You Make The Call

Ben Brantley reviewing a revival of All My Sons in The New York Times:

[Director Simon] McBurney has staged Miller’s tale of a self-deluding, guilt-crippled American family with the ritualistic formality and sense of inexorability of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Would that he could summon the primal power associated with those ancients.

[....] But to bring out this aspect of the play as literally as Mr. McBurney does is to underline not only what’s obvious but also what’s awkward in a work that relies heavily on mechanical plotting and bald speechifying. And to transform its characters into archetypal puppets of destiny is to deprive actors of the chance to create richly human portraits.
[...] Mr. McBurney sustains this particular distancing device by having the ensemble members sit, within our view, on the sidelines. The production has other ways of reminding us that what we’re watching is a sort of mythic (and artificial) theatrical rite. Tom Pye’s set is a rectangle of green, green grass, with a screen door in the middle, behind which hovers a ghostly Magritte-like image of a house.

Words announcing changes of scene are projected, as is video footage portraying factory assembly lines, soldiers at war and, for the conclusion, that vast sea of humanity (embodied by a contemporary street crowd) whom we must acknowledge as our responsibility.

[...] The leading performers make their entrances and exits glacially, in robotic profile, across the back of the stage. When they speak, they often find themselves competing with anxious, portentous music, which might as well be a floating road sign marked “Doom Ahead.”

[...] Mostly this vaunting interpretation falls into that same limbo between intention and execution where so many of Miller’s baffled American souls find themselves.

Hilton Als in The New Yorker:

The characters in “All My Sons” are essentially ideological constructions; one can barely feel the blood beneath the rhetoric. As a result, the show is a directorial challenge. It’s a stretch to imagine anyone doing a better job with it than Simon McBurney does here. He draws out the play’s emotional and intellectual content by removing it from its naturalistic fustiness. The only set to speak of in his staging is the rear wall of the Keller home, and a tree that has fallen in the yard, a symbolic metaphor for the Keller family. McBurney’s production reminds one of Jed Harris’s influential 1938 take on Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” and of Lars von Trier’s 2003 film “Dogville”—works in which we were made acutely aware of the stage as a stage, of the set as a set. The action of “All My Sons” doesn’t begin with a raised curtain. Instead, the actors walk onstage together. They gaze out at the audience as Lithgow reads the stage directions—“The back yard of the Keller home . . . August of our era”—and then disperse to the wings, where we can see them, waiting to come on and watching the action unfold with us. When an actor gets his cue, he walks toward the stage slowly, expressionless. Only on joining the action does he become fully animated, a “character.” McBurney isn’t overemphasizing the play’s theatricality—he’s giving the production the only theatricality it has.

The great thing about being a critic is you're never wrong.

PS Here's another line from Brantley:

It’s understandable that producers would think this is an auspicious time to revive “All My Sons,” a heartfelt condemnation of capitalist greed and its concomitant lack of moral responsibility.

It's always an insult to call an old play timely (since it implies it didn't mean as much earlier and won't mean so much later). But I must ask Mr. Brantley when, in the 61 years since the original production, has there been a feeling in the theatre that now is NOT a good time for a heartfelt condemnation of capitalist greed and its concomitant lack of moral responsiblity?