Peter Askin’s Trumbo is based on the play, Trumbo, by Christopher Trumbo, and is clearly a labor of love and ideological affinity for all the Hollywood celebrities who participated in the production. The Hollywood blacklist ensnared the playwright’s father, Dalton Trumbo, and many other talented people in the period of the cold war, the House Un-American Activities Committee, Senator Joseph McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover and other cruel relics of a bygone era. Trumbo’s withering take on these instruments of his torture could be used as a club against the Bush-Cheney administration for its perceived assault on the Bill of Rights in the name of national security. It could be, but it shouldn’t be. Every age has its own nuances, and I happened to have lived through the period of Trumbo’s torments. For viewers of Trumbo who have not, it may seem that the national hysteria over the Red Menace was contrived simply to punish Trumbo (1905-1976) for his defense of the First Amendment.

A brief reference is made in the film to Winston Churchill’s coinage of the term “the Iron Curtain” to describe the Soviet Union’s absorption of several Eastern European countries into its oppressive orbit. But there is no mention at all of the right-wing Republican assault on the Truman administration for its alleged “softness” on Communism, which resulted in our “losing” China to Mao’s Red hordes. After all, the Republicans had been out of the White House for 15 years when Trumbo received his first subpoenas from the committee, and, then, as now, Hollywood was a prime target for right-wingers.

Yet in the selected Trumbo letters out of his 600-page collection, read by a succession of A-list actors, there is little attention paid to domestic politics, to the confrontation between Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss, which did so much damage to the Democratic party, Harry Truman, Dean Acheson and Adlai Stevenson, the last candidate for whom I rang doorbells. There’s no mention of Klaus Fuchs, the Rosenbergs, the theft of U.S. nuclear secrets for the Soviet Union.

These facts did not justify the Hollywood blacklist, nor Trumbo’s imprisonment for contempt of Congress, along with his equally “unfriendly” screenwriting colleagues. As it is, he emerges from the emotional readings of his letters as a witty punster with a great deal of personal charm, and, in my opinion, more than a little political guile. His language is relentlessly idealistic with only an occasional lapse into the incriminating “comrade” and the mourning over the fall of Barcelona to the fascists. He talks extensively of his military experience in the Pacific during World War II, but there is not a word about his activities in the ’30s and ’40s that made him vulnerable to exposure for his beliefs. It is not that he should have apologized for his Marxist thoughts in the middle of the Great Depression. His ability to survive despite all the obstacles placed in his path was heroic enough without his never acknowledging that he knew John Howard Lawson, the self-appointed commissar of many Hollywood screenwriters. Still, I do appreciate Trumbo for acknowledging much-abused director-producer Otto Preminger’s role in ending the Hollywood blacklist in 1960 by publicizing Trumbo’s screenplay credit for Exodus. Ultimately, Trumbo is well worth seeing for what it tells us about the age in which this irrepressible individualist lived, loved, suffered and finally triumphed. Indeed, his hilarious letter to his son, Chris—in college at the time—on the pleasures, glories and guilts of masturbation is alone worth the price of admission. Whatever reservations I have about Trumbo can be attributed to my liberal anti-communist mind-set, which demands that the whole tangled story of the cold war be told.

For the record, the reading ensemble for Trumbo consists of Joan Allen, Brian Dennehy, Michael Douglas, Paul Giamatti, Nathan Lane, Josh Lucas, Liam Neeson, David Strathairn and Donald Sutherland. The articulate interviewees are Emanuel Azenberg, Walter Bernstein, Larry Ceplair, Kirk Douglas, Peter Hanson, Dustin Hoffman, Lew Irwin, Kate Lardner, Helen Manfull, Victor Navasky, Jean Rouverol, Christopher Trumbo and Mitzi Trumbo.

asarris@observer.com

The trend of playreading is neither fish nor foul-not quite play, not quite reading. It's a new force in theater: live radio with guest celebs. The Exonerated is a well-meaning example of the genre: a rotating cast of performers read oral accounts of prisoners on death row. The current cast is Keir Dullea, Fisher Stevens and Marlo Thomas, and the upcoming cast will include Josh Brolin, Rhea Perlman and Peter Weller. All good people, for sure, but there's the inescapable impression that a worthy cause has been turned into Celebrity Squares .

