Review: A Riveting ALL MY SONS at Lyric Stage Boston

In January, Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons” will mark the 80th anniversary of its Broadway opening. Seven decades later, with the Iran war at the top of the newsfeed, the play’s unflinching look at the American Dream through the prism of wartime profiteering and lives lost seems as relevant today as when it was first written.

Indeed, a riveting new Lyric Stage Boston production, running through October 18 and under the well-paced direction of Scott Edmiston, pairs Bill Mootos and Lauren Marie Duncan, as self-made midwestern businessman Joe Keller and his wife, Kate, and a strong supporting cast to make its still-powerful, unsettling points.

Joe Keller owns and operates a factory where faulty airplane parts were manufactured and sold to the U.S. government during World War II, resulting in the deaths of 21 American pilots. When his business partner takes the fall, Keller escapes prison but not the lingering small-town whispers about his possible part in the crime. Rumors aren’t the only wartime remnants haunting the self-possessed Keller. One of his two sons, Larry, was reported missing in action in the war, and his wife refuses to accept that the young man is dead.

Miller – who, two years after winning his first Tony Award for “All My Sons,” would win his second Tony and a Pulitzer Prize for his masterwork “Death of a Salesman” – was inspired to write about the Keller family by a true story he read in a newspaper detailing how a child turned her father in for selling faulty parts to the U.S. military during the second World War.

Miller also found inspiration in one of the themes of Henrik Ibsen’s play “The Wild Duck,” the idea of two business partners being torn apart when one is sent to prison for a crime committed by the other. As he would do in “Salesman,” Miller brilliantly captures the profound ache of a family broken by its own web of lies and a world that values economic success over humanity.

At Lyric Stage, the first act is a slow build, with the cast’s rhythms initially unsettled. When the actors find their footing, however, Miller’s layered script begins to get its due.

Leading the steadying is Mootos, who follows some memorable earlier actors – including Ed Begley, Richard Kiley, and John Lithgow on Broadway, and Will Lyman at The Huntington – as Joe, while imbuing his portrayal with a jittery nervousness that allows him to make his own mark on the part.

When Duncan settles in, she gives her character dimensions that show that Kate isn’t just a grieving mother or friendly neighbor, she’s also her husband’s enabler. Edmiston and Duncan have made this a steelier Kate than some earlier interpretations – including Dianne Wiest’s heartbreaking turn, opposite Lithgow, in the 2008 Broadway revival – making her complicity in covering up her husband’s likely malfeasance easier to see if still impossible to justify.

With a viselike grip, Kate holds to the hope that Larry will come home from the war, that her husband’s deeply damaging secrets will remain hidden, and that her family will somehow remain intact. She bristles when her younger son, Chris (an earnest Mark Souza), back from the war and working with his father, romances Ann Deever (a kindly Josephine Moshiri Elwood), his late brother’s onetime love and the daughter of Joe Keller’s imprisoned business partner.

The Kellers can’t move forward with so much of their past unresolved. And before long, Ann’s brother George (the perfectly cast Quinton Kappel) arrives to put an end to his sister’s new relationship and to once again raise questions about Joe Keller’s real role in his company’s crimes, in some of the play’s most charged moments.

In supporting roles, Allison Beauregard and Chris Heuisler play the Kellers’ next-door neighbors, Sue and Jim Baylis, who believe that Joe is guilty. There’s also Clara Clough as George’s pre-war girlfriend Lydia Lubey, Eric McGowan as her horoscope-reading husband Frank Lubey, and Julian Hirshfield as Bert, an eight-year-old boy who befriends Joe.

A well-tended backyard, with its attendant tranquility captured by scenic designer Janie E. Howland with period props by Emily Allinson, is the setting for neighbors’ visits and the dramas that accompany them. A weakness of the set, however, is that it lacks any sense of nearby homes, leaving guests to wander in as if from the darkness.

Chelsea Kerl’s splendid late 1940s costumes – including Kate’s flatteringly fitted dresses, the men’s bespoke suits, and an open-hemmed cashmere sweater vest worn by Souza’s Chris Keller – convey the upper-middle-class world of the period and are shown off to good effect by Karen Perlow’s lighting design. Composer and sound designer Oleg Smirnov adds mood-setting music to the proceedings

As the male head of the Keller family, Mootos remains stolid until the full weight of his own simmering grief finally subsumes him.

“Sure, Larry was my son. But I think to him they were all my sons,” he sobs of the young men who lost their lives because of his decisions. “And I guess they were, I guess they were.”

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