Life With….

A few weeks ago, I saw All My Sons at Playmakers Rep.  For those who do not know, All My Sons is Arthur Miller’s first major play, and it won a Tony for its script.  It was set a few years after the end of World War II and first produced in that era as well – it focuses on two families who owned a factory together during the war that produced airplane parts – the parts failed and 21 pilots died.  One father went to jail, the other was eventually exonerated, though his partner’s son, as well as his own sons, suspect his culpability.  Additionally one of the sons of the acquitted man died, in the war, in mysterious circumstances after learning of the accidents.  The action takes place over the course of one revealing day in the lives of these families.

In this haunting production I was moved, but not as much as I expected to be given the reputation of the play for bringing much of its audience to tears.  I cannot fault the acting, Marianne Miller, who I did not love in Nicholas Nickleby, gave a fine performance as Ann Deaver, and the Keller family portrayed by Christian Conn, Paul O’Brien, and Ellen McLaughlin inhabited their roles thoroughly.  In fact only once or twice in the whole production could I see the actors “working,” and typically even in a good performance I see it three to five times when sitting in seats as good as I had for this production (second row dead center).  Additionally the set and costume design were phenomenal -the costumes getting the period look perfectly down to the lines at the back of stockings (I can’t help but think that the inspiration of Mad Men, being set only a few years later helped the look) and the set with its twist on a multilevel white house was genius.  The set consisted of astroturf, with minimal lawn furniture, a dead bent tree, a deck, the back door of a house opening into a view of the family kitchen.  The house then went flat and rose up two stories -with windows popped out even with the deck so that people could stand in them for effect when needed, evoking both hominess and comfort as well as a sense that all is simply a facade.  behind and surrounding the house were images, in black and white of 1950s ranch houses, the evocation of the rise of suburbia and the pictures neighborhoods, capable of hiding both many miseries and many pleasures, of the era of Richard Yeats’s Revolutionary Road was complete and intentional.  (For more on the book, not the movie, please see this Richard Ford piece from the New York Times).

At the same time – I did not love it and at times was actively annoyed by the play.  I came to one conclusion.  For all of the classical drama that Miller uses to set up and inform his tragic plays, he, particularly at that young age, could not get past his own didacticism.  I remember reading and watching Miller before, and thinking – he cannot let the audience make a moral leap on their own, he feels the need to preach, sometimes more then the Greeks who inform his work did before him.  I felt this more strongly in this play then ever, and for all the drama, and classically imbued tragedy, this preaching turned me off.  It ripped some of the emotional impact of the play away from me as it reminded me of moralizing and sermons.  Other playwrights of the era also dealt with a changing America, capitalism, and families (though few explored fathers and sons as Miller did so often and well), but Miller stands with a few others, in stature.  Like Tennessee Williams and later Albee, his works continue to move us and inspire, but unlike them both – their preachiness is always at, or just below the surface, making it difficult for me to fully suspend reality and see the plays as a reality unto themselves.  This of course is personal opinion, and many disagree, but for me, it is flaw that mars much of his otherwise brilliant work.

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