In the opening scene the audience's eyes are seared by the headlights of Willy's car. Michael Philippi's lighting floods the stage with a darkness that is always threatening to consume, the image of the tidal pull of depression itself. That shift into and out of focus, just as Willy himself is unable to remain fixed in an immediate reality the lines between the play's harsh present and Willy's reimagining of the past have seldom seemed so fluid. The designer Mark Wendland has conceived the rooms of the Lomans' house as moving platforms The Brooklyn home to which Willy Loman returns from an aborted road trip at the play's beginning is no stable sanctuary. Falls and hisĮxpert production team are mercifully less literal, that is effectively the landscape they create here. Miller, who had originally titled the play ''The Inside of His Head,'' has said he thought of having it occur in a set that would indeed be in the shape of a man's head. Instead, it demands that you experience Willy's suffering without sociological distance, that you surrender to the sense of one man's pain and of the the toll it takes on everyone around him. Miller's deluded Brooklyn dreamer or looks ennoblingly up to him as a martyr to a success-driven country.

Robert Falls's powerhouse staging, first seen at the Goodman Theater in Chicago last fall, never looks down on Mr. Right into the mind of its decimated hero, played with majestic, unnerving transparency by Brian Dennehy.

In the harrowing revival of Arthur Miller's ''Death of a Salesman'' that opened last night at the Eugene O'Neill Theater, 50 years to the day after it made its epochal Broadway debut, you walk The mostįrightening thing of all is that you understand exactly what he's feeling. You get the sense that Willy Loman would crush his own skull to destroy the images inside. He presses at his temples, he pulls at his cheek, so hard that you're surprised that his face remains intact. Is right hand, so sturdy and thick-fingered, keeps flying pitifully to his forehead, to what he assumes is the source of all that Attention Must Be Paid, Again By BEN BRANTLEY

Death of a salesman monologue