War Profits Vs. Our Place In The World

All My Sons by Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller had a thing about dishonesty. He seemed to think it could destroy people's lives. This can be a hard sell to audiences who thrive on the lies and trickery rampant in "reality" television shows, shows that are popular because they teach exactly the opposite of Miller's lessons in such plays as The Crucible and All My Sons.

All My Sons carries with it an additional challenge for modern audiences. It suggests that there are times when it might be wrong to make money. It dares to argue that business ethics matter-and not just as a long-term way of growing the bottom line.

Protecting the Family Secrets

All My Sons was the first play Arthur Miller wrote that received critical acclaim, winning a New York Drama Critics Circle Award. It would launch a career which would crown Miller as one of our most important American playwrights.

The three-act play, first performed shortly after World War II, focuses on the Kellers, a family in Middle America. The father (Joe Keller) and his business partner (Herbert Deever) manufactured plane parts during the war and his partner was convicted and imprisoned for shipping out faulty parts which caused the deaths of military pilots. Shortly after that conviction, Joe Keller's oldest son, Larry, was reported missing in action.

The play opens three years later as the mother, Kate, continues to hold onto the belief that her eldest son is still alive. She so strongly believes this that she wants to stand in the way of Larry's fiancé and Herbert Deever's daughter, Ann Deever, from marrying her younger son, Chris. As the play progresses, you learn the Keller parents are still keeping some intense secrets from everyone, including Chris who worships and respects his father. Ann's brother George is the catalyst for many of these secrets being revealed and forever changing the family.

Building the Flawed Hero

Miller's fame would later grow when he brought to the stage the flawed everyman of Willy Loman. It is easy to see the roots of Willy Loman in Joe Keller. He's an imminently likable man-he has a good sense of humor, is good with children, loves his family fiercely, and worked hard building the American dream.

Keller's life was devoted to giving his children something better than he had. But along the way, he put his blinders on. He decided that his goals and his family were more important than the world around him. By the end of the play, we are horrified and part of our horror comes because we liked Keller so much in the beginning.

The Star of Honesty

Another fascinating character is Dr. Jim Bayliss, a friend of Chris' and of the family. There are many who think that Bayliss is the voice of Miller in this play. He is the outsider with inside knowledge who sympathizes with the family because he understands how we end up sacrificing our ideals to pragmatism.

Bayliss has a line that is later echoed by John Proctor in Miller's The Crucible: "Every man does have a star. The star of one's honesty. And you spend your life groping for it, but once it's out, it never lights again." But where Proctor holds onto his honesty, declaring that he cannot sign a false confession, "Because it is my name, because I cannot have another in my life.", Bayliss and the Kellers have let their light go out. While Proctor loses his life to keep his name, one has to question whether Bayliss and the Kellers didn't suffer the greater loss.

All My Sons is filled with memorable lines, lines that continue to echo long after you've read the script or left the theater.

Joe Keller asks his son why he should be condemned for making money during the war just because others were dying. The lines continue to reverberate in today's environment where we are asking ourselves many of the same questions when it comes to Iraq and such companies as Halliburton. Keller defends himself, "Who worked for nothin' in that war?.It's dollars and cents, nickels and dimes; war and peace, it's nickels and dimes, what's clean?"

Staging the Story

All My Sons is a play and as such it is meant to be seen. It is a play that is powerful because it is compact. It is a clean play in which every line and every word matters. Miller's play is rich in subtext, a subtext that can be brought to life by talented actors.

The script is worth reading-if you're willing to read it seven or eight times, taking the time to visualize it and hear for yourself what different inflections of each word might mean. But I recommend an easier path-see the play on stage.

Granted, I have a bias. I was the assistant director to a production of this a year ago. It was an experience that had me falling more in love with the script as the production advanced. Many scripts start to fall apart as they are rehearsed-or at least their flaws come out like tulips in spring. All My Sons has the opposite affect. It becomes stronger as the play is polished and there are few weaknesses to it.

The play takes place on a single set and all the action takes place over a single weekend. The cast is large, but each of the characters bring something to both the story and the theme.

Given the immediacy and the intensity of the script, All My Sons is a play I would much prefer on stage to a movie version. There is something powerful about having the events unfold before you with real people before your eyes in three dimensions. It makes it much harder to dismiss the challenges that the play throws out.

Challenging Our Assumptions

Both Joe and Kate Keller make convincing arguments that what they did was acceptable-that they had no other choice. Miller doesn't try to pretend that the answers were easy or obvious. The play would lack power if he painted them as uncaring ogres who were interested only in lining their purses. Instead, we see that they were doing the wrong things for reasons that they thought was right. We see the painful price that is paid for compromising ethics and for taking an easy, less profitable path.

While the play ends in a Miller trademark depressing manner, it also ends with a challenge. When Kate challenges Chris, saying that they can't be anything but sorry, Chris snatches that comfort from her and from us: "You can be better! Once and for all you can know there's a universe of people outside and you're responsible to it, and unless you know that, you threw away your son, because that's why he died."

It's a challenge that continues to be one we need to hear.

--B. Redman