STAGE REVIEW : ‘ALL MY SONS’: FLAWS IN THE DESIGN

With faulty O-rings and leaky reactors in the news, Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons” (1947) becomes a pertinent play all over again. Bill Bushnell’s staging for the Los Angeles Theatre Center has some design flaws of its own, however.

This was Miller’s first successful play, written in reaction to the official optimism of the day. America was feeling good about itself in the late-1940s, having rid the world of the arch-villain, Hitler, without losing its innocence. Miller suggests that under the self-satisfaction there was, in fact, an uneasiness, a sense that sins had been committed and the old innocence lost.

The sun is shining over the Keller’s house as the play opens, but all the boys have not come home from the war, and certain subjects are best avoided, such as Joe Keller’s stay in prison for having shipped out a load of defective airplane parts, leading to the death of 21 young pilots. (Philip Baker Hall makes Joe a cocky little guy in rimless glasses, akin to Harry Truman.)

Joe was finally cleared, to the satisfaction of his idealistic son, Chris (Bill Pullman). Yet, there is an uneasiness in the air, as if the family hadn’t closed the books on the war, yet. It’s as if they were waiting for Chris’ lost-over-the-Pacific brother to come home and tell them what to do. Kate, the mother--Nan Martin--literally expects that he will. And in a sense the dead brother does return, to his father’s destruction.

Even in 1947, that final letter-from-the-grave seemed a trifle stagy. Today, we notice, too much, the play’s carpentry: the work that went into making sure that today would be the day when Joe Keller’s betrayal caught up with him. Still, it’s quality carpentry. And the play’s old-fashionedness includes an old-fashioned willingness to get down to cases that’s particularly refreshing in a time when America’s mood is even more self-congratulatory than it was in ’47.

“Who worked for nothin’ in that war?” says Joe to Chris. “War and peace, it’s nickels and dimes, what’s clean? Half the Goddam country is gotta go (to jail) if I go!” Then and now, this cuts through a lot of smarm.

I wish I believed Bushnell’s production more. It’s not awful, but it rings hollow particularly when it strains to remind us of O’Neill, or even the Greeks. The strain begins with D. Martyn Bookwalter’s set, which implies that the Kellers live in a stone mansion set in the middle of a park, not an ordinary house with neighbors on either side. The play that Miller wrote is about Joe Smith, not about the folks who live on the hill.

The elevated note is further struck by Nan Martin, whose Kate reminds you of one of the Furies in a housedress. Back straight, fingers twitching, eyes on fire--this is acting with a capital A, and it’s too much for a play where Miller is clearly trying (not always successfully) to keep the language and behavior down to earth, so as to make the shock of recognition all the more shocking.

Philip Baker Hall as Joe goes too far in the other direction. He works so hard to be ordinary that (1) we can’t see why Chris worships him, and (2) his anger, when it erupts, comes from nowhere and sounds like an actor turning it on.

In general, that’s the effect of this production: actors reading lines, often quite well, rather than people in a backyard sweating out their lives. Bushnell throws in thunder-and-lightning and a dramatic frozen pose when Joe and Chris go at each other on the lawn. But otherwise the director seems to have let his actors find their own blocking, and it’s not a lot more interesting than if they were radio actors clustered around mikes in a studio. They don’t live in the set, making it all the more unreal.

Being capable actors, they do have their moments. Martin has a grasp of Kate’s conniving side, and it’s amusing to watch her calming down Gregory Wagrowski (who wants Joe’s hide) with a glass of grape juice.

Sheila Shaw is solidly there as the cynical lady next door who has had enough of Chris’ “phony idealism.” (Julie Fulton isn’t nearly as alive as Chris’ girl, Ann.)

And Pullman as Chris comes to an interesting calm place at the end of the play. For the first time we can accept the other characters’ assessment of him as a man who needs to know and to speak the absolute truth. This “All My Sons” makes it back to the base in one piece, but it doesn’t soar.