Review - All My Sons: Flying Blind

After his Broadway debut shut down after four performances, All My Sons was the play that put Arthur Miller on map; running for a good nine months, winning the 1947 Tony Award for Best Play and bringing the author to the attention of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Miller's look at the changing American dream from individual achievement to a more collective consciousness has often been compared to classic Greek tragedy but director Simon McBurney's new Broadway revival adds Brechtian tones, multimedia commentary and abstract staging to the proceedings. His highly stylized interpretation doesn't exactly enhance Miller's text, but so many of his touches remain on the peripheral of the production and can easily be tuned out while staying riveted to the dynamic performances he draws from leads John Lithgow, Dianne Wiest and Patrick Wilson.

At first you might think we're in for something akin to Thornton Wilder's Our Town as Lithgow, with the cast positioned behind him, begins by advising the audience to turn off their cell phones and reads us the playwright's opening stage directions, which set the play in the back yard of the home of Joe and Kate Keller (Lithgow and Wiest). At the very least, this addition helps save the play from being interrupted by entrance applause every time name star takes the stage, but then it appears we might have stumbled onto a non-traditionally cast production of King Lear as another unscripted scene has Wiest, now in character, battling the winds of a ferocious storm that, as described later on in dialogue, uproots their highly symbolic tree and sends it crashing to the ground. While the moment is somewhat unnecessary, the storm is whipped up very effectively by lighting designer Paul Anderson and sound designers Christopher Shutt and Carolyn Downing. Shutt and Downing's melodramatic underscoring at key moments of the play is absolutely unnecessary, given the dialogue's realistic tone.

Once the play begins as Miller scripted, we more clearly see set and costume designer Tom Pye's depiction of the Keller yard, represented by a flat platform of green grass. Chain link gates standing alone suggest there's a fence and the upstage home is simply a great wall of brown shingles which serves as a screen for projection designer Finn Ross' (for Mesmer) newsreel footage. (Interesting, but not nearly as interesting as the Miller speeches they're intended to highlight.) There is a door, but it stands a few feet in front of the house, letting the actors remain visible, though emotionlessly out of character, as they enter and exit. Audience members whose seats provide a view behind the proscenium and into the wings can see that all offstage actors are seated quietly in precisely spaced out chairs until ready to enter. There is no attempt to hide the theatre sand bag that rests at the foot of another large tree, whose branches hang stage left.

That uprooted tree, by the way, is a memorial to Joe and Kate's older son, Larry, an air force pilot who was declared missing in World Word II. Though it's been three years and everyone else assumes the worst, Kate steadfastly holds on to the hope that he's coming back some day. However, younger son Chris (Wilson) has since developed a relationship with Larry's former fiancée Ann (Katie Holmes) but he knows that asking his mother to accept their intended marriage would require her to accept Chris' death. Meanwhile, Ann's father, Joe's former business partner, is in jail for allowing a shipment of defective airplane parts to be sold to the government. Joe also served time for his suspected involvement in the incident but was later exonerated.

McBurney's cast displays a strong disconnection between the lead foursome, particularly as Lithgow and Wiest occupy their own worlds of guilt, antiquated values and disillusionment. Lithgow, with his tall, robust physique and hearty voice, excels in stage performances that allow him to show insecurities leaking out through a strong façade (dramatically in Requiem For A Heavyweight, comically in Beyond Therapy). His Joe Keller is a grotesque distortion of the great American success story. Watch his chest swell with patriotic pride as he describes his return from jail, deflecting accusing looks from neighbors with a piece of paper saying he's not guilty. Weist gives Kate's tragic vigil for her son hints of a bitter, controlling flipside, as though she'd be willing to accept his apparent death if not for the manipulative advantage it gives her over the family. Patrick Wilson's Chris - earnestly family oriented, but demanding in his principles no matter what the expense - is so good I suspect this performance may lead to offers of roles that don't require him to take off his shirt.

In supporting parts, Christian Camargo, as Ann's brother George, comes off as too intensely grim to be believable, but the surrounding community characters (played by Becky Ann Baker, Michael D'Addario, Danielle Ferland, Jordan Gelber, and Damian Young) effectively provide warm and neighborly surroundings.

Katie Holmes, who, from the looks of her credits, appears to be making her professional stage acting debut, draws a lot of publicity for the production and has many fans waiting for a glimpse of her at the stage door every night. Some of them, I understand, have even seen her performance.

Photos: Top: The Company; Bottom: John Lithgow, Dianne Wiest, Patrick Wilson and Katie Holmes

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