Not far from the Court Theatre you can see displays of outsized mining equipment at the nearby Museum of Science and Industry. Their corkscrew blades get powered to rip the rocks in their way into fragments and dust. Fix this image in your mind’s eye, as this writer did, when you venture to see Court’s All My Sons, to prepare yourself for playwright Arthur Miller’s plot similarly tunneling with massive speed and power into deeper and deeper still layers. Not gold or ore, Miller’s deep tunneling pen unearths humanity ripped bare-- raw, quaking, mortal and flawed.
It’s after World War II. Men have returned back to this small town changed by the war and not able to talk about it much. Those are the lucky ones. Others haven’t returned.
In the Keller family that is at the center of this story, they have one of each- a son (Chris Keller played by Timothy Edward Kane) returned and working now with his father (Joe Keller played by John Judd) in the family business and another son lost at war and whose body has never been found. Their mother (Kate Keller played by Kate Collins) refuses to believe that her lost son has died, and carries on hanging by a thread.
Son Chris has invited his late brother’s one-time fiancée (Ann Deever played by Heidi Kettering) to visit, with intent to propose marriage to her. He’s deeply in love but—it’s complicated. That her father was Joe Keller’s business partner and they had both been indicted for selling defective war plane parts to the Air Force is one complication. That his mother has to believe that Ann will wait for her other son to return from the war is another.
That’s just the setup. For two hours, Miller’s pen tunnels down, down, down deeper and deeper still into the terrain. The pace of All My Sons does remind of Miller’s Death of a Salesman, though many would likely find the latter a superior script.
Court Theatre Stages a Classic Worth Watching
We learn from the Court Theatre’s typically outstanding program notes that Miller was inspired to write by a real newspaper report of a patriotic daughter turning in her war profiteer father to authorities, for cheating at the war effort’s expense. Actually, the interplay of patriotism vs. family is but the starting point in Miller’s insightful explorations that might be summed up—compromise happens, humanity happens.
