It may not be Arthur Miller’s most iconic work, but without All My Sons, there would have been no Death of a Salesman. As Miller’s second Broadway play prepares its first Broadway opening in 21 years, Broadway.com tells the story behind this American classic, and how it saved Miller the Playwright from becoming Miller the Beer-Box Assembler.

Once More Unto the Breach
On November 23, 1944, Arthur Miller made his Broadway debut with The Man Who Had All the Luck, a fable about a garage mechanic who was “cursed” with good luck. Of the reviews in New York’s seven papers, five were negative. “Incredibly turgid in its writing and stuttering in its execution,” declared the Herald Tribune. “Only one or two effective moments,” said the New York Times, blaming a confusing script and jumbled themes. An unmitigated flop, the play closed after two previews and four performances.

Its author could barely sit through one, calling the production “a well-meant botch.” According to Martin Gottfried’s Arthur Miller: His Life and Work, Miller’s first Broadway experience left him so disenchanted with theater that he was actually relieved to “read about the tremendous pounding of Nazi-held Europe by Allied air power. Something somewhere was real.” He vowed never to write another play.

After publishing his lone novel, 1945’s Focus, Miller modified his vow: to never to write another play if the next one didn’t find an audience. He remembered a story told by his then-mother-in-law, Julia Slattery (“the last person in the world I could imagine being inspired by,” he later emphasized). She talked about a local Ohio girl who’d reported her father to the authorities after learning he knowingly sold defective airplane parts to the Army during the war. Before Slattery had finished, her son-in-law had “transformed the daughter into a son, and the climax of the second act was clear in my mind. I knew my informants’ neighborhood, I knew its middle-class ordinariness.”

Miller spent the next two years fine-tuning the new piece, then titled The Sign of the Archer (a reference to matriarch Kate Keller’s belief in astrology), while turning out radio plays to support his wife and kid. Borrowing the 24-hour structure from Greek tragedy, he set the action in the backyard of a middle-American home. Joe Keller is a successful, if uneducated, factory owner. His wife refuses to accept the death of their son Larry, who’s been MIA for three years. Their surviving son, Chris, has summoned Larry’s fiancee, Ann Deever, in hopes of proposing to her. When her brother, George, arrives, the truth surfaces about Joe’s involvement in a shady business deal that resulted in tragedy—and the incarceration of their father. Renamed All My Sons, the play introduced themes that would define Miller’s greatest works: domestic unrest, the sins of the father, the corrosive effects of the American dream.

The fledgling playwright aimed for tight pacing, narrative clarity and commercial viability, a desire for audiences “to mistake my play for life itself,” Miller later told the Times, “a play about which nobody could say to me, ‘What does this mean?’” A half-dozen drafts and some 700 pages later, Miller sent the play to Broadway producer Herman Shumlin, who often worked with Lillian Hellman. Shumlin called back and said, “I don’t understand it.” Maybe it was time to update the resume and brush off that business suit.

The Second Time Around
Luckily, the play won two important admirers, Harold Clurman and his protégé Elia Kazan. Both had been members of the pioneering Group Theatre, who’d partnered after its demise in the hope of producing commercial plays. To Miller, Clurman was “a priest of a new kind of theatre that would cry down injustice and

heal the sick nation’s wounds.” Kazan had little directorial experience at the time, but Miller had seen him act in the original productions of Waiting for Lefty and Golden Boy. “And here were both of them fairly lusting after my play,” Miller wrote in his memoir, Timebends. “I had arrived.”

Both men said they wanted to direct, forcing Miller into an awkward decision. Clurman was the legendary figure. Kazan had fewer credits but was more aggressive. Perplexed, Miller grilled his peers. “The picture they were giving out was of a Clurman who might be inspired but could often fumble, and a Kazan who was wily and could punch directly to the point with actors.” Much to Clurman’s chagrin, Miller chose Kazan.

According to Kazan’s autobiography, A Life, Clurman acted like a spoiled brat during rehearsals—talking audibly with secretaries, laughing at his own quips, demanding Miller’s time when Kazan needed it. “He was always, one way or another, calling attention to his own presence,” the director noted, mentioning how Clurman kept an adoring young woman nearby who granted him “the privilege of warming his hand between her legs.”

Despite the backstage drama, Kazan noted that the rest of the cast and crew “functioned perfectly.” Ed Begley, Beth Merrill and Arthur Kennedy played the Kellers, while Lois Wheeler and a young Karl Malden portrayed the divided Deever siblings. Out-of-town tryouts in New Haven and Boston went swimmingly, and when All My Sons was ready for Broadway, “the production was like a bullet on a straight, clean trajectory that rammed the audience back into its seats,” recalls Miller.