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Death of a Salesman follows two days in the life of the Loman family, who live in Brooklyn and have, at long last, very nearly paid off their mortgage. But they have perhaps never felt more insecure. Bills are piling up. Willy’s job as a traveling salesman has stopped paying him a salary. In his 60s, he is beginning to feel his age, and as he works for scant commissions, he’s started to exhibit a faltering grasp on reality, and an increasingly vigorous drive toward self-destruction. His wife Linda — senses terrible possibilities just around the corner. Meanwhile, adult sons...

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....

HILLARY Clinton's campaign overnight predicted a rapid end to the Democratic White House race next month as the press read the last rites to her quest to be the first woman president. With more party elders drifting to Barack Obama's camp and the media declaring the nominating battle all but over, Senator Clinton aides battled back with appeals for voters to be heard and for new donors to come forward. Even as he vowed no surrender from the former first lady, Clinton campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe said party bosses known as "superdelegates" would coalesce behind a candidate once the final...

I often decry the laziness, incompetence and bias of the American press. Tuesday night in Sago, West Virginia, the press sank to an all-time low, in covering the mine disaster. Working on the Internet, with a 24-hour news channel running, I heard the announcement that the original reports were false. Instead of one miner dead and 12 rescued, the reverse was true. Only one was found alive where they had barricaded themselves in, to await rescue. An orgy of press coverage followed, in which reporters stuck microphones in the faces of grief-stricken survivors, seeking agonizing sound bites for the titillation...

Attention must be paid. That's the line — the big line from ''Death of a Salesman.'' And, if you missed it this last week or so, well, you weren't paying attention. It was the headline in the Christian Science Monitor, and the New York Times: ''Attention Must Be Paid.'' California's Contra Costa Times went with: '' 'Attention Must Be Paid' To Playwright.'' And the Chicago Tribune saved it for the slow-motion elephantine punchline of its opening paragraph: ''The Man who wrote 'Death of a Salesman' died Thursday. And attention must be paid.'' In Britain, where they've built an Arthur Miller...

"Great drama is great questions," Arthur Miller wrote, "or it is nothing but technique." He was right, but his counsel had become a lonely one by the second half of his career. In many ways, the American theater has returned to what it was before Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams and Miller arrived -- light entertainment. Even today's dramas, more often than not, tend to confirm fashionable points of view while pretending to be shocking or politically daring. One thinks of Six Degrees of Separation, among others. Great questions extend beyond place and time, and Miller's greatest play, Death of a...

NEW YORK (AP) - Arthur Miller, whose dramas of fierce moral and personal responsibility such as "Death of a Salesman" and "The Crucible" made him one of the 20th century's greatest playwrights, has died at the age of 89. Miller, died Thursday night of congestive heart failure at his home in Roxbury, Conn., surrounded by his family, his assistant, Julia Bolus, said Friday. For decades, the playwright, along with Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams, dominated not only American stages, but theaters throughout the world. Broadway marquees were to dim their lights Friday night at curtain time. "It is the loss...