James Strecker Reviews the Arts

Very soon into the Stratford Festival’s production of All My Sons, we realize that we intimately know these people before us. We run into them by the hour in our daily lives. However, if we have the guts to admit what we are, we soon here recognize ourselves as well, especially our hidden parts of feeling and deed and memory that we instinctively conceal. The playwright, of course, writes with an expected masterful skill quite beneath the skin of his characters where mask and façade are born. He writes with unrelenting insight where human self-deception and deception of others crack and crumble, no matter how hard we try to maintain them.

What makes this production memorable is that, thanks to these actors—without exception—we see deeply considered lives unfold in a firmly present tense before us. We sense that, as these lives reveal themselves to us, they certainly don’t want to be revealed, they want to protect their illusions, delusions, and daily rituals of survival. We thus feel like intruders, voyeurs of a kind. More to the point, what if they ask us to see ourselves in how they get through life in this world –we too will be exposed. The strength of this cast is that it doesn’t reach out to convince us or to merely demonstrate human propensities, but rather pulls us in to experience the emotional lives of the characters collectively portrayed.

You have met Joe Keller many times. Here, through an insightful Joseph Ziegler, he is the quintessence of ordinary, a man garbed in the American Dream of success and also garbed in baggy pants and a plaid shirt with suspenders. He sits in his back yard, perusing the daily paper with the casual intensity that such reading requires. He seems an okay guy, a reticent blandness you might politely listen to or desperately avoid. “I ignore what I’ve got to ignore” does seem his declared motto, but the tired worried look in his eyes is constant and troubling. And, no matter what happens to him, we’re never quite sure why.

Keller’s style of life seems colourless, yet he is an amiable, unpatronizing friend to the neighbourhood kids, so we feel some comfort in their fun together. Nevertheless, he obviously needs to perpetuate the façade that everything is okay and later urgently tries to discredit his former partner, Deever, with the ironic “the man never learned how to take the blame.” Joe embodies the capitalist, profit-driven American Dream -“It’s nickels and dimes” he summarizes- and we realize gradually that he is both a success story in achieving this dream and a casualty of it. He takes no prisoners and for that he becomes one. His past knows his name and it is getting nearer. Ziegler makes us worry for him.

We meet Lucy Peacock’s Kate Keller at the outset. It is dark, “4:00 a.m.” and she “walks the night” in what seems a habitual emotionally crippled glide into her back yard. There she reaches into the sky, beyond herself and perhaps beyond her existence, one might assume, but a storm is in the works, thunder rumbles, and a tree nearby cracks and falls. We note how she exists on the verge of becoming frail and old. Later we note how she struggles to walk and articulate words, how she seems to dwell in a private hell that will never be reached by anyone. She needs others to share her delusion that son Larry is not dead and declares “I want you to act as if he is coming back.” She also pleads the heartbreakingly desperate “Believe with me Joe, I can’t stand alone”

Usually Kate badgers others into submission through the force of her passionate desperation or beats them down with her own despair. We feel the tension in her pain, not because she might break but probably because she is unable to. In all this, she seems haunted but vigorously so. Later on she goes motherly on George when he is about to reveal the family secret and tries to quiet him with a truism: “We all get hit by some lightening”. And she attacks George and manipulates –she’s good at it- with the unanswerable question “Why do you have to make believe you hate us?” Meanwhile, she tries and tries to will her dead son alive. She goes for the jugular of any suggestion to the contrary. Through Peacock, Kate’s pain is a cosmic force.

Tim Campbell plays Chris, the Keller’s living son, with assertive subtlety. He spars with his dad and we sense a guileless kid playing the role that family life assigns him. This he does even though, according to his mother, he was a “killer” in the war. His body and manner embody irony since, after all, his parents to whom he acquiesces are aging toward frailty while he, their son, stands hulking in a hesitant awkwardness. The undercurrent of contained emotion in him is palpable and we wonder –and know too, don’t we? – why this military guy who has just been through the war cannot be an adult with his parents. He kisses his bride to be nervously and we know he is holding back, but from what we are unsure.

We sense Chris’s ongoing dance with his past in the war and also with the blend of truth and lies that shape family life. Kate as a cautioning mother tells him “You don’t realize how much people can hate, Chris” -is this a clue to something?. Ann observes how he is always finding something good to say about people, and indeed he is accommodating, considerate and a little too nice, like one playing a tightly-scripted role. But like his dad he doesn’t want stability rocked with damaging truth that will disturb his mother. On the other hand, he is frustrated that his mother does not face the fact that her other son is dead. Like a good kid, he is always in the middle, a place some would call hell.