I'm not in favor of "guest artists" popping into a show that's read. I like actors to be wholly committed to a show that's performed. The "guest artist" gives the impression he's "between engagements." But great actors get to "own" roles. They make them their own to such a mesmerizing extent that years later, even a lifetime later, the role mythically "belongs" to them. "Guest artists" don't make history.

Nor do readings. Unless you count The Vagina Monologues. More or less everyone has been in The Vagina Monologues at one time or another. The former Mrs. Rudolph Giuliani was in it. You could have been in it, if you had played your cards right. The Vagina Monologues was a lucky show. People all over the world found the oral testimony of women talking about their vaginas a thrilling theatrical experience. But for me, the curtain went up and there they were-the stool, the music stand, the script, the glass of water and Rhea Perlman.

Not that I've anything against Ms. Perlman. I'm not even sure she was in The Vagina Monologues . Perhaps it was Marlo Thomas. It makes no difference who was in it, provided it was a celeb. A.R. Gurney's Love Letters for two actors began the low-budget playreading game in earnest. Find two celebs-preferably a real, live showbiz couple-plus two desks, two chairs and two bundles of faded love letters, and away we go! But where's the show? Where's the unshackled, spontaneous production ?

The deluxe version of a playreading was Al Pacino in Oscar Wilde's Salome on Broadway last season. The famous play was retitled Salome: The Reading for the occasion. Now, you might think that the decadent, biblical excesses of Salome would be a perfect opportunity for a full-scale, wonderfully nuts staging. And there you would be wrong. The concert version with its music stands and bound scripts and solemn ensemble in black had the reverse chic of a serious work in progress .

Mr. Pacino didn't need the script on the stand by his side. He first played his zapped-out Herod with the Yiddishkeit inflections a decade ago and knew the play backward. Even so, he turned over the pages of his script on cue-as if it were a real reading. The lovelier-than-ever Marisa Tomei as the uninhibited slut Salome sort of touched herself up on a stool in a diverting departure from the script. Everyone else in the cast seemed word-perfect, too. So here we had a historic first: Al Pacino and a distinguished cast that also included Dianne Wiest and David Strathairn pretending it was a playreading for the sake of appearances.

Anyone can read onstage. Not every actor reads well. Some cling unnervingly to the book like Leo Bloom to his blankie in The Producers . Which brings me coincidentally to Nathan Lane. Mr. Lane has just left Trumbo , an inspired reading at the Westside Theatre of the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo's terrific letters and testaments to honor from the McCarthy era. F. Murray Abraham has taken over the role, and for three weeks from Oct. 21 it will be Brian Dennehy. After Mr. Dennehy, qui?

It can't be Rhea Perlman. Not that I've anything against Ms. Perlman. Trumbo is for two male actors who play Dalton and his son, the narrator (still portrayed by the excellent, wry Gordon McDonald). Mr. Lane was a first-rate reader-bouncing off the text, giving Trumbo ' s burning indignation the velocity it requires. But he's a great performer rather than a great actor. Give Mr. Lane a showstopping piece like Trumbo's hilarious letter of advice to his son at college extolling the joys of masturbation, and the star will take no prisoners. Outrageous riffs and broad emotions are Mr. Lane's calling card, caricature his specialty. But Trumbo was a complex, not necessarily lovable man, his intelligence diamond-sharp. Nathan Lane was mostly on muted best behavior in the show, as if trying his darndest to be good , stuck behind a desk like a bloodhound on a leash.

Mr. Abraham and Mr. Dennehy at their best-and Trumbo demands nothing less from anyone presuming to fill his shoes-should find the more nuanced notes and make this important show even better. Playreading or no, to be in the same room as Dalton Trumbo's principled heart and mind is an extraordinary gift. The screenwriter of such epics as Spartacus , Exodus and Papillon was, of course, one of the Hollywood 10 branded a Communist sympathizer and blacklisted to a slow starvation by the 1950's McCarthyite witch hunts.

