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The stage and screen actor Jeffrey DeMunn has spent the better part of the past two decades toggling between powerful stage dramas, such as his current role as the iconic Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman (running through Feb. 27 at The Old Globe in San Diego), and film and TV work that mixes science-fiction and horror elements with soulful and moving stories. Many of those screen projects have been collaborations with director-writer-producer Frank Darabont. Those include two Oscar-nominated films "The Shawshank Redemption" and "The Green Mile," the 2007 adaptation of Stephen King's "The Mist," and the new zombie apocalypse TV series, "The Walking Dead," which blazed like a supernova last fall, premiering to record-setting audiences on AMC.

On the surface, it would appear that DeMunn's work in stage plays like Salesman, Arthur Miller's The Price, Thornton Wilder's Our Town, and David Hare's Stuff Happens has little in common with the kind of science-fiction fantasy roles that he's best known for on the big screen (note, DeMunn did score a 1995 Emmy nomination for playing a serial killer in HBO's "Citizen X"). But dig below the outer membrane (or the rotting zombie flesh, if you will), and you'll find there may be more in common between suicidal salesman Willy Loman and DeMunn's melancholic curmudgeon Dale in "The Walking Dead" than meets the eye.

"With 'The Walking Dead,' you could remove the zombies and put something else in their place — something that is putting human beings under stress, under pressure, putting them in a hard situation," DeMunn observes. "And then you watch and see how do they do — how do they survive, how do they treat each other? This is a timeless subject matter for drama: People under that kind of duress. If you take the Loman family and you remove the fact that he [Willy] is no longer relevant to the business that he is in, then there's no play. But if you bring to bear on those people some kind of pressure, then it's interesting. How are they going to deal with it? And it's something that Frank [Darabont] is fascinated with and has often written about in the past. So yeah, the show's not so much about zombies; it's really just about people."

	Jeffrey DeMunn as Willy Loman
	photo by J. Katarzyna Woronowicz

There may be no zombies, decaying flesh, or brutal violence in "Death of a Salesman," but the tragedy is no less heartbreaking. For the 63-year-old DeMunn, this is his second time in a year playing the character of Willy Loman. He tackled the role last spring at the Dallas Theater Center, in a completely separate production with a different director and cast. (The production at the Old Globe is directed by Pam MacKinnon.). And indeed, he acknowledges that there are some advantages and disadvantages to having played the iconic role so recently. The advantages? "It removes from my shoulders and my heart the panic of: Can I learn all of these words? Which is not an unreal thing. The play really talks a lot. And when I first did it, I had to expend an awful lot of energy memorizing [lines] and I think an equal amount of energy worrying about whether or not I was going to be able to actually get it. So it has removed from my heart the concern of, 'Well, geez, can I even do this part?' As it turns out, yeah, I can do the part. So now I can focus more on how well can I do it, how fully can I do it, how much more can I learn about this man, and how much more can I understand about the play that Miller put together."

The danger of playing Willy back-to-back in two different productions, DeMunn says, is not to rely on habits formed in the previous production, to try to rediscover the play all over again. "I don't want events, emotions, whatever from that previous production to intrude on this one. I need to start fresh and clean, or as clean as I can," he says. "So you need to be able to rediscover it each time, to be like a skier and find a little fresh snow on the slope every time you come down the hill. There's the danger that there are responses, thought processes, or emotional processes that I went through in the previous one that maybe aren't even appropriate now. So I have to be keenly aware of, to stay on top of, and have my ear attuned to that possibility, so that if stuff does start to repeat, I can sort of break it down and say, wait a minute, come on, let's take a fresh shot at this."

The role of Willy Loman is a titanic one. He's the psychologically-scarred deluded dreamer shifting back and forth between faded visions of a past too-good-to-be-true and the painful reality of his present mental state, which is threatening to come undone. In Arthur Miller's unflinching critique of the American Dream and the illusions that sustain it, Willy is the center around which his wife and two grown sons gingerly orbit as they engage in a desperate struggle to ground him in the present — a reality that's too hard for Willy to face. The play remains as resonant today as when it was first written in the late 1940s.