious backstage comedy, Mrs. Loman is Leaving, in which two aging actors are making their comebacks in Salesman. But there are offstage bumps: The man playing Willy is hallucinating as wildly as his character, while Joanne, the woman playing Linda, is falling apart after she learns, via text, shortly before curtain, that her husband is leaving her. Her grief and fury over her personal crisis commingle with Linda’s and color her challenge to the director’s encomiums about Willy.