The story of how he survived persecution in scoundrel time and ultimately managed to survive and even triumph-without naming names, without easy capitulation and betrayal, without draping himself in the false colors of patriotism and the flag-is one of the great, enduring stories for our time. The letters, bursting at the seams with the furious intoxication of words and moral choice (and not a little wit and good humor), could have been written by G.B. Shaw. The Trumbo who "stood silent in the chamber of liars" and lost everything as an uncooperative witness in the cause of liberty and conscience is the true patriot and one of the saints.

"I've stood on a gray day in the Fifth Marine Division Cemetery on Iwo Jima, and looked off at the graves of 2,198 Americans," goes one of the letters that makes the blood boil. "In the center of all those graves on a slim white pole on a concrete pedestal flew the American flag. And I swear it was not the flag of informers. And if I could take a census of all the American faces I have seen and of all the dead whose graves I have looked on-if I could ask them one simple question: 'Would you like a man who told on his friend?'-there would not be one among them who would answer, 'Yes.'

"But, show me the man who informs on friends who have harmed no one, and who thereafter earns money he could not have earned before, and I will show you not a decent citizen, not a patriot, but a miserable scoundrel who will, if new pressures arise and the price is right, betray not just his friends but his country itself. I do not know of one Hollywood informer who acted except under duress and for money; such men are to be watched. I cannot imagine they are not watched …. "

Trumbo is written and compiled by Dalton's son, Christopher Trumbo, and directed by Peter Askin. With all my reservations about "readings," it's a pleasure to make the acquaintance of Dalton Trumbo in a show that must be heard.

To wit: a balmy Saturday night around 11 P.M., outside the stage door of the Eugene O'Neill Theater. It was two days before Mr. Dennehy and Death of a Salesman would sweep the Tony Awards. Dozens of women were lined up behind two barricades, clutching programs from Salesman . Big, poufy beauty-parlor hairdos, median age 50. They were waiting for Brian Dennehy, their big man, their wide-bodied Willy Loman–he could eat Dustin Hoffman for breakfast!–who lumbers across the stage each night on his plastic knees. One woman, who said she had come in from Blue Point, L.I., to see the show, gripped the barricade, turned to the woman beside her and announced, "He's a Long Island boy. Went to Chaminade. One of our famous boy's Catholic schools."

Vicki Lucachick, a 55-year-old woman from Los Angeles, said she'd gladly permit Mr. Dennehy to eat crackers in bed. "Sorry, dear," she said, turning to her husband, a slender man inablueblazer. "There's something very attractive about him. My husband knows that I love him. It's hard to explain what it is. There's just this, this manliness ."

Heidi Higgins, a robust woman from Rockland County, gestured toward her fiancé, who shares a rhinocerotic body type with Mr. Dennehy. "He knows about my infatuation. That's why he got the tickets," she said. "I'm a bigger woman and I prefer bigger men."

At 11:15, a sound like an Apache battle cry came from the back of the crowd. "There he is!" Out swaggered Brian Dennehy, all 6 feet 2 inches of him, three bills easy, in pale blue jeans and a beige linen jacket, doing his best to stifle his proud Irish smile. The women pushed against the barricade. Several stood on tiptoes. Mr. Dennehy carried his own pen and began signing programs. He looked at the programs as he signed. The women kept their eyes fixed on his face.

Then one woman, a slight, 40-ish woman, did something they all wanted to do. "Can I hug you?" she asked, tentatively. He wrapped his arms around her, and for a moment she was invisible, enveloped in Dennehy flesh. Mr. Dennehy released her–she beamed–then, after yukking it up with a cop, he ducked his massive head into the waiting town car.

Brian Dennehy is a new breed of Broadway matinee idol, a man who appeals to the kind of women who buy most of the tickets to Broadway shows.

"It's about fuckin' time," said Mr. Dennehy's agent of 22 years, Susan Smith, a pleasant woman who seems to swear a lot. "We've got this idea of matinee idol all ass-backwards. It's been these 12-year-old boys with no brains in their heads who emote nothing. Brian is that old-fashioned sense of what a man is, for those people that might have seen Spencer Tracy or Gary Cooper."

