The actor gets “Happy” in Broadway’s Death of a Salesman

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Welcome to Building Character, TDF Stages‘ ongoing series about actors and how they create their roles

Every night, before the audience arrives at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre for Death of a Salesman, Finn Wittrock spends time on the set walking around his “own house.”

The house is based on Jo Mielziner’s set design for the original 1949 production of Arthur Miller’s classic play, which follows the tragic final days of salesman Willy Loman (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Wittrock, who plays Willy’s son Happy, says the history of the set helps him prepare for the harrowing show.

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The Tony Award winner moves into “Hurt Village”

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Welcome to Building Character, TDF Stages’ ongoing series about actors and how they create their roles

Tonya Pinkins believes in Hurt Village.

In Katori Hall’s latest play, now in previews at the Signature Theatre’s new complex, the actress stars as Big Mama, the weary matriarch of a Memphis housing project where drugs, violence, and poverty are coiled around everyone’s throat. Even in this nightmare, however, there are flickers of hope: Big Mama’s talented great-granddaughter is threatening to flourish. Her grandson has just come back from the Iraq War. And there’s a chance the government will help her family move to a better part of town. When trouble comes, Big Mama clings to these silver linings, and her effort gives the production a furious energy.

For Pinkins, Big Mama feels authentic. “There’s a rawness to [Katori's] work that I would say allows you to bring all your truth to it,” she says.

And that’s not the case with every production: “I did another play, and it was also a black play, and I didn’t find anything about the people to be real. I didn’t know any black people like them. It was an awkward sort of thing to be portraying black people who didn’t feel authentic. But with Katori’s stuff, it’s so raw that the comments I’ve gotten from friends are that it [shows] a part of life that they want to forget, that they don’t want to look at.”

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The actress fights her impulses in The New Group’s latest play

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Welcome to Building Character, TDF Stages’ ongoing series about actors and how they create their roles
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She’s a character you want to shake some sense into. As she moves through Russian Transport, Erika Sheffer’s world premiere play at the New Group, Diana behaves like someone who’s in control of her life and her family. A Russian immigrant who helps her husband run a car service, she’s gruffly charming as she barrels over everything, insisting that it’s Chinese food for dinner and threatening to kill her children if they don’t sit down right now.

Still, Diana can’t see that her family’s imploding. Her brother Boris, fresh off the boat from Russia, arrives with dark plans for his time in America. He changes everyone’s lives, and even though Diana’s partially aware of what he’s doing, she misses the most important details.

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The Tony-winning actor plays a spy in “Blood and Gifts”

Welcome to Building Character, TDF Stages’ ongoing series about how actors create their roles

The first time we meet Simon Craig, the dissolute British spy played by Jefferson Mays in Blood and Gifts, he is muttering to himself as he spills pocket change all over the floor. The second time, he’s about to be shot by an ostensible ally.

By the end of J.T. Rogers’ sprawling look at Western involvement in the 1980s war between Russia and Afghanistan, Simon’s CIA counterpart—a square-jawed Texan named James Warnock—has received a brutal crash course in the consequences of realpolitik. But so, in odd and tragic ways, has Simon, who after 14 years in Afghanistan knows the lay of the land but is still capable of crippling disappointment.

“We started referring to Simon as Cassandra during rehearsals,” says Mays. “He sees what’s coming down the pike before anyone else.” That’s not to say, however, that Simon is ready to face what’s coming. “I learned a couple interesting things about MI6,” Mays says of the British intelligence service. “They generally leave their fellows out in the branch for a fairly long time, so they tend to go native. Or to seed. Or both.”

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The “Stick Fly” star can’t worry if we agree with her character

Welcome to Building Character, TDF Stages’ ongoing series about how actors create their roles
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Tortured love affairs, parental disapproval, and a board game that leads to a wall-rattling fight: There’s plenty of juice in Lydia R. Diamond’s Stick Fly. However, drama’s only half the equation in the play, which is running at Broadway’s Cort Theatre. The show stands out from other family meltdown sagas because it fuses fury with deep conversations about race, class, and gender. The characters are just as likely to hurl accusations about racist subtext as they are to cry about their daddy’s dark secrets.

Both elements spring naturally from the story, which centers on the Le Vays, a clan of wealthy, African-American intellectuals. When the sons bring home their girlfriends—Taylor, an African-American entomologist, and Kimber, a white scholar who works with urban youth—philosophical differences quickly lead to personal explosions.

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