Brian Dennehy Found the Tragic Grandeur in Ordinary Lives

NYT Theater ^ | Apr 2020 | Ben Brantley

[CondoleezzaProtege]

I had admired Mr. Dennehy — who died on Wednesday, at 81 — as a smart, risk-taking and undersung actor onstage and onscreen. He was a heartbreakingly sensitive lout as the parvenu Lopakhin — a brute with a touch of the poet — in Peter Brook’s production of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” (1988) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. His performance as the serial murderer John Wayne Gacy in the 1992 television film “To Catch a Killer” was a penetratingly human portrait of a monster, and it haunted my nightmares for a long time.

But nothing I had seen Mr. Dennehy do before prepared me for his take on Willy Loman in Robert Falls’s shadow-shrouded “[Death of a Salesman],” [Arthur] Miller’s benchmark drama from 1949. The scale of his performance was more genuinely tragic than any version of Willy I’ve seen before or since. Mr. Dennehy had a large and brawny frame that loomed intimidatingly from a stage. Yet the character he was portraying thought of himself as a little man — so insignificant that he was afraid he was on the verge of disappearing altogether...

The disparity between Mr. Dennehy’s physical stature and his character’s sense of smallness generated extraordinary pathos. It was as if he had been made outsized by pain. And there was a visceral intensity to the way he moved...

He received his second Tony four years later, as the miserly, combative father in Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” also directed by Mr. Falls. Though his character, James Tyrone, was a retired matinee idol, Mr. Dennehy refrained from the easy temptation of playing the ham...he registered the enduring, impossibly tested love of a man for his wife, and the wounds with which she had left him...

[SkyDancer]

Yeah, sad to learn about that. My dad and uncle served in Nam and my two bro’s served in Iraq. Thank you for your service.

[one guy in new jersey]

Eagerly went to see Dennehey when he was cast in Death of a Salesman on Broadway.

Attention must be paid!

Boy was he great in that.