All My Sons

All My Sons is an early Arthur Miller effort (I believe it was his second play to be produced), and its only interest is historical. Those whose admiration for the later Miller plays is unbounded (I am not among that number), will in all likelihood enjoy it. I sympathize with Miller's often stated intention--to remove Broadway from its current rut by writing "public" plays (the word is one of Miller's favorites) which enlarge the intimate psychological drama by treating important social issues--but I find his plays themselves, except for a few flashes of powerful dialogue and a few beautifully contrived scenes, dull.

Miller's intention in All My Sons is to show that a man's public acts and responsibilities are inseparable from his private ones, that he is as responsible to all mankind as he is to his family. Joe Keller is the owner of a factory which sold defective airplane parts to the army in World War II, managing to kill some American flyers. Passing the responsibility off onto his innocent partner, he escapes a jail sentence and lives scot free but heavy hearted in his "American town." Both his sons fought in the War--the elder lost at sea, the younger returned home to live with his family and inherit the factory, which now produces toasters and washing machines.

The Keller family, despite its typical appearance, is in a bad way, Joe is a murderer Chris, the son, is an idealistic capitalist-to-be: and Mrs. Keller is a neurotic (she has migraine headaches and insists her son is still alive). Chris wants to marry Ann Deever, his brother's former sweetheart and, by the way, the daughter of his father's partner. Chris discovers his father's guilt and is disillusioned; Joe discovers that his older son had committed suicide when he heard about his father's crime, and shoots himself.

It is always easy to spot the moral of a Miller tale, because he always has a chorus ready to tell us what it is. For instance, Joe tells his mother, "Once and for all you can know there's a universe of people outside and you're responsible to it, and unless you know that, you threw away your son because that's why he died." Actually, that's not why he died at all. He died because, as he said in a letter to his girl, "I can't face anybody." He died, like a violated Victorian heroine, out of shame.

So, my first objection to this play is that it is not as "well made" as it is said to be. Miller never really synthesizes the psychological and the social; he straddles them. Really there are two morals to All My Sons: "Don't cheat the government, you never know when you'll be found out" and "Don't marry your brother's girl friend, she may turn out to be your father's partner's daughter."

My second reason for disliking Miller is that most of his characters are either improbable or dull. Chris is both. After seeing his platoon wiped out around him, he returns home with his ideals intact, full of talk about bravery, camaraderie, and general intolerance for cowardice. Miller's representation of the relationship between the men who went to war and the folks back home is far from a responsible, accurate social picture. Then there is the mother, obsessed by fear and guilt, but always a pragmatist. After her husband's suicide, her immediate words are, "Don't take it on yourself. Forget now, Live." There is hardly a need to categorize the rest of the injured and innocent characters. As is usual in Miller's plays, the only interesting character is the father, the center of all the play's conflicting forces.

Miller's third and most irksome flaw is suddenly to change the way his characters talk, from common speech to rhetorical and poetic common speech, whenever he approaches a climactic scene. His dialogue, which is usually dull, becomes silly.

The Charles Playhouse production is not good enough to overcome the play's weaknesses. John McQuade conveyed less of of Keller's toughness than of his nervous guilt (perhaps the nervousness was McQuade's), and Alan Bergmann was properly intense and idealistic as Chris, though the character seemed somewhat more stupid than he should have. Sylvia Davis as Kate Keller was generally unconvincing. There were, in spite of it all, a few very powerful scenes.

Charles Olsen, who directed the production, chose to accent the melodrama, which is a good idea for most of Miller's plays. But there is no way to dilute the false rhetoric and high mindedness which keep All My Sons from being pure and pleasant melodrama. Bill Simpson's sets were garish and out of keeping with the tone of the play.