Review: ALL MY SONS at Antaeus Theatre Company

Arthur Miller’s ALL MY SONS is a classic of American theater with its Midwest setting and its takedown of the American Dream. While maybe not as devastating as Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” it has a quiet power that is wrenching all the same. Debuting on Broadway in 1947, it won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and Tonys for Best Author and Best Direction of a Play. Revivals around the world, and film, radio, and TV adaptations followed, garnering more praise cementing the show’s reputation.

Taking place in the Midwest in August 1947, ALL MY SONS, based on a true story out of Ohio, focuses on successful businessman Joe Keller (Bo Foxworth) his wife, Kate (Tessa Auberjonois), and their son Chris (Matthew Grondin), who were visited by their former neighbor Ann (Shannon Lee Clair) the evening before, inadvertently setting off a series of consequences that tear the family apart.

Director Oánh Nguyễn does a fantastic job navigating the story and its emotions with the significant arcs each character has. It’s a beautiful balancing act, the flow never flagging even with a 125-minute run time. Miller’s script is smart and complicated, but it isn’t ever self-important or difficult to engage in. The characters are rich and distinct, and with its themes of idealism, capitalism, and cynicism ringing as true today as they did when the show was first produced, it’s still alarmingly now.

Foxworth gives a flawless, complex performance as the neighborhood patriarch with buried secrets, and Auberjonois is devastating as a mother awaiting the arrival of her other son, Larry, whose shadow looms large as he has been missing in action for the past three years. Clair grounds the story with sympathy, empathy, and heart, giving a soulful, captivating performance. Grondin, who may have the trickiest role of all, is the perfect Everyman, his eventual disillusionment possibly setting him on the road to becoming another Willy Loman, the sad-sack protagonist of Miller’s “Salesman.” And Michael Yapujian, as Ann’s brother, showcases great range, by turns skittish, vulnerable, broken, sad, and furious, injecting a startling jolt of energy into the second act.

The costumes by Wendell C. Carmichael are exquisite, the quality jumping off the stage. The handsome set by Fred Kinney and the effective lighting by Andrew Schmedake add immensely to both the world established by Miller and also to the fracturing lives of the characters. Intimacy and fight choreographer Shinshin Yuder Tsai stages supremely realistic altercations, which is very difficult to enact on-stage.

While ALL MY SONS is a tense sometimes explosive drama, there are also moments of genuine humor, which offset the rest with such contrast, they only make the experience starker, more sober with the ever-present reminders of the real world outside the theater. With Miller’s prescient book and under Nguyễn’s precise and fluid direction, ALL MY SONS is another gem in the Antaeus crown.