Death of a Salesman is generally regarded as Arthur Miller’s best play, but I think All My Sons, Miller’s first big hit, is in some ways a more carefully crafted piece. It is constructed in the style that has dominated our theatre since the 19th century, realism, in which everything that happens on a stage reconstructs the life we see around us every day, as if we are looking at a room through an invisible fourth wall at people who talk like people in everyday life. Ibsen showed us that this “ordinary” style could also be made to reflect about extraordinary issues of human relations, ethics and psychology. 

Miller’s All My Sons is squarely in that tradition. Set on a postwar August Sunday in 1946 in the backyard of the Keller family home in a town in the Midwest, Joe Keller and his partner Steve Deever ran a small machine shop which had a contract to supply cylinder heads for military fighter planes. Something happened in the manufacturing process, and a batch of cylinder heads had cracks in them. Joe and Steve covered up the cracks, and twenty-one planes crashed, killing their pilots. Joe and Steve went to jail when investigators discovered their crime, but Joe was soon exonerated, claiming that he was not at the factory but at home with the flu when Steve decided to cover up the cracks. 

Now Joe’s younger son Chris, a veteran of the war, runs the shop with his father. He has been corresponding for two years now with Steve’s daughter Ann, working in New York. Ann had been engaged to Joe’s older son Larry, who is missing in action. Now Ann comes for a visit. She and Chris are seriously planning to marry. But Larry’s mother Kate believes that Larry is indeed missing and might turn up at any moment. It would be wrong for Chris to marry his brother’s girl. And Ann’s brother George also visits after seeing his father in prison, convinced by his father that Joe Keller had betrayed him and lied about the flu. 

So the guilts and the lies and the attempts to ignore the cracked lives pile up. Ibsen could hardly have come up with more drama in an ethical dilemma. 

At Hawthorne, Kurt Knoedelseder makes a confident Joe Keller, perhaps even a little proud, certainly relieved to have beaten the rap, though he does seem to refer to it rather frequently. His wife Kate, played by Susan Wylie, stands rooted in her conviction that her older son cannot be dead. Zachary Murphy takes Chris through the ethical and emotional dilemmas that he thinks he has avoided. You may regret that Jennelle Gilreatth Owens’ Ann Deever moves too easily from Larry to Chris, but it has been two years, they grew up together, so there is perhaps a just resolution there. Mike DePope as her brother George is justifiably an angry young man, but he does wish he could be as comfortable in the Kellers’ back yard as he once was. Kay Love and Gerry Love play neighbors Sue and Dr. Jim Bayless, he longing to spend his time doing medical research, she needing those fees his patients pay to keep their family comfortable. Also neighbors who grew up there are Lydia and Frank Lubey, bringing their unique domesticity to the proceedings. Eliza Weatherston is little Bertie, a neighborhood child who likes to visit with Joe.

Danny Brown’s direction does justice to this American classic. Natalie Piacentini’s set has a nicely restrained look. Colleen Heneghan designed the costumes, Eric Wennlund the lighting, Jacob Baxley the sound, and Ken Clark coordinated the props. Harry Kolmer is the Assistant Director and Ann Hier Brown the Stage Manager. 

Hawthorne Players’ All My Sons is a strong production of a strong play.

—Bob Wilcox

Photo by Ken Clark
Kurt Knoedelseder (left) as Joe Keller and Susan Wylie as Kate Keller in All My Sons.