Indeed, the Midwestern tourists and Long Island matinee ladies who can afford Broadway's $70 tickets can only imagine sending Leonardo DiCaprio to his room, not inviting him to theirs. In 1997, women made up 60 percent of Broadway audiences, and, on any given night, only 12 percent of the audience is from Manhattan. And the Manhattanites are more likely to be lusting after pansexual Alan Cumming in Cabaret or Kevin Spacey as the lithe and smooth Hickey in The Iceman Cometh . Actors with the kind of bodies they see in the gym every morning.

Tastes run different on mainstream Broadway. A group called the Michael Crawford Phantom Movie Campaign says that they will boycott a movie version of Phantom of the Opera if Warner Brothers casts sexy Latin actor Antonio Banderas, and not Mr. Crawford, in the Phantom role. "Banderas is not a musical star, just a pretty face … What is needed is an exciting voice and gobs of sex appeal, which is M.C.," wrote Geri A. Mellgren-Kerwin, on the campaign's Web page.

If you ask Elizabeth Franz, who won the Tony as Linda Loman in Salesman , about the 60-year-old Mr. Dennehy's sexual power, she will tell you it comes from his vulnerability.

"When you really get to know him, you realize how insatiable he is," said Ms. Franz. "He needs so much approval, but he has this incredible exterior. He needs help, he needs protection, and he needs to be taken take care of."

And there are plenty of women eager to do so. Joyce Breach, a nightclub singer in her 50's who has seen Salesman three times, the way teenage girls kept going back to see Mr. DiCaprio in Titanic , summed up her feelings as she watched Mr. Dennehy from the audience. "I would characterize it as steam heat," she said.

'Down and Out'

Ground zero of the suburban theater ladies is the Joan Hamburg Show, the Wednesday morning radio show on WOR-AM that broadcasts upstairs at Sardi's, with a studio audience of about 200. They watch the show, eat lunch, then trundle over to the matinees. Mr. Dennehy was the third guest on June 2. The ladies had given Art 's George Segal a nice reception, and Night Must Fall 's Matthew Broderick got the cheek pinching. But, said Ms. Hamburg, "When Brian came in, those women stood up . They went crazy. Everything he said, they laughed. They were thrilled. I'm telling you, they were thrilled! I've had all the celebrities on. But with this huge room, his personality is so pervasive, you could here a pin drop. You never see that."

Of course, there is a long tradition of portly guys getting the girls: Henry VIII, the Three Stooges' Curly Howard, Jackie Gleason, Luciano Pavarotti. "You know if a chubby guy wakes you up at 6:30 in the morning, it's not to go running," said Carrie Snow, a writer in her 40's living in Los Angeles who has had a crush on Mr. Dennehy even before he played a chunky alien in Cocoon .

Who is the real Brian Dennehy? As a young father, he worked as a meatpacker and a truck driver. He's an ex-Marine and politically conservative, an avid reader of the American Spectator who did stump work for Al D'Amato's failed Senate campaign. He has health problems–two years ago, he had both of his bum knees replaced with plastic ones, and in March, during the Salesman run, he was hospitalized for "exhaustion," something that initially seemed like a heart attack. "It was going out after the show and eating late and not getting enough sleep," said Lisa Protzmann, Mr. Dennehy's personal assistant at the O'Neill. She quipped, "Every restaurant in New York has been alerted not to let him drink too much." Said his agent, Ms. Smith: "Brian's had an extraordinary life, and he probably wouldn't change five minutes of it. But sometimes you pay for an extraordinary life, and he may be doing that at this juncture."

By the way, he's been married for 11 years to his second wife, Jennifer, a 42-year-old Australian brunette whom he met on the set of Return of the Man From Snowy River , on which she worked as a costume designer. They live in the sticks in Connecticut with their two young kids.

Just a couple of years ago, Mr. Dennehy wasn't signing many autographs. He was most often seen in TV ads, lurking in a dark suburban hedge, motioning toward a light in a bathroom and intoning, "She woke up with heartburn."

Before Salesman , said Ms. Franz, "Brian was down and out, in a way. He says he wasn't even doing B movies, he was doing C movies, because he had saturated the movie business. And then this came along."

