And Mr. Dutton brings a ferocious volatility to Willy’s moments of heated anger at the beloved son, the ex-football star Biff (Ato Essandoh), who has disappointed him. The frenzied outpouring of energy, as of an animal caught in a trap, can be harrowing to watch.  But if Mr. Dutton’s voice is a great actor’s asset, it can also be a hindrance to expressive nuance. For too much of the first act, and intermittently throughout the second, we register the volume without detecting the tangle of feelings beneath it. The performance is marked by flashes of piercing clarity, but there are also passages when Willy’s fluctuations between fantasy and reality, between reckless hope and nagging despair, become blurred.  Yale Rep’s history with the work of Mr. Wilson, the great playwright who died in 2005 and who is represented on Broadway this season by a brilliant revival of “Joe Turner,” gives Mr. Bundy’s production — and Mr. Dutton’s participation in it — an air of mild daring. All-black revivals of classic American plays peopled by ostensibly white characters are by no means uncommon. James Earl Jones recently played Big Daddy in an all-black Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”  But Mr. Wilson stood opposed to the practice, famously engaging in a public debate at Town Hall in Manhattan in 1997 with Robert Brustein (the founding artistic director of Yale Rep) over “color-blind” casting and the lack of support for black-oriented theaters. In “The Ground on Which I Stand,” an address to a national theater conference that helped spark the contretemps, Mr. Wilson said, “To mount an all-black production of a ‘Death of a Salesman’ or any other play conceived for white actors as an investigation of the human condition through the specifics of white culture is to deny us our humanity, our own history.”  There are specifics in “Death of a Salesman” that would not seem to apply to the African-American experience in the middle of the 20th century. When Biff dreams happily of returning to Texas to become a rancher, it is jarring to ponder the potential fate of a young black man embarking on such an endeavor in 1949. It is easier to see beyond skin color in some plays than others. Unlike Williams, Miller was a social critic in his plays as well as a general observer of the moral failings universal in man. And revivals that cast classic plays entirely with black performers — and are thus not “color-blind” at all — can reasonably be viewed with race at least present in mind.  I suspect these issues would fade into irrelevance if Mr. Bundy’s production consistently transmitted the play’s ability to move us time and again with its depiction of a man who has got by for so long on self-deceptions and ethical equivocations that he has not noticed how they have poisoned his life. But the tentative or unfocused stretches in Mr. Dutton’s performance are matched by similar weaknesses among the supporting players.  Mr. Essandoh is impressive in the scenes in which Biff’s long-festering resentment of his father’s hypocrisy flares into confrontation but seems less at ease in the flashback scenes that require him to bound around with a football. As Happy, the son who has long lived in Biff’s shadow but doesn’t bear the burden of his father’s hopeless ideals, Billy Eugene Jones has a nice light touch, but he does not seem naturally to possess the louche affability of a serial pickup artist.  While Kimberly Scott brings a warm, understated dignity to the role of the fiercely supportive Linda, Willy’s wife, she never taps into the surging emotional depths of the role in the big setpiece moments, which are mostly tepid.  Perhaps most crucially, the cast never establishes the fraught sense of a family caught relentlessly in a cycle of conflict and compromise that can make this play so powerful. As much as it is a portrait of a man in crisis, “Death of a Salesman” is the story of a nuclear family splintered by a false value system. Willy may be the one stooping under the weight of his sample cases, but everyone around him is carrying baggage too.  A version of this review appears in print on , on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Willy Loman Is Lost, Still Looking for Stimulus. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Charles S. Dutton stars in a new production of this 20th-century American classic for Yale Repertory Theater, featuring an all-black cast.