WHAT: PlayMakers Repertory Company presents "All My Sons"
WHEN: Saturday through Feb. 14
WHERE: Paul Green Theatre
UNC Center for Dramatic Art, Chapel Hill
TICKETS: $10-$40
FOR MORE INFORMATION: Call 962-PLAY
ON THE WEB: www.playmakersrep.org
BY DAWN BAUMGARTNER VAUGHAN
dvaughan@heraldsun.com; 419-6563
CHAPEL HILL -- A Greek tragedy set in an American backyard, "All My Sons" was late playwright Arthur Miller's first theatrical success. PlayMakers Repertory Company presents the 1947 drama at the Paul Green Theatre at UNC. It opens Saturday night.
Guest actress Ellen McLaughlin, also a playwright who adapts Greek plays, portrays Kate Keller. Kate refuses to believe that her son Larry died during World War II. Though he has been missing in action for years, letting her surviving son Chris marry Ann Deever would be acknowledging Larry's death. Kate's husband Joe sold faulty airplane parts during the war, and blamed his business partner, and Ann's father, Steve Deever.
McLaughlin said "All My Sons" has the elements of a Greek play: a family, tragic events, the action all taking place in one day, the figures are responsible for their own destruction, buried secrets come to light, and the big reveal cleanses society.
Miller was heavily influenced by the Greeks, she said, who invented the form, as well as Henrik Ibsen, who took on issues of morality. McLaughlin said a role like Kate Keller is one that makes her want to act.
"It is one of the great parts, a hard part," she said. This is her first time working with PlayMakers, and she has been an admirer of artistic director Joe Haj for years.
"[Kate] has been difficult to get a handle on because she's fueled by so much she can't speak about -- truths she's pushed so deep she can't let even herself know them," McLaughlin said. "She's complicated and intense. It's not been fun to play her. At the end of the night I end up with enormous amount of tension in my shoulders, and in my dreams." She said that during rehearsals she has dreamed about the issues in the play, like trying to hold things together that are falling apart.
McLaughlin said she is impressed with PlayMakers as well as fellow guest actors Christian Conn, who portrays Chris Keller, and Paul O'Brien, who portrays Joe Keller.
O'Brien performed in another Miller play, "The Crucible," when it was on Broadway in 2002 with Liam Neeson and Laura Linney, before Miller's death. Miller came to watch rehearsals even though his longtime wife had just died.
"It was stunning to see him soldiering on. His plays are like that. People go through terrible loss and keep going," O'Brien said. O'Brien lives in New York and rarely leaves the city for acting parts, but wanted to be part of "All My Sons." He immediately liked guest director Davis McCallum and was especially interested in the production once he learned McLaughlin was also in the cast.
O'Brien said that "All My Sons" could take place anywhere in America.
"It was so of its time. When we read it I can see my dad and my dad's friends in Joe Keller," he said. "It's a paradigm of the American family so easily identifiable."
O'Brien said he has seen a production of "All My Sons" that he hasn't liked, because it was done so melodramatically and played the dysfunction of the family.
"In my mind, they're good people but under stress did a bad thing. They're charming people, fun people to be with. As a kid I remember people like them," he said. O'Brien said that Miller wrote some pretty good jokes into the play. "If the audience doesn't like these people, why spend the night with them, through good times and bad?"
Director McCallum said that at the center of "All My Sons" are the questions: How do you define a family, and are there relationships that are bigger than family? Are there principles that trump love of family? How far outside our own personal family should our circle of care and concern extend?
While the play is about father and son relationships, McCallum also explores the point of view of the women -- Kate Keller and would-be daughter-in-law Ann Deever, played by Marianne Miller. The women's journey in the play is as important as that of the father and son, he said.
"One of them comes to this back yard determined to become engaged to the brother of her sweetheart, and overcome almost any obstacles, go to any lengths. The other is determined with every fiber of her being that her other son is coming home, and not dead," McCallum said. "They're set on this collision course. That dynamic fuels the play."
McCallum said the audience is seduced into loving the Kellers at the start of the play, before they feel anxiety and mounting sense of dread. He said that O'Brien, McLaughlin and Conn are beautifully suited to their roles as the Keller family.
The thrust stage at the Paul Green Theatre is transformed into the Keller back yard, with a background image of a house for sale, a house you want, McCallum said, with a back yard where you want to be.
