In 2026, the question of human disposability is no longer theoretical. AI has begun consuming white-collar work with the same ruthless efficiency that automation once devoured factory floors. How do you provide for your family when the skills you’ve spent decades honing become obsolete overnight? How do you raise children to succeed in a world that increasingly has no place for them … or you?
Playwright Arthur Miller asked these questions back in 1949. Death of a Salesman emerged from an America drunk on post-war prosperity, but already breeding the anxieties that would metastasize across decades: the relentless and expedient drive for efficiency, the tyranny of payment plans, the hollow promise that being “well-liked” would be enough, and the slow-motion tragedies of people who play by the rules and discover—too late—that the rules have changed.
Death of a Salesman follows Willy Loman, an aging traveling salesman whose grip on reality is loosening as his career collapses. His wife Linda holds the family together through sheer will, while his sons Biff and Happy circle the wreckage of their father’s expectations: one fighting to escape, and the other having already lost.
It’s a sad, small tale that does not end well.
A symphony of devastation
Death of a Salesman Director Dean Gabourie conducts, rather than directs: he never rushes, allowing each character and dynamic its measured beat. “Attention must be paid,” Linda famously insists—and Gabourie pays it to every detail. In the process, he transforms this shabby tragedy into something grander: a full-sensory symphonic experience that is fantastically beautiful … and more completely devastating, as a result.
At the symphony’s heart, Tom McCamus delivers a Willy Loman for the ages. His distinctive voice operates at registers that map precisely to Willy’s fractured consciousness: flat in moments of lucidity, low and quizzical when unprocessable realities intrude, and deployed like a grappling hook when he seizes on faint hope and spins it into fantasy. McCamus makes us feel deeply Willy’s tragic complicity in his own delusion and its unfairness: two truths, both wrenching, that we hold simultaneously.
Lucy Peacock’s Linda has the harder task: locked in brittle helplessness, she must be monotone without being boring while sounding alarms that no one heeds. She alternately placates and pushes Willy and her sons in a quietly shattering performance. Meanwhile, Joe Perry’s Biff fights visibly for his life, desperately clawing through a smothering, reality-dampening tarp that starts with Willy but is abetted by Linda and brother Happy. Each layer he pierces takes a Herculean effort, but there is always another, and we feel the effort. And finally, Josh Johnston’s wheedling Happy feels like Willy’s truest heir: the delusion distilled into a quick-talking hustler who thinks he owns a world that will eat him alive.
The rock-solid supporting ensemble—David W. Keeley, Matthew Kabwe, Sean Arbuckle, Krystin Pellerin, Raymond Strachan, and others—flesh out Willy’s collapsing world with metronomic precision and flashes of humanity.
The instruments of tragedy
Michael Louis Johnson’s mournful trumpet opens the production before the play even begins, transitioning us elegiacally into Willy’s world. It announces what we are about to see: a requiem. And throughout the show, it won’t let us forget it: scene transitions are punctuated with the plaintive brass dignity of song.
Scott Penner’s set is simply magnificent. We’re surrounded on three sides by towering rows of tenement windows. Willy’s apartment is sparsely realized at center stage, with just a single light dangling above it to focus our attention. His home is one of countless others: a tragic idea that the set makes inescapable. There’s a sense of porousness and pressure, and the confusion of inside and outside, as a world of struggle presses in on this small family.
The windows light up to punctuate the drama, supporting powerful transitions between the increasingly indistinguishable worlds of memory and reality. And when those massive buildings unexpectedly move, we understand the scale and power of the interior life preying on Willy. Memory and desperate fantasy gain staggering architectural weight.
Louise Guinand’s lighting design and John Gzowski’s sound are additional instruments in this symphony, and make otherworldly use of Willy’s recollected and imagined exchanges with his brother Uncle Ben (Keeley). These spectral, unmoored sequences are exquisite and sonorous. They lay bare the multi-generational dimensions of this tragedy—the delusions Willy inherited and is passing down.
Attending this symphony
This Death of a Salesman lands with fresh devastation. So many of the things Willy expects—like people knowing and respecting you, and an organization you’ve served for life taking care of you as your career winds down—now seem like quaint anachronisms. And with the advent of AI, the gig economy, and remote work, the world of work has been atomized and re-engineered to make the conditions of secure, respectable and fulfilling employment near-impossible.
But the play also hits hard because—just like Willy and his family—we are the co-authors of our delusions. The world today is exponentially more capable of fostering and feeding them … and of abandoning us when the rug gets pulled out. But we own our half of this song, and that’s a brutal thing to sit with.
“Attention must be paid,” Linda memorably cries. She simply can’t fathom how her husband can be discarded and forgotten by a world whose approval he hustled so long to earn. Of course, the passive voice of her phrasing betrays its keening impotence: attention must be paid … but by whom? And who says so?
So let me rephrase her sentiment in the active voice. Go see Death of a Salesman. Experience the terrible, immersive beauty and the shocking resonance of this symphony.
Pay attention to this production.
Death of a Salesman runs at Stratford’s Avon Theatre until October 24, 2026. Tickets are available at stratfordfestival.ca.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
