Watching Death of a Salesman, the audience expects to experience Willy’s decline, and still yearn for him to accept the conditions of his tragic life. However, Willy’s defeat is so massive that he cannot pull himself up from the depths. This new theatrical modernization of Arthur Miller’s classic brings an additional layer of pain to the character’s inability to thrive in a society that has turned its back on the Willy Lomans of the world. In this jazzed version, Willy, played by veteran actor Wendell Pierce, faces many challenges, including competition, ageism, psychological issues, personal disappointments—and race.Miller intended for Willy’s losses and loneliness to be felt strongly by the audience, and in this production, in part, they are. However, our palpable identity with Willy’s struggles and defeats is interfered with by several staging factors. Sections of the Loman house and other locations that hang from the rafters reflect Willy’s unstable life hanging in the balance, but the various pieces of furniture and architectural elements floating in and out, both vertically and horizontally, are confusing. Other staging elements add to this confusion, including the random smoke effects, strobe flashes, mechanized movement of the actors, and slow motion and other ghostly mannerisms of his elder brother Ben during the scenes in which Willy’s distorted memories are on display, as well as the confusing and mumbled dialogue between Linda and silhouetted screen images. These stage effects prevent the audience from fully empathizing with Willy’s decline. At the center of Miller’s classic play is Willy’s troubled soul; nothing around him should block one moment of his pain. The technical sideshow in this new production takes focus away from Willy and his struggles and disappointments. Although Pierce delivers his lines with riveting gravitas, fear, and desperation, the technical choices are too blaring and diffuse Willy’s emotions and grief.Willy’s tragic decline is also weakened by a lack of connection with his sons. While Biff, played by Khris Davis, and Happy, portrayed by McKinley Belcher III, display their struggles for their father’s attention and personal success, their personal conflicts in this production are too separate from their father’s. There is scant listening and little empathy or connection, resulting in three relatively close but separate stories in what is a family drama.Willy’s confrontations with his sons, particularly Happy, seem imbalanced, and Hap, the younger son, tends to dominate the exchanges with his father, throwing the rhythm of Willy’s conflict with Biff off kilter. Happy pushes his story unevenly, tossing his sensitivity to his father’s plight too readily and turning his disappointments into his own separate account. Because of these directorial choices, the audience remains too removed from the play’s focus on Willy’s loss of his American Dream and of the tragedy in Miller’s play.On the other hand, Linda, beautifully portrayed by Sharon D. Clarke, underscores her husband’s pain and sympathizes with his downfall in a way that tugs at the audience’s sympathies. Through her empathy for her husband and fierce outcry about the injustices he endures, the audience sees how devastating Willy’s demise is to her as he loses his dream and life.The actual success of this production of Miller’s heart-wrenching play lies in showing that the American Dream fails even more by putting Willy in a Black-and-white world, in addition to the original failures Miller included in his play, a world in which even a white friend and neighbor cannot change the fortune of a Black man in America. For some, no matter how badly they may want to attain the American Dream, the reward is denied, and the injustices are evident on the stage. In this new production of Death of a Salesman, while Willy’s voice should receive more focus and clarity, nonetheless “he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So, attention must be paid.” And, indeed, it should be paid, and he should be heard.