Arthur Miller's postwar play leaves mark REVIEW | Scars of 'Sons' still shocking
Purchase tickets
to All My Sons
— or —
Call the Greenhouse Theater
Box Office
773.404.7336
LOCATION NOTE:
All My Sons is performed
at
the Greenhouse Theater Center, Downstairs Mainstage,
2257 N. Lincoln,
just 8 blocks south of TimeLine
by Hedy Weiss, Theater Critic
published September 2, 2009
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
On the heels of its long-running success with Alan Bennett's "The History Boys" (which celebrates its 100th performance Thursday night), TimeLine Theatre has done it again -- this time with a powerhouse revival of Arthur Miller's "All My Sons" that has been brilliantly orchestrated by director Kimberly Senior, and staged at the Greenhouse, a fine satellite venue.
Miller's play debuted on Broadway in 1947 -- just two years after the end of World War II, and two years before the arrival of "Death of a Salesman." And it raised the kind of soul-shattering questions that made any easy resumption of the quest for the American dream in the postwar period seem more like a nightmarish exercise in denial than a victory lap.
For Miller, the "shadow" war took the form of an intense inner battle on the homefront. Using an essential element of Greek tragedy -- in which once-worthy families engineer their self-destruction-- he limned the rotten, even vaguely incestuous downfall of two quintessentially Midwestern middle-class families. Their neighbors became a local chorus (and now cross the lawn of designer Jack Magaw's iconic photo realist set).
"All My Sons" is about two families with a twined fate. The men of these families were partners in a business that manufactured cylinder heads for fighter planes used by the Air Force. When wartime production quotas became intense, they permitted cracked cylinders to leave the plant, thus endangering the lives of fliers.
While Joe (a ferociously good Roger Mueller) was exonerated of the crime and continued to prosper -- despite the wartime death of his beloved older son that has left his wife, Kate (Janet Ulrich Brooks, absolutely volcanic here), half-mad -- his weak partner Steve went to prison and was abandoned by his family.
Now the grown children in both families must come to terms with their parents' choices, with a thick residue of guilt, and with the fact that the war ultimately became a horrific exercise in enterprise, with the fiercest battle the one between profit and loss. And everyone sells out on some level.
Senior, who last season triumphed with "The Overwhelming" at Next Theatre, has assembled a sterling cast, and together they breathe fire into a play that might easily feel dogmatic.
Erik Hellman, Chicago's answer to Leonardo DiCaprio, is ideal as Joe's idealistic son, hungry for the love of his dead brother's fiancee, Ann (Cora Vander Broek, a real looker in designer Lindsey Pate's retail-ready frocks). Ann, like everyone in this shattering play, makes her own tainted deal.
