All My Sons

The tree in the yard, and what a set can do

The play opens on a back yard with a young apple tree broken off at the trunk. The tree was planted for Larry Keller, the son who did not come back, and a storm in the night has snapped it. Mordecai Gorelik designed the set and lit it for the 1947 production; the setting given on the playbill was the back yard of the Keller home on the outskirts of an American town, at the end of summer 1946.

Breaking the tree in the first stage direction does two jobs at once. It puts Larry Keller's absence in the middle of the yard where nobody can walk past it, and it gives Kate Keller a reason to have been awake and out in the garden at four in the morning. A reader watching for economy should notice that Miller gets the family's whole situation on stage before anybody has explained anything.

The yard also fences the play in. Everything happens in it, including two scenes that would conventionally happen elsewhere: the conversation with the lawyer next door, and George Deever's arrival straight from the prison visit. Neighbours walk through the hedge instead of being visited, so the family's private business is transacted in a space the whole street can see into.

Directors have kept coming back to the yard and building it differently. Simon McBurney's 2008 Broadway production, with John Lithgow and Dianne Wiest as the Kellers, had Tom Pye design both set and costumes. Jack O'Brien's 2019 revival at the American Airlines Theatre, with Tracy Letts as Joe Keller and Annette Bening as Kate, used a set by Douglas W. Schmidt and took three Tony nominations.

Twenty-one pilots, and the arithmetic of a family

The crime is specific and the specificity is the play. Dramatists Play Service states it in its own summary. Joe Keller and Steve Deever made aircraft parts during the war. Deever went to prison for selling cracked cylinder heads to the Air Force, twenty-one pilots died, and Keller escaped punishment and grew wealthy. A cracked cylinder head is not sabotage. It is a part that will pass an inspection if somebody paints over the flaw.

Joe Keller's defence, when he finally makes it, is a defence of family. He did it for the business, and the business was for his sons, and a man has to look after his own. Penguin's own account of the play names the theme Miller would spend his career on: the relationship between fathers and sons, and the conflict between business ethics and personal ethics. Joe does not think of the twenty-one as anybody's sons.

The title is the counter-argument, and it is a line from the play rather than a label on it. Twenty-one dead pilots were somebody's children, and the play's argument is that a man who cannot see that has misunderstood what a family is. The National Endowment for the Humanities picks out Chris Keller's sentence to his mother as the play's core: that there is a universe of people outside, and she is responsible to it.

Once and for all you must know that there's a universe of people outside, and you're responsible to it.

Kate Keller's refusal, and why the plot needs it

Kate Keller insists that Larry is alive and will come home. Nobody else in the house believes it, and the play makes her insistence look at first like grief that has not moved on. Penguin's own description gets the mechanism right: a troubled father and son both know the second son will never return from the war, and the mother believes her missing boy will soon come home.

The refusal turns out to be structural rather than emotional. If Larry is alive, then Ann Deever is still Larry's girl and cannot marry Chris; the wedding Chris wants depends on the family agreeing that Larry is dead. And if Larry is dead, the question of what killed him is open, which is the question Kate Keller cannot afford anybody to ask.

Miller therefore gives the mother the play's best-defended position and the least honest one. Kate Keller knows more than her son does about her husband, and her hope for Larry is the one belief that keeps the rest of it unexamined. Beth Merrill created the part; Dianne Wiest played it in 2008 and Annette Bening was nominated for a Tony Award for it in 2019.

Everything then depends on a piece of paper. Ann Deever has brought something with her from the city and has been deciding all day whether to produce it, and Miller holds it back until the third act. Withholding a document is an old device, and what makes it work here is that the document destroys the very person who has been protected by the argument about whether Larry is alive.

Written inside the rules, and what came next

All My Sons is the most conventionally made of Miller's major plays, and the convention is a decision. Three acts, one set, one day, cause following cause, every revelation delivered by somebody walking into the yard with news. Miller had watched his first Broadway play, The Man Who Had All the Luck, close after four performances in 1944, and he wrote the next one to a form that could not fail on structure.

Ibsen is the model, and the debt is easy to hear: a respectable household, a buried commercial crime, an outsider arriving with evidence, and a last act in which the head of the family has to answer for it. Miller made the connection explicit three years later by adapting Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, which premiered in 1950, and Viking published his version in 1951 with his own introduction.

Two years after this play he threw the form away. Death of a Salesman keeps one set but abandons chronology altogether, staging Willy Loman's memories in the same rooms as the present. Reading All My Sons first shows what Miller could already do, and makes the 1949 play look less like a young writer's experiment and more like a decision taken by somebody who had proved he could write the well-made version.

The play's own later life has been steady rather than spectacular. Arvin Brown's 1987 revival at the John Golden Theatre, with Richard Kiley as Joe Keller, won the Tony Award for Best Revival. Simon McBurney's 2008 production ran 101 performances with John Lithgow, Dianne Wiest, Patrick Wilson and Katie Holmes. Jack O'Brien's 2019 staging for the Roundabout Theatre Company took three Tony nominations. Miller also directed the play himself, at a summer theatre in Arden, Delaware, in 1953.