Eighty years on, and the play All My Sons is still being produced. I wonder why?
Filigree Theatre’s eighth season production of All My Sons left me without feeling, almost blank. Not in a clean-slate sort of way, but blank in a staring-at-something-you-don’t-quite-comprehend way. While I am not fond of older remakes, in theatre or film, many I find dated with prejudice, when a good story has universal appeal, I see the value.
In the case of All My Sons, I had a hard time putting together the disparate pieces of this narrative. There are two main themes to grapple with. The corruption of wartime profiteering corporations (in wartime in this case, but it is a general theory) and those men working within the system who lack the courage to combat wrongdoing, and in this context, death to military personnel. The second is the inner workings of a dysfunctional family. In particular, what it means to be a father and a son, according to the father.
Miller did not do a great job at giving one or the other prominence, which would have focused the story. Another undercurrent theme, not revealed until the second half of the second act, is suicide. Maybe society viewed suicide as a taboo topic during the play’s Broadway premiere in 1947?
Yet suicide in literature has always been written about, so the topic may not have been all too strange?
Every person in the play is a walking firecracker ready to explode. The father, Joe, is a typical salesman, the kind Arthur Miller loves to hate, and a corporate lemming. His son Chris is so entangled in a web of loyalty to his parents and his job, yet beneath his exterior, we are waiting for some type of panic attack or outburst, which comes way too late. Realistically, no one would hold on to the secrets and intense feelings the way these characters did for the duration. It seemed humanly disproportionate to what was happening. Maybe this is how life was in the 1940s? The characters were, after all, WASP Americans, whose culture propagated these types of behaviors.
Kate, the all-domineering-under-a-friendly-facade mother, is in radical denial about her loss, which isn’t just hers alone. What struck me was the minuscule portal from which this family viewed the world, as if the world was an afterthought or not thought of at all. Because they are all in denial and have to control their suppressed emotions, they interrupt one another, preempting any sign of truth-telling or simple honesty. Intolerant of one another’s reality, which no character seems to understand, and condescending, especially the men towards the ideal ‘subservient’ women (barf!), all the characters are guilty.
What struck me most, however, was how little I felt for any of them. Nobody left me with any emotion whatsoever. I couldn’t connect with their anguish, their loyalties, their anger, or their desperation. Whatever feeling I had was contempt. Contempt for their inability to confront the truth, for their self-absorption and for the way they seemed to perpetuate the very circumstances that were destroying them.
Was that what Miller wanted? Perhaps he intended us to feel contempt for Joe Keller and the moral compromises he made. Perhaps he wanted us to question the price of blind loyalty to family and the corporate structures that allow wrongdoing to flourish. But I suspect he also wanted us to feel the human tragedy beneath those decisions. There is a difference between being intellectually confronted by a play and being emotionally drawn into it. For me, that connection never happened.
J. Kevin Smith performed Joe Keller, the father,. Tonie Knight played Kate Keller, the mother, and wife of Joe,. James Caleb Lindsley performed Chris Keller, the son,. The girlfriend of Chris and former girlfriend of Chris’s brother Larry, Ann Deever, was played by Lauren Ellie MacLeod. Jon Edward Cook played the role of neighbour George Deever. Mike Ooi acted as Dr. Jim Bayliss, while Bethany Harbaugh took on the role of Sue Bayliss, the snoopy neighbor and Dr. Jim’s wife.
For those who haven’t seen the play, I will not give away any spoilers.
The Filigree Theatre’s Austin production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons runs through November 14, 2026, across three weekends.
- Venue: Ground Floor Theatre, 979 Springdale Road, Suite 122, Austin.
- Performance schedule: Thursday–Saturday at 8 p.m.
- Sunday matinees: 3 p.m.
- Additional performance: Sunday, November 8, at 8 p.m.
- Running time: Approximately 2 hours and 30 minutes, including a 10-minute intermission.
There are three weekends of performances, with the final performance on November 14.
Tickets: All My Sons – Filigree Theatre