Images: 
Total Rating: 
****
Previews: 
May 9, 2016
Opened: 
June 1, 2016
Ended: 
September 25, 2016
Country: 
Canada
State: 
Ontario
City: 
Stratford
Company/Producers: 
Stratford Festival of Canada
Theater Type: 
International; Festival
Theater: 
Stratford Festival - Tom Patterson Theater
Theater Address: 
111 Lakeside Drive
Phone: 
1-800-567-1600
Website: 
stratfordfestival.ca
Genre: 
Drama
Author: 
Arthur Miller
Director: 
Martha Henry
Review: 

Arthur Miller’s All My Sons has always struck me as his stepchild, which even potent productions of, all seem to get qualified or grudging approval. So it is heartening to read Canada’s master theater artist and teacher, Martha Henry, write that she was surprised to discover that All My Sons is a great play – a much greater play than I thought it was when we started working on it.”

Initially, it was one of about seven plays and musicals – all better than many which have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama – that were rejected for the 1946-47 Pulitzer because the committee said that there was none worthy of the prize. (The problem was that some of the Committee were afraid to award the prize to O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh because of its doity words.) The problem remains that Sons is a slightly talky play that eloquently discusses enough serious comment about ethical problems in American society and history to enrich a whole season or two of meaningful drama . . . what we call “challenging.”

Also, a long-undiscovered letter is climactically produced by the fiancée` of the Keller family’s lost son to clinch the dispute about how and whether he died in World War II; and her delay may seem a contrivance. But its revelation really doesn’t solve anything, and I don’t find it implausible. It merely underscores the awfulness and fallibility of everyone’s situation.

Martha Henry’s production is naturalistic and without melodrama. The one experimental innovation here is to cast Ann Deever, the former fiancée of the Keller’s missing son, with the dynamic actress, Sarah Afful, an African-American woman. Therefore (since this is not “colorblind casting”), the Deever family are African Americans here, as are Doctor Bayliss and his wife. That’s not much of a strain on the plot and actually enriches the play’s sociopolitical commentary.

Joe Keller was an exemplar of the American dream: manufacturing airplane parts at the beginning of World War II, he was a guiding force in the community’s support of the war effort. But a huge shipment of defective parts for warplanes was noted by his partner, who frantically called Joe and told him of the danger. Joe promised to arrive and deal with the problem but didn’t, and his partner took responsibility for shipping them and was jailed for apparently causing many fliers’ deaths.

We find out about this background in the current conflicts as Joe’s wife Kate refuses to accept that her eldest son Larry, missing in action for some three years, actually died in the war, and she does not want to allow her son Chris, just recently returned from the war, to marry Larry’s former fiancée Ann Deever. Ann has abandoned her father who is seriously ill in prison. Her brother has become aware that Joe probably lied about his responsibility and visits the Kellers to persuade Ann not to marry into the family. And as all of them become aware of Joe’s selfish refusal to admit his crime, it becomes obvious that his wife Kate’s opposition to the marriage is based on her hiding an understanding of Joe’s guilt.

Then Ann releases the time bomb of a letter from the missing son Larry expressing his despair at hearing of his father’s guilt and expectation that this is, therefore, a farewell letter. All these threads are both meaningful and realistic. Each of these people has made a compromise with responsibility to attempt to reach some desired personal peace and a grab at happiness. After Joe sees his dead son’s letter, he eventually makes an eloquent statement that he sacrificed integrity for the sake of his sons but should have realized about all those dead heroes that “they were all my sons.” And he shoots himself.

Stratford veteran actors Joseph Ziegler and Lucy Peacock here appear startlingly old and close to doddering. But they play Joe and Kate as flawed but meaningfully compelling and empathetic people. Ziegler delivers Joe’s great speech finally presenting Miller’s iconic title with a matter-of-fact authenticity that gets into our bloodstreams.

Tim Campbell is somehow both frantic yet understated as the hopelessly anxious Chris. Sarah Afful’s Ann is beautiful and desirable but seemingly trapped in Ann Deever’s misgivings. And Michael Blake makes a flawless transition from passionate, self-righteous opponent to far-too-easily converted, yearning friend.

The topnotch technical staff once again make the Patterson Theatre’s weird, long thrust stage look realistic, as the ill and elderly Kellers casually carry coffee cups about 70 feet from their kitchen to their outdoors breakfast table. And, as usual, Martha Henry’s fine direction seems invisible and inevitable. This is an awfully good revival of a tough but important play.

Cast: 
Sarah Afful, Rodrigo Bellfuss, Michael Blake, Tim Campbell, Maxwell Croft-Fraser, Jessica B. Hill, Robert King, Lucy Peacock, Krystin Pellerin, Brandon Schneider, Lanise Antoine Shelley, E.B. Smith, Emilio Vieira, Joseph Ziegler
Technical: 
Set: Douglas Paraschuk; Costumes: Dana Osborne; Lighting: Louise Guinand; Sound: Todd Charlton; Fight Director: John Stead