We watch Sarah Afful’s Ann Deever develop before us as a poised young woman with an understandably low key and cautious manner. She is feeling her way in a family situation she has not encountered for three years. These are her former neighbours, the family of her once fiancé and his brother, the latter to whom she would now be wed. Joe Keller had been exonerated for a crime that his partner, her father, a man she refuses to see, is now in jail. Her father is a strong though avoided presence for her and she seems vaguely beaten down by life, but not beaten. She hears and speaks with her body, reacts gradually like one who perhaps knows secrets she must conceal and is feeling her way. Thus we sense we have something to later find out.

On one hand, we see Ann as warm and responsive and politely confident, but she also, at the same time, suggests a woman just out of reach, one on the edge of mysterious. We sense a quietly burning turmoil in Ann, one that her composure usually, but not always, conceals. She is not a woman who declares her inner life outright on her own, but one who reveals by subtle clues. She doesn’t suppress her feelings, but doesn’t make them an ongoing fact of her life. She seems to float like a whisper, albeit with implied unspoken torments, one notch above the social façade of those about her. But she refuses to see her father, she lives with that unresolved fact of her life, and we wonder what else goes on in her head, in her heart.

Each life in All My Sons has its regrets, perhaps pain, and its attempt at a resolution. E. B. Smith’s Dr. Jim Bayliss is a man unobtrusively confident in himself, a good neighbor more geared to helping others than his own wife. We discover a concealed depth to him in his revelation that he always knew of Joe’s guilt. To this Kate adds a pulsating fact, “Chris almost knew,” and again the lie of the Keller’s family situation rises to the surface. Meanwhile, Bayliss speaks for many a life turned sour with “It’s hard to remember the kind of man I wanted to be.”

No doubt the energetic wife of Dr. Bayliss, Sue, has her own regrets. We notice her want of reticence, her outspokenness, her active hips, the way the light fabric of her dress sits like a breeze on her backside, and we know she’s too hot for the tightened Americana of this neighbourhood. Meanwhile neighbour Frank, with checkered slacks, is slightly cocky in hat and manner, while his wife, Lydia, bubbles freshly into the minutiae of middle class life. Each of these neighbours goes home to an existence we can easily imagine from what we see of them before us. They show us enough to make us wonder who they really are and might be.

Joe, Kate, Chris, and Ann each carry heavy emotional loads as they try to stay afloat. It’s a measure of this brave production that as much is left unspoken and implied as is actually said by them. Thus an undercurrent of tension prevails in the unsaid, and we feel the intensity of this volatile situation and its fragile cover-up. We know it will explode, but who knows when? “If your brother’s dead, then your father killed him,” Kate tells Chris. “She’s out of her mind” Joe says.

Indeed, one fears that Michael Blake as George Deever will explode in a performance of barely contained rage against injustice done to his dad, his own frustration at being unheard,  and his having to endure the devices of white humiliating black. And we come to realize more and more that something is rotten in Americana’s back yard. Chris has gradually come to acknowledge, come to admit, that in truth it was his father who was responsible for the death of twenty-one pilots. We then feel Joe’s desperation when he tries to save himself with, “Chris, I did it for you.” In turn Chris agonizes with the impotent “What must I do to you?” but no ocean of water can clear the Keller family, and anyone they touch, of this deed.

The Keller family has lived a cancerous lie supposedly to protect the fragile Kate with her self-delusions. But the lie has been kept secure to prevent revelations of each one’s complicated part in that mutually-supportive lie. Joe’s question “What do I do now?” can have no answer. There is no answer which does not seed its own destruction in some fatal way, like Kate’s remark “Tell them you’re willing to go to prison.” Not long after, Kate alone in the back yard says Joe’s name four times and the last is spoken from the depths of human hopelessness, not for oneself but for another, another human one has loved. It is shattering to hear and I’ll never forget it.

In Miller’s play the American dream may kill itself, idealism may sob its guts out at the compromised world in which it exists, and always people may do their futile and sometimes dirty best to survive. But the only possibility is to live and see it all through –if we can. How much of ourselves can we indeed live with, Miller, through this convincingly human but unrelenting production, seems to wonder and ask. Director Martha Henry never lets us off the hook, never allows her actors to leave their parts unquestioned and deceive us with evasion, never avoids the nitty-gritty of a lie that human nature may decree to keep us going. The characters, and the actors here who find them, take us into truths about ourselves that we as individuals -and as a culture- would rather conceal and much too often do.