Toying with Lives
SAUVAGE, LEO
On Stage TOYING WITH LIVES BY LEO SAUVAGE The revival of Arthur Miller's All My Sons now at the John Golden Theater is more than a little unsure of its focus. Nonetheless, it is an...
...I noticed no trace of this in Richard Kiley's performance...
...After six months of instruction the Professor takes his student to a royal garden party, where she impresses everyone as a perfect lady...
...All My Sons is, after all, a tragedy, not a melodrama...
...Larry never returned from a mission he flew three years ago...
...Perhaps the playwright would have approved...
...Most of the pain is that of known loss...
...But Joe's moral psychology is not so simple...
...By chance he encounters a well-known colleague and boasts that within six months he could teach this girl to speak and behave like a duchess...
...The gradual dramatic progress of the first act has already permitted us to guess that Joe Keller is the person responsible for the death of his son...
...As far as she's concerned, Ann is still engaged to Larry...
...And notwithstanding that 40 years have passed since the play first appeared, one cannot help noticing how it sets many a contemporary bell ringing...
...The trouble is the "intimation": When it comes in the second act, it is worse than superfluous...
...It's a bet...
...Surely a major work, All My Sons nevertheless has some minor flaws...
...Indeed, a serious romance is clearly developing between the silent Ann and the nervous, troubled Chris...
...Yet for all the slighting of this theme in the present production by New Haven's Long Wharf Theater, the play remains a work of great dramatic impact—as the almost religious silence maintained by the audience attests...
...Pearce (Dora Bryan...
...Having won the wager and concluded his linguistic experiment, Higgins makes it very clear to Eliza that he thinks of her merely as someone who brings him his slippers and habitually occupies a place among his furniture...
...The Professor's vulgarity, incidentally, strikes me as hardly compatible with Pygmalion's premise...
...Compounding the gimmickiness is the sudden surfacing toward the end of a letter Larry wrote before his fatal flight that denounces his father as the man who caused the deaths of his comrades...
...Yet her father was a weak-willed man who could not say no to his boss, and he lacked any personal motive for initiating a cover-up (we are not told how he was convicted...
...Joe comes much closer to the image of the cold-blooded —and potentially bloody-handed— businessman...
...In desperation, Eliza announces that she will marry Freddy Einsford Hill, an idiotic aristocrat, and open a flower shop to earn "his" living...
...Colonel Pickering (Lionel Jeffries), the other phonetics expert, also moves in to observe Eliza's progress...
...Before the Professor can start the experiment with Eliza Doolittle (Amanda Plummer), arrangements must be made with the flower girl's occasional father, Alfred, a rascal who calls himself "one of the undeserving poor...
...The interpretation is certainly consistent with a lengthy postscript to the published version of the play, in which Shaw "predicts" that the former flower girl will end up as Freddy's wife, and rejects any suggestion that Professor Higgins would consider marrying her...
...He has Kate accidentally let it slip that her husband hasn't been sick for 15 years —directly contradicting his pneumonia alibi...
...Among those who decide to see George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion at the Plymouth Theater there may be quite afew who, besides wanting to catch Peter O'Toole's belated Broadway debut, are curious about the original "book" for My Fair Lady...
...For Shaw's own Professor Higgins, especially as performed by O'Toole, comes across as an insensitive, egotistical, ultimately ugly character...
...To use Miller's expression in a 1957 commentary defining the playwright's preoccupations in All My Sons, Joe cannot see the "relatedness" of his actions to their consequences...
...We are in 1946, near summer's end, and the War is still terribly present to America's families...
...Late in the War an investigation had determined that Joe's firm was responsible for supplying cracked cylinder heads to the Air Force, resulting in fatal crashes...
...some, however, is bound up with vain hopes that the missing son or father or husband might yet turn up alive...
...O'Toole plays the callous attitude to the hilt in the last act, giving an impression of cruelty that seems to go beyond the text...
...His wife Kate can...
...When this obsession ramifies into the death of one of those sons—not to mention the other 20 pilots—he feels pain but not guilt...
...At times A11 My Sons makes the viewer feel he is watching a Greek tragedy unfold—something rarely experienced on Broadway, even fleetingly...
...Miller juxtaposes these two equally intense sorts of suffering within a situation that, despite his avowed intention to be "as untheatrical as possible," is theatrically constructed in every sense of the word...
...Chris will marry Ann because his father, by causing the death of Larry, opened the way...
...she means nothing more to him...