"Frankly, if Gene Hackman had taken early retirement and Bob Duvall wasn't the brilliant actor that he is, Brian's career would have emerged on a different plane," said Ms. Smith.

Broadway does wonders for a flagging career. Women are also swooning over Tom Wopat ( The Dukes of Hazzard ) in Annie Get Your Gun and Richard Chamberlain in The Sound of Music . Ms. Protzmann, Mr. Dennehy's assistant, estimated that Mr. Dennehy receives three to five letters a day from smitten women who range from college age to middle age. Many of the letters include photographs and dinner invitations. One woman wrote that her widowed mother had built a shrine devoted to the actor, centered around an autographed napkin. The woman wrote that her mother had become accustomed to referring to Mr. Dennehy as her imaginary husband.

A friend of Ms. Protzmann's mother, when she heard about the young woman's job, asked Ms. Protzmann to pass a message to the star. "'I want you to tell him for me that I think he's very, very sexy,'" Ms. Protzmann recounted. "And she had this really saucy look in her eyes, you know, she kind of raised one eyebrow. I was really shocked."

One irony is that Mr. Dennehy was not cast for his sex appeal. "Of course, sex is a huge concern of producers, but they don't generally do a casting call for that," said casting director Barry Moss, who cast Jekyll and Hyde and Footloose . "They have people in mind who are known commodities. You'll hear them saying, 'Names, names, names! We need names!'"

Sean Cummisky, who monitors the comings and goings at the backstage door at the Eugene O'Neill Theater, said that Mr. Dennehy's phalanx of women was actually not the largest he had seen. That distinction belongs to Lucy Lawless, star of TV's Xena: Warrior Princess , who attracted a screaming, largely lesbian throng of 1,000 to the backstage door on her closing night playing Rizzo in Grease two years ago. Mr. Cummisky said he was taken by surprise by Mr. Dennehy's female fans, how they would try to one-up each other by claiming they'd been fans longer, or seen more of Mr. Dennehy's movies, or traveled the furthest to see Salesman . They ask Mr. Cummisky what Mr. Dennehy is like in private, if he's faithful to his wife, and if they'll be able to get a picture taken with him. "After they get the picture, they'll be like, 'Ooooh! '" he said. "It's like a really obsessed fan kind of thing. I don't see him as a sex model. And it's not only older women. You see some women about 30 years old out there."

An hour after winning his Tony Award for best actor, Mr. Dennehy was standing with Ms. Smith in the middle of Les Pyrénées restaurant. He was wearing a tuxedo he bought at Rochester Big and Tall, and scarfing down bow tie pasta with pesto, trying to avoid the question of what it's like being Broadway's biggest stud. "Oh, please," he said, between bites of a crusty roll. "I've had so many women come up to me and say, 'You know what, you remind of my father,'" he said, laughing. "Draw what sexual conclusions you wish from that, but I think that women find me a comforting, maybe powerful presence, and I don't think it goes any farther than that. Because every time I've been available for contacts, there didn't seem to be anybody there."

He paused. Chewed. "Well, not that I was terribly lonely," he said. He looked at his agent. "Susan was funny. I used to go out with all these models, and I'd say, 'Susan, what do you think?' And Susan would say, 'She's dumb as a fuckin' post.' And I says, 'Yeah, but what does that got to do with anything?'"

Here's something unique to the point of bewilderment in the 1990's: a family movie about the rarest of subjects-goal-oriented teenagers who don't rape, pillage, plunder, strip, or wear condoms on their ears. The high school kids in October Sky are more focused on building their own spacecraft than stringing the prom with toilet paper. They are the children of hardscrabble coal miners in a barren and impoverished Appalachian eyesore called Coaltown, W. Va., who fight an uphill battle to fulfill their lifelong dreams, and the struggle is all the more compelling and inspired because their story is true.

The year is 1957. America is space crazy. Russia has just beat the United States to the draw by launching the Sputnik satellite, which is orbiting the Earth every 96 minutes. In dreary Coaltown, where every boy is expected to follow his dad into the black hole that provides every family with its singular source of income, the only way out is a college football scholarship. In this bleak and hopeless landscape, Homer Hickam Jr. (played by the charismatic, open-faced young actor Jake Gyllenhall) is an unusual oddball. Too small to excel at sports but brilliant in science, Homer's idol is Wernher von Braun, not Elvis Presley, and when he looks up above the black smoke of the mines into the October sky, he sees a future beyond high school graduation that might be his one-way ticket out of hell.

