Before the intermission of All My Sons, the insistent underscore music and occasional movies projected on the rear wall were merely distracting. During the second and third acts, though, they became positively maddening.
Rather than helping me focus on the members of Arthur Miller’s fracturing family, or the present-day parallels to these late 1940s Americans trying like hell to amnesiate themselves about the war they had just fought, the music and the largely irrelevant visuals instead had me posing a series of questions during this revival of Miller’s 1947 play, a success that had paved the way for Death of a Salesman and The Crucible a few years later:
- Does director Simon McBurney not trust Miller’s language to tell the story? Does he really have to project shots of mechanical gears as the characters recount the shipping of faulty airplane parts that caused 21 World War II pilots to crash?
- If he doesn’t trust the play’s language, why did he hire excellent actors to speak Miller's words, like John Lithgow as Joe Keller, the possibly culpable parts manufacturer, Dianne Wiest as his seemingly delusional but actually clear-eyed wife Kate, and Patrick Wilson as their born-to-be-disillusioned son Chris?
- Is McBurney simply so enchanted with the technology available to today’s Broadway directors, or is the “muscle” in this production really sound designers Christopher Shutt and Carolyn Downing and projection designer Finn Ross for Mesmer? And were the actors body-miked simply so we could hear at least some of those words above the music and sound effects?
- Do McBurney and his designers feel they need to “cue” the audience when a major revelation is taking place or a scene is reaching its emotional climax?
(See end of review for possible answers to these questions.*)
It’s somewhat understandable that McBurney would want to jazz up Miller’s angry, naturalistic drama, which is constantly threatening to explode into Angry, almost campy Melodrama—complete with the Conveniently Expository Big-Mouthed Neighbor, the third-act Letter That Explains Everything and the Offstage Pistol Shot.
At this stage in his career, Miller was still trying to finesse his symbols and overt messages into the grain of a naturalistic, fourth-wall, well-made play. His leap forward with Death of a Salesman (with the help of director Elia Kazan) was to expand drama’s perimeter—and its tolerance for a bit of strangeness—far enough so that the symbols seemed to be part of the landscape, and the melodrama less an author’s trickery and more a plausible response to the play’s big themes. (Kazan’s work with the other post-war playwriting giant, Tennessee Williams, whose poetic, symbol-strewn Streetcar Named Desire is also from this period, probably helped Miller and Kazan add some magic to Broadway’s realism.)
Article comments