Mar 7, 2008

'All My Sons' emotionally gripping

By John Angell Grant / Theater Reviewer

I see dead people. That's the experience of the war-shocked Keller family in playwright Arthur Miller's 1946 moral fable "All My Sons."

"All My Sons" is a challenging work to stage, because it feels dated in many ways. But the folks from Filbert Steps Productions have managed a seductive and moving community theater production on the intimate second stage at Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts.

The entire show is set in the backyard of an affluent suburban American home during the summer of 1946, as one neighborhood tries to land on its feet after the deep emotional injuries of World War II.

For the Keller family, emotional growth seems to have stopped with the inability of its matriarch to admit that her oldest son, a pilot missing in action during the war, is now clearly dead.

The nurturing of her denial by her husband turns out to be a co-dependent trade-off for her overlooking other misbehaviors on his part. Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.

Tied up in the family's inability to look honestly at itself is a huge question nobody wants to ask: Where did the Kellers' wartime wealth come from?

The upshot of all this round-robin of denial is an incapacitating case of collective post-traumatic stress disorder.

In the Kellers' neighborhood, friends have decided that they will go along with the Kellers' shared family delusions out of kindness and respect. It proves to be an exhausting game.

At the core of this massive family denial is the basic human need to protect our selves from fear. Namely in this play, fears of looking at how we really make our way in the world, what we do for money and how our behaviors often injure others.

The whole mess is too painful and too complex to examine honestly. After all, says Mr. Keller, we're doing it for the sake of the family.

On its surface, "All My Sons" feels like a show from a bygone era. Filled with melodramatic twists and turns, playwright Miller's family life and family humor from 1946 are corny. The play's self-conscious and didactic architecture of group psychology often feels overly expositional.

Director Jim Kohlberg's Mountain View production overcomes these stylistic and melodramatic limitations. Although the show opens with dialogue paced so fast it seems the actors aren't listening to each other, the pace settles down with the arrival of actor Patricia Tyler, as Keller matriarch Kate, who brings the performances of her co-actors down out of their heads and into their hearts.

The play's second half is quite moving and powerful, as the family ghosts, fears and resentments hit the fan.

Among the actors, Josh Sigal and Kaytie O'Hara have a magical and moving scene as want-to-be lovers who have trouble expressing their intentions. Lisa-Mari Newton is scary as a backbiting neighborhood doctor's wife.

Excellent Jake Vincent raises the entire stage's emotional stakes as an injured and smoldering former family friend.

"All My Sons" turns out to be a play about the conflict between trying to make money to support a family, versus doing the right thing ethically in the larger world. Put in simple terms, what is the difference between appropriate family prosperity, and loot with blood on it?

In the injured postwar world of this play, its characters learn that not just one's family, but men everywhere are "all my sons." Check out the show. You won't be disappointed.

Rating: Three and one half stars

E-mail John Angell Grant at jagplays@paloaltodailynews.com.