His enthusiasm is not shared by his father (Chris Cooper), the mine foreman who expects Homer to spend the rest of his life with a shovel in his hands and considers the space program a waste of time and taxpayers' money. Undeterred, Homer enlists the aid of three school chums and as a team they plod through one failure after another, learning from their mistakes, as they build their own launch site with filched lumber and nails, enlisting help from local welders, and paying for supplies by confiscating and selling the spikes and metal parts from a deserted railroad track. The only person in town who believes in them is their pretty, encouraging, goodhearted science teacher (Laura Dern) who even battles the principal and the sheriff to guide their science project to the winning spot at the county science fair.

Despite the skepticism of his own family, Homer leads the boys on to the national competition in Indianapolis, inspiring the entire community, but the school can only afford to buy one of the four eggheads a bus ticket, so it's up to Homer to travel alone to glory, win his father's pride and acceptance, and fulfill his own destiny. Watching him do it, you can't help but cheer him on, although the outcome is seldom in doubt. (In the process, he finally brushes elbows with Wernher von Braun himself, and doesn't even know it.)

There isn't much suspense in how it all turns out. In the epilogue, we're informed that all four boys went on to successful careers and Homer recently retired from a job as a NASA engineer that lasted 20 years. Some of the characters border on too-good-to-be-true caricature-the inspiring teacher with the terminal disease, the timid mother who finally takes a stand, the self-obsessed older brother whose own football scholarship makes him superior to Homer and his impossible dreams, the emotionally detached and inflexible father. You get the picture.

But October Sky is so well populated by a solid, earnest cast that these people all come alive through characterizations that throb with honesty and vitality, through the empathetic direction of Joe Johnston (the special effects wizard who shared an Oscar for Raiders of the Lost Ark ) and through a nicely observed sense of time and place and community spirit by screenwriter Lewis ( Ghosts of Mississippi ) Colick. The result is a colorful, credible and very moving tapestry of a living, working, interrelating small-town, blue-collar community that is superbly realized in a film that touches the heart. I can understand why it is prompting comparisons to American Graffiti and Stand By Me , but I was more closely reminded of the dramatically assured relationship between the bright Welsh coal miner battling the ignorance and poverty of a demoralized village and the courageous teacher whose guidance and stubborn determination paved the way for his college education in the famous Ethel Barrymore play and Bette Davis film The Corn Is Green .

When Homer temporarily deserts his science project after his father nearly dies in a mine explosion and finds himself lowered into the mine shaft to help out with mounting expenses at home, he looks up through the cage and sees the stars. Here, the film gets a bit heavy with visual symbolism. But for the most part, October Sky 's emotional centeredness and clear vision of intelligent kids with inquiring minds and uncompromising faith in a future they must carve for themselves with their own resources makes for an exemplary film that has the power to uplift the flagging spirits of people of all ages. The only remaining question is: Will audiences tired of depravity and mean-spirited violence lift a film of real values to box-office success? Your move.

Dennehy Is Big; Voice Like Shrapnel

Some notes on current people and things in New York after dark: In the triumphant 50th-anniversary production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman , Brian Dennehy carries his enormous bulk like the carcass of a dying hippo. This is a great thing to watch, because the sheer size of this man makes the tragedy of Willy Loman's failure doubly moving. It's always more poignant when a big man crashes.

I wasn't fortunate enough to see the definitive original performances created by Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnock, but they are available in the only televised version of the original production at the Museum of Television & Radio on West 52nd Street.

Fredric March was a pale imitation in the 1951 movie version and Dustin Hoffman came nowhere near it in the 1985 revival. But Mr. Dennehy brings to life the terrible fate of a loser trapped in the void of his own self-delusions with staggering emotional impact. He is the shabby, cheap, dishonest, insufferable big-talker filling his two sons with false hope that ruins their lives, but in his petty and selfish disposition he finds the glints of occasional tenderness in a man without a moral compass that are not always obvious in the text itself. Watching his bluster and garrulous bonhomie crumble, you feel stricken.

