The drama came from the audience instead of the stage during Tuesday evening’s production of Death of a Salesman on Broadway. As reported by The New York Post, a disruptive woman stalled the show to the point that Wendell Pierce was forced to break character in an attempt to calm her down, before police removed her from the theater.
The latest revival of Arthur Miller’s classic, which continues at The Hudson Theatre through January 15, stars the Treme and The Wire star in the lead role of tragic Willy Loman. He was nominated for the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role in a Play for the West End production in 2020. His co-stars include Sharon D. Clarke, who won the 2020 Olivier for Best Actress, as Ben’s wife Linda Loman, André De Shields, a Tony and Grammy-winner for Hadestown and Emmy-winner for Ain’t Misbehavin’, as Willy’s older brother Ben, and Khris Davis and McKinley Belcher III as Willy’s sons Biff and Happy.
The Post reported that on Tuesday, a woman caused a bit of a ruckus from her seat during the first act of the three-hour tragic play. It appeared, at first, that she would leave during intermission, but the top of Act II is when things got truly out of hand.
According to a witness who was eager to update their social media followers, the “irate, seemingly inebriated audience member disrupted the play’s second act so intensely that the action had to be suspended.” Eventually, the house lights came up, and Pierce “patiently & heroically pleaded with her to leave peacefully despite her insistence that she should be carried out forcefully (she was eventually escorted out by police).”
Here you see Pierce as the picture of calm during the chaos (and the audience applauding the security detail’s arrival).
Once the commotion died down, “Pierce segued seamlessly back into the role of a lifetime—his first appearance on Broadway in three decades—an acting job all the more remarkable given the real-life drama that could have derailed the entire night,” as per a user on Instagram.
A Reddit user (so take this with a grain of salt) said that audience member was rustling her bag through all of Act I and loudly responding to the performers on stage. This person also claims the woman wouldn’t leave the theater without getting her money back, and, before the police came, Pierce told an usher to just grab some cash to get her out of there.
Producers released a statement, reading, “We’re grateful to the entire team at the Hudson Theatre for working together to resolve the situation and resume the performance as quickly as possible.”
In 1949, Death of a Salesman, starring Lee J. Cobb, won the Tony Award for Best Play, Miller won the now-retired Best Author of a Play Tony, Elia Kazan won for Best Director, and other awards included the Pulitzer Prize. Broadway revivals have starred George C. Scott in 1975, Dustin Hoffman and John Malkovich in 1985 (turned into a made-for-television film directed by Volker Schlöndorff), Brian Dennehy in 1999, and Philip Seymour Hoffman and Andrew Garfield in 2012, directed by Mike Nichols. The 1951 movie version starred Frederic March. Among its many points of reference in other work, it is the play-within-the-film of Asghar Farhadi’s Academy Award-winning Iranian movie The Salesman and it weirdly over-indexes as a punchline on The Simpsons.