...Kate Keller (Joyce Ebert), however, refuses to give her son up as dead...
...Joe escaped conviction by claiming he was out sick with pneumonia during the period in question and had no idea that defective parts were being delivered...
...Miller intended the pace to be such that "boredom might threaten...
...Miller also explores a deeper theme in All My Sons: man's innate longing for justice...
...His purpose, he said, was to create "an atmosphere of undisturbed normalcy" so that "a genuine horror" would be provoked "at the first intimation of the crime...
...Nonetheless, Miller makes use of a trick that no good detective story writer would resort to...
...Joe's technical assistant, Ann's father, was sent to prison, and Ann now hates him for his presumed guilt in the affair...
...The Professor responds with a derisive laugh and the curtain falls...
...The action takes place in the backyard of the Keller family's home, on the outskirts of an industrial town in Connecticut...
...The tragic proposition leads to precisely the problem of justice that, I believe, the production at the John Golden fails to articulate...
...He finds himself fascinated by the language of a cockney girl selling flowers and haranguing people who have sought shelter from the rain under the portico of a church...
...But they may well conclude that Lerner and Loewe were right to ignore the text—as well as Shaw's categorical injunctions—and endow Professor Henry Higgins with enough humanity to make a somewhat happy ending possible...
...Regrettably, director Arvin Brown and the key members of his cast seem scarcely to have noticed...
...An astute director would have done Miller the favor of downplaying such clumsily sensational, if not altogether unnecessary, episodes...
...I have often been undecided about Amanda Plummer's acting...
...Joe Keller commits suicide when, thanks to the efforts of Ann's younger brother George (Christopher Curry), his guilt becomes known: He announces with some vehemence that he does not want to go to prison, and we are also given to understand that he cannot endure—much less understand —the hatred of his surviving son...
...Everybody knows, since My Fair Lady, how Pygmalion begins...
...An even more disagreeable character in this production is Kate Keller...
...Happily, there are also some understanding actors on stage...
...He appears not the least bit disturbed though, about his obedient technical assistant having suffered so greatly in his stead...
...The first act moves slowly, yet that in itself is not the problem...
...Nonetheless, it is an important step in Broadway's rediscovery of serious drama...
...Joyce Ebert portrays her as a scheming virago, rather than a fond, helpless wife...
...In fact, his obsession with profits is ultimately an outgrowth of the love he feels for his sons and his concern for their future...
...as Eliza Doolittle, I find her perfect...
...He may be able to correct Eliza's accent, but how can he teach her manners when he himself has none...
...What is more, while vainly trying to dissuade Chris from marrying Ann, she makes it the linchpin of her final, exasperated argument: In solemnly confirming Larry's death, she insinuates, the marriage might put Chris in the position of one day having to acknowledge that it was their father who killed him...
...With the apparent complicity of the director, he makes Joe Keller into a kind of moral monster, quite different from the almost ordinary businessman and blindly loving father the author meant him to be...
...They will discover that Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe were not very faithful to the Irish playwright's 1913 comedy—a not uncommon outcome when musical adaptations are done of works written for the legitimate stage...
...Jamey Sheridan is well supported by Jayne Atkinson and convincingly counterpointed by Christopher Curry...
...Ann will marry Chris because her father, by bearing the burden of Joe Keller's guilt, permits Chris to keep an honorable name...
...The many witty lines and situations are enjoyable, but we rebel at being asked to believe that a girl, whatever her origins, could fall in love with such an incorrigible pig...
...To the contrary, we are left with the impression that his greatest regret lies in not having definitively transferred his culpability to Ann's father...
...For those who might not otherwise get the hint, Ebert italicizes it by quickly covering her mouth with her hand...
...A famous phonetics expert is passing through Covent Garden one night...
...By contrast, Miller's 1957 commentary spoke of "the conscience of Joe Keller and its awakening to the evil he has done...
...Following some clever talk on both sides, five pounds change hands, and Eliza is taken into the unmarried Professor's flat where she is placed under the care of his housekeeper, Mrs...
...His father, his brother—who lost 20 other men in accidental plane crashes—and his former fiancée Ann (Jayne Atkinson) are all resigned to Larry's death...
...Joe Keller (Richard Kiley) owns a small metallurgy company that during the War made spare parts for the Air Force, in which both of his sons served —Larry as a pilot, Chris (Jamey Sheridan) as Larry's commanding officer...
Vol. 70 • April 1987 • No. 6