Despite her twitching and fluttering mannerisms, Elizabeth Franz, as his long-suffering wife Linda, finds the strength hiding behind her frail, birdlike exterior just as Mr. Dennehy finds the weakness hiding behind his girth. I've always found the play a bit of a long-winded bore, but while director Robert Falls dissects the small lives of insignificant people on their knees he also holds a mirror to the death of the American Dream in a superb production that has power and passion in it. It's dismally depressing, but it whips you into an undercurrent close to the core of life and raises the theater season to heights of artistry.

On the club scene, noisy buzz lured me to check out one Natalie Gamsu, a white South African with a college degree in business administration who arrived in New York seven years ago and joined the New York work force, struggling girl-singer division. Translated, that means her day job is waiting on tables. Every Thursday night, however, she dons black feathers and sings Harold Arlen songs at the village club Eighty-Eights with a voice like shrapnel.

Can she sing? "My Shining Hour" is so flat it's impossible to judge. "Come Rain or Come Shine" picks up a bit, but it doesn't swing. "As Long as I Live," which really is a swing tune, no getting around it, becomes a scream for help. Weaving around with a brandy snifter pretending to be a drunken barfly floozy, her "One for My Baby" becomes a slurred and mournful dirge. The fatal blows are a gruesome rendition of "The Man That Got Away" pulverized by so many outstretched arms and facial distortions it reminded me of a crucifixion, and a terrifying "Over the Rainbow" that strips Judy Garland's trademark song of all innocence and joy.

With black fingernail polish and arms flapping like a demented swan, she hits so many clams she should open a fish market. Instead of the cool jazz intonation one expects from Harold Arlen's blues-tinged torch songs, Ms. Gamsu's rich but misguided contralto takes on the dark, stark bellow of a funeral mourner. Times being what they are, she probably spends her waitress tips on living expenses. One hopes if she plans to pursue a career in the saloon business, she puts a bit aside for a vocal coach. Comparing Arlen love songs to Ben and Jerry's Chunky Monkey doesn't ease the tension. She says she grew up in the desert listening to Miriam Makeba. It is painfully obvious she should have been listening to Lena Horne.

Mr. Miller has written eloquently about the theater, pointing out his admiration of Ibsen and epic Greek drama, but he is not a complicated man. He writes from experience–the family in Salesman is based on Mr. Miller's despairing, suicidal uncle, his two sons and his suffering wife. And he writes straight from the gut, unafraid of the direct pull of honest emotion expressed by so-called ordinary people. Willy Loman, a "low man"–not a god or a king, but an Everyman.

The perceptive English critic Michael Billington wrote with a sense of wonder about Death of a Salesman that it "puts an amazing amount of America on to the stage." It tells the story of the last day in the life of an American dreamer, the salesman, Willy Loman, yet it disturbs us on many levels. It's a chronicle of one anonymous man's crackup–Arthur Miller's original title of Salesman was The Inside of His Head . (Thank God he didn't use it.) It's also a domestic tragedy of family life, of guilt and need and primal love, of the yearning between fathers and sons:

"Pop, I'm nothing!" Willy's son, Biff, pleads furiously. "I'm nothing, Pop. Can't you understand that? There's no spite in it anymore. I'm just what I am, that's all."

As played by Brian Dennehy and Kevin Anderson in the 50th-anniversary revival of Salesman on Broadway, that scene is almost unbearable. Biff breaks down, holding on to his father. "What're you doing?" Willy says, bewildered. "What're you doing? Why is he crying?"

"Will you let me go, for Christ's sake? Will you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens?"

And Salesman is, of course, an unapologetic critique of "the wonder of this country"–the pursuit of happiness and the American Dream. The moral seriousness of Arthur Miller–call it conscience–can turn preachy. It's become quite fashionable to glibly patronize his political views as mere polemic or old hat. But who else has written such enduring dramas about capitalist greed ( All My Sons ), the Communist witch hunts of the 1950's ( The Crucible ) or the steep price of the McCarthy era ( A View From the Bridge )? No, Mr. Miller's moral universe is not so easily dismissed, not so irrelevant as a dated sermon.

