While Broadway’s import Ink charts the descent of British public discourse into the gutter, All My Sons rips off the apple-pie surface of complacent post-war America to reveal a cesspool of corruption. As the play opens in the Roundabout Theater Company’s revival, it’s a picture-perfect weekend morning in designer Douglas W. Schmidt’s idyllic suburban backyard. Successful businessman Joe Keller is reading the Sunday paper as neighbors cheerfully pop in and out, chatting about their lawns and picnics. The huge houses gradually become looming prisons as the true nature of Joe’s business becomes clear. During the war, his company shipped defective airplane parts causing the deaths of several pilots. He managed to shift responsibility to his milquetoast partner and now shares the rehabilitated business with his son Chris. But the unexplained disappearance of Chris’s brother in the war still haunts the family.
Playwright Arthur Miller lays the symbolism on a bit thick at times (a tree planted as a memorial for the missing son is destroyed in a storm), but Miller’s message of blasting war profiteering and calling for individuals to take responsibility for improving society still packs a wallop.
Jack O’Brien’s straightforward production at the American Airlines slowly builds to a devastating climax as Joe and his wife Kate must face their complicity. Tracy Letts, one of our leading playwrights (August: Osage County), shows he’s also among our most intense stage actors, displaying Joe’s jovial friendliness and his cowering fear with equal conviction. Annette Benning in her first Broadway appearance in over 30 years, is just as heartbreaking as Kate, maternal and warm at first, but then drained of emotion and destroyed when her guilt is revealed.
Benjamin Walker has the nearly impossible task of embodying the conscience of the playwright as Chris, but he manages to make him a believably conflicted man rather than a symbol of a generation.
