All My Sons

Abstract

Toward the end of act 1 of All My Sons, Joe Keller explains what it was like to have been exonerated for the crime of knowingly supplying faulty aircraft cylinder heads during the war. He describes walking through the neighborhood, the apparent proof of his innocence in his pocket in the form of release papers. Neighbors who had been certain of his guilt were, he claims, obliged to admit his innocence through a combination of the trial verdict and his self-confidence. As he tells this story, Joe reveals a detail that is of no consequence to the plot but that establishes important aspects of the context: that the planes that crashed through his negligence came down in Australia: “I was the beast; the guy who sold cracked cylinder heads to the Army Air Force; the guy who made twenty-one P-40s crash in Australia. Kid, walkin’ down that street that day I was guilty as hell. Except I wasn’t and there was a court paper in my pocket to prove I wasn’t” (80).How would that detail have been received in the first performances of All My Sons in 1947? Most likely, it would have been understood as one more fact that materially connects the play’s suburban backyard setting to the global conflict that has recently transformed the lives of the Kellers and their neighbors. “Australia” is, potentially, an alien and jarring word in Miller’s midwestern suburbia, albeit one that provides crucial background to the story. Australia was the location for multiple U.S. Army Air Force airbases during the war and a key launchpad for the campaign in the Pacific. It is, then, a word that provides realistic and immediate detail for the original postwar audiences; an understanding of Australia as a close military ally of the United States in the Pacific was forged during these campaigns. But it is also a word that says something, to Americans, about distance. It broadens the horizons against which the action of the play takes place, the neighborly fences giving way to a vertiginously endless sky. If All My Sons is famously an Ibsenesque play, whose narrative is structured around the inescapable consequences of past actions, it is also a play that sets the resolutely local against the global, and at this moment in the dialogue, “Australia” is Miller’s sign for that collapse of distance between the suburban backyard and scenes of international conflict.The word might, of course, land a little differently in Australia in 2023. It is not that New Theatre’s production in Sydney made deliberate play of the distance—both temporal and geographical—of 1940s America from our own contemporary moment. It is rather that Miller’s most realist play can’t but help, at this remove, to look like a period piece. “Australia” still jars, but it does so a little differently, making us aware of where we are now, at this moment, in relation to the end of the Second World War. In conversation with Saro Lusty-Cavallari, the young director of this excellent production, he talked about the need not to see midcentury pieces of work such as All My Sons in purely allegorical terms. Rather, he would prefer that we see them as opportunities more precisely to place ourselves within our own histories. It would perhaps be easy, with its story of corrupting greed, patriarchal parochialism, and collapsing ideals, to read All My Sons as an allegory for many of the political developments within which we have been living since 2016, the year of Brexit and Trump. But merely to allegorize Miller, Lusty-Cavallari insists, would be to ignore the implications of the play and to ignore the processes of history themselves. It is not that All My Sons is from a different time and place that resembles our own; it is, rather, that we have found ourselves living through the outcome and possible endpoint of postwar American political history. Those failing aircraft are no longer just falling to the ground in 1940s Australia; they have been crashing around the world for the past eighty years.One of the ways that Miller establishes the small slice of suburbia within which the action takes place in All My Sons is through a very particular set. Like Ibsen’s, Miller’s sets instantiate the social and cultural relationships that are being examined in the play. Like the loft space in The Wild Duck and the formal room in A Doll’s House with its doors to Torvald’s study, the seemingly simple set for All My Sons belies a complex message of social relations. In place of Ibsen’s interiors, All My Sons is set outside, a backyard to which neighbors seem to have constant access. At the back of the stage is the Kellers’ house, which operates something like the skene of the classical Greek stage, an opaque wall behind which the tragic action occurs. This is not the dreamscape of either Miller’s Death of a Salesman or Tennessee Williams’s Glass Menagerie. The sets of both of those plays are permeable in ways that allow for the past to revisit the present. Rather, we have a static scene into which characters move either vertically from inside the house or, more often, horizontally from the neighborhood houses.This simple standard set for All My Sons is predicated upon, and makes good use of, a traditional stage with wings. New Theatre in Sydney is a relatively small studio theater with no wings. The director’s set designer, however, produced an interesting and highly effective solution to the problem of Miller’s very precise requirements for this play, and one that increased the particular atmosphere of claustrophobia and neighborliness that is a feature of the play. Kate Beere’s set angled the back of the house in such a way as to allow the audience to see the back door, through which of course Joe makes his final exit, but to also shield the entrances of the neighbors as they arrived into the backyard. What this lost in achieving a sense of a wider neighborhood, it gained in a sense of oppressive proximity.This inventively condensed set proved the perfect backdrop for Greg Poppleton’s excellent performance of Joe Keller. The backyard became a mini stage set upon which all attention is focused on this narcissistic figure, an image of all that was already wrong about the American dream of familial and domestic self-sufficiency. The small space between the fallen apple tree and the garden furniture was his to command, lording it over neighbors and families alike until, of course, he breaks and flees to the interior of the house itself.Of particular note both in the play and in this performance were the women’s roles. Kath Gordon as Kate Keller and Kaitlyn Thor as a truly horrendous Sue Bayliss were standout performances in this production. As Claire Gleitman has written, Miller portrays gender in particular, perhaps rather static, ways in this early play. Women come to seem representative of a blind belief in the primacy of domestic, family life, even at the cost of doing what is right, or even at the cost of mass death: “corrupt guardians of the bourgeois prison” (28). Thor captured to particularly impressive effect this small-minded and mean-spirited attitude, drawing our attention into the small hypocrisies that accumulate across time and that invade personal relationships at every moment, even as those personal relationships are the very things supposed to be being protected. The focalizing effect of the set, pulling our attention into the small space of the backyard, contributed to this impression of corrupted sensibilities being slowly dissected across the whole piece.The portrayal of the younger characters was, I felt, a little less successful. The textured and nuanced performances that characterized the older characters, their responses to the slow unravelling of their own tragic histories, did not have an equivalent. But this is likely a product of a deeply pessimistic play as much as anything. In All My Sons, there can be no viable future for the young couple. Unlike the broken hopes for possible, if damaged, future lives with which he leaves us in Death of a Salesman, Miller offers us more delusion as he has Kate tell her son at the close, “Forget now. Live.” As we have witnessed throughout, a life based on forgetting and disavowing the past is not a life worth living. The awkwardness of this production’s ending, with lights lingering for some time over the still forms of the remaining characters, seemed to speak to the bleakness of Miller’s ending, posing questions (with no answers) about how it might be possible to continue.Overall, this was not a production that made any grand gestures or imposing directorial decisions in the face of the challenging material with which Miller has left his actors and directors. Rather, with quiet confidence, this subtle production slowly but surely unraveled the implications of the play while asking its audiences to think a little more about how they might be implicated in the complex histories that it articulates.