All About All My Sons
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.
On opening night, Clurman sent a telegram to Kazan that gushed, “This is a wonderful beginning for us. You have done a magnificent job. But I want you to remember that this is only the beginning. Love, Harold.” Its worried tone wasn’t lost on Kazan: “If he was suspecting that I was reconsidering our partnership, he was right.”
Welcome to the Theater Elite
All My Sons opened on January 29, 1947, at the Coronet Theatre now the Eugene O’Neill. “A piece of expert dramatic construction,” raved New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson, after proclaiming Miller “a genuine new talent.” There were detractors. Some critics accused Miller of ripping off Ibsen, while others took swipes at the critics who had liked the play.
Nevertheless, after a nine-month run, All My Sons was voted Best Play by the New York Critics’ Circle besting Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, and won the first-ever Tony Awards for Best Play and Best Direction of a Play. So how did Broadway’s newest talent commemorate his artistic promotion? By getting got a job assembling beer boxes in a factory. “My play was bringing in some two-thousand dollars a week and my wage there was the minimum, forty cents an hour,” Miller recalled, adding, “I took that job in Long Island City as though to insure my continuity with the past.” He quit within a week.
All My Sons indeed marked the end of the Clurman & Kazan production team. Two years later, Miller and Kazan would scale even greater artistic heights with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Death of a Salesman. But three years after that, their partnership soured when Kazan stood before the House Un-American Activities Committee and testified that he, Odets and seven other old friends from the Group Theatre had once been members of the Communist Party.
As the 20th century wore on, Willy Loman became an archetype, and The Crucible Miller’s meditation on McCarthyism became the definitive syllabus entry under “Historical Allegory in Contemporary Drama.” Meanwhile, All My Sons faded increasingly into the shadows, though a production in Jerusalem in the mid-70s became the longest-running play in Israel. “It may as well be an Israeli play,” Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin told Miller. “Boys are out there day and night dying in planes and on the ground, and back here people are making a lot of money.”
In New York, All My Sons received a couple of anniversary productions, both drawing rather faint praise. In his review of the first Broadway revival in 1987 starring Richard Kiley and Jamey Sheridan, Frank Rich qualified his admiration with “the Joe-Chris confrontations do look like warm-ups for the roof-raisers between Willy and Biff.” A decade later, Ben Brantley offered kudos to Michael Hayden and Angie Phillips as Chris and Ann in Roundabout Theatre Company’s 1997 off-Broadway revival he was less effusive about John Cullum as Joe. “The machinery of the well-made play is indeed visible here right down to a climax-precipitating letter, produced at the last minute,” Brantley noted, “but that doesn’t dilute the strength of Mr. Miller’s skills as a storyteller.”
All My Sons made it to the silver screen in 1948, starring Edward G. Robinson and Burt Lancaster. In the late-80s, it was also performed on PBS’s American Playhouse by James Whitmore, Michael Learned and Aiden Quinn as the Kellers, with Joan Allen and Zeljko Ivanek as the Deever siblings, directed by Jack O’Brien. But go search “all my sons” on Netflix. The first result is My Three Sons: Season 1: Vol. 1.
The Hottest Play in Town
In 2001, Arthur Miller attended the New York premiere of Mnemonic, a multimedia memory play directed by Simon McBurney, founder of the innovative Theatre d’Complicite. The playwright approached McBurney and asked the English actor-director if he’d like to work on his plays. Though Miller died from congestive heart failure in February 2005, McBurney eventually made good, bringing All My Sons back to Broadway a year after the play’s 60th birthday.
One imagines Miller was ready to shake up his own oeuvre, and McBurney and his design team obliged by limiting the set to a few objects—a screen door, a garden gate, a green lawn—filling the rest of the space with projections, music and sound effects. The actors never really slip from view, either, instead sitting off to the side, at times crisscrossing and nodding to one another when joining or leaving the action. It’s sort of like watching a wrestling match.
Thanks to the revival’s high-profile cast, Miller’s first success no longer seems like a neglected sibling. Googling the play results in page after page of paparazzi photos—mostly of Katie Holmes, of course, who’s making her Broadway debut as Ann Deever. Adds marquee names John Lithgow, Dianne Wiest and Patrick Wilson to the cast, and the new All My Sons suddenly looks just like the old one: a Broadway event with artistic and commercial clout to spare. At last check, the Keller family was playing to 98 percent capacity. Now what would the beleaguered author of The Man Who Had All the Luck make of that?