As an indictment of capitalism, or business, or America, Death of a Salesman (at the Hudson Theatre through January 15) still fails; attention need not be paid to Arthur Miller’s feeble swipes at how an honorable man has supposedly been left to wither in the cold by the rapacious pursuit of profit. At sixty-three, Loman will shortly qualify for Social Security; moreover, he has a lot of equity in his Brooklyn house, which is one month away from being fully paid off, and has a standing job offer on the table.

Looking at Salesman through middle-aged eyes for the first time, I can appreciate Miller’s fine sense of tortured family mechanics. Today a metonym for mediocrity, Willy Loman (a bluff Wendell Pierce) illustrates how failure can be contagious—how it can bloom like algae and turn everything a sickly color. The real tragedy in the play is not Willy’s slow collapse but how his failure infects his once-promising son Biff (Khris Davis), who should have advanced greatly beyond his father’s station but won’t.

With black performers in all of the principal roles and white actors playing all but one of the people to whose station Willy aspires, however, the production, directed by Miranda Cromwell (first staged at London’s Young Vic in 2019), makes for an incongruous coda to the Black Lives