Award-winning actors Annette Bening and Tracy Letts return to Broadway in the play that launched Arthur Miller as the moral voice of the American Theater. In the aftermath of WWII, the Keller family struggles to stay intact and to fight for their future when a long-hidden secret threatens to emerge - forcing them to reckon with greed, denial, repentance, and post-war disenchantment across generations.
Contrasting with video designer Jeff Sugg's horrific clips of doomed airplanes plummeting to the ground, O'Brien's production is decidedly low-key. Letts' Joe is an unremarkable everyman, happy to retire comfortably. Bening's Kate, living in an era when wives don't have much choice in the matter, determinedly stands by her husband's claims of innocence, knowing that her personal future is dependent on his. Walker's Chris, whose wartime experiences may have instilled a greater empathy for others, is an earnest voice of emerging ideals.
The stormy climax of All My Sons still packs a wallop, but the road to it is long, painfully dated, and-though we don't like to admit to basic failings in our canonized playwrights-marked by some truly frustrating logical potholes. And in director Jack O'Brien's production, the play's glaring issues go unexamined, swathed in a suburban summertime scenic design by Douglas W. Schmidt that's so artificially verdant it feels cloying. Of course, the point of the play is that unpleasant things are going to go down in this Norman Rockwell-esque backyard, but there are also unpleasant things going on in the fabric of Miller's play, and these are being summarily avoided-even added to-as the production reverentially, almost complacently, presents All My Sons as an unquestioned masterpiece.
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