In a 1950's essay, he wrote of Death of a Salesman : "Willy Loman has broken a law without whose protection life is insupportable if not incomprehensible to him and to many others; it is the law which says that a failure in society and in business has no right to live. Unlike the law against incest, the law of success is not administered by statute or church, but it is very nearly as powerful in its grip upon men …"

Willy protests: "I am not a dime a dozen! I am Willy Loman, and you are Biff Loman!" But the prideful Willy never was a success, only a failure. Which is why–in Arthur Miller's universe–attention must be paid. "I don't say he's a great man," goes the famously compassionate speech of his long-suffering wife, Linda. "Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid."

"Charley, the man didn't know who he was," says Biff Loman at Willy's grave. He was a sham. But what does this salesman actually sell? Mr. Miller doesn't tell us, and perhaps there's no need. Willy Loman is selling himself–like every salesman, including Presidents. Willy himself is the commodity, riding on a smile and a shoeshine–until he's used up and spat out.

Our first sight of Brian Dennehy's salesman is of a shadowy colossus silhouetted in the darkness against the bright headlights of his car. It's a startling, near mythic image, and the heft of the man signals a giant fall. When he lugs his two suitcases, the weary weight of his life hangs in the defeated, exhausted balance.

For those of us who saw Mr. Dennehy as the arriviste merchant Lopakhin in Peter Brook's 1988 production of The Cherry Orchard , the poetry within this fine yeoman actor will come as no surprise. Where he touches us so deeply is in his naked emotional rawness. I felt he paced Act I a little cautiously, as if holding something in reserve for the big arias of Act II. But Mr. Dennehy has produced a monumental performance.

He is honest in everything he does–from Willy's utter, tragic bewilderment, to his burning agitation, to his ultimate Lear-like madness in the garden scene when Willy plants seeds in the darkness, pathetically planting a future, some rootedness, some desperate meaning to his futile life.

I much preferred Mr. Dennehy's Everyman to Dustin Hoffman's Dustin Hoffman in the 1984 Broadway production of Salesman . The technically brilliant Mr. Hoffman is invariably Mr. Hoffman in disguise. But Mr. Dennehy moves us precisely because he's devastatingly real. And nowhere is he more effective than in his tremendous scenes with Kevin Anderson's Biff. The two of them stamp Robert Falls' production with its heartbeat of self-delusion and failure and ferocious love.

The cast is splendid, and my doubts in places aren't decisive. Mr. Anderson's Biff is a most effective, emotionally true performance, but he is almost too much the jock, lacking only the delicacy or refinement that often accompanies fallen favorite sons of rich promise. Elizabeth Franz has been raved about by many of my colleagues, but her Linda Loman is too twitchily neurotic for my taste. She holds little in reserve, including her inner despair. Ms. Franz's Linda is no passive doormat, however. This frail protector-wife could knock her two wastrel sons senseless, and in the "attention must be paid" scene, she practically does.

I found Mark Wendland's scenic designs too busy at first (and that Loman kitchen has never been cooked in). Why is the house impressionistic, and the car real? No matter. The revolving set successfully mirrors the rupture within Willy's psyche, the blur between past and present, until everything floats unhinged in the void between reality and dreams. There is excellent work, too, from lighting designers Michael Philippi and composer Richard Woodbury.

In the end, though, we return to the play, and we are reminded that Death of a Salesman is arguably the greatest play of the 20th century. We know its flaws . And with each throw of the dice, with each new production, we think what might have been done differently, as we do with a Chekhov or Ibsen, or any masterpiece.

In many ways, this important production marks a coming home for Arthur Miller. Until recently, his plays have been far more celebrated abroad than at home. The English, in particular, have always valued his narrative form and public conscience. The dramas are a forum for debate. The English have also felt comfortable with Salesman 's tragedy of the American Dream; it made them feel superior. But post-Thatcherite England has changed dramatically, becoming Americanized. We are all salesmen now.

So this classic drama speaks to us as urgently as it ever did. And all family wars and disappointments and yearnings are eternal.