Little Theatre Brings Home Arthur Miller's 'All My Sons'

Complex Issues of Morality and Ethics Infuse Family Drama

Spring has been a great time for fans of playwright Arthur Miller.

Arena Stage's dual presentation of "Death of a Salesman" and "A View From the Bridge" is still running in Arlington, and the District's Theater J just closed "The Price." Rockville Little Theatre is now showcasing Miller's first Broadway success, "All My Sons."

This is a worthy, if imperfect, staging of the 1947 drama. The show is worth seeing as a prime example of Miller's skill using ordinary-sounding dialogue to deeply probe issues of ethics and morality.

Director Stuart Fischer has an uneven cast, but his primary actors mostly flourish in the leisurely pace of the drama. With time and space to inhabit and grow their characters, the lead actors gradually ratchet up the intensity until they ultimately turn in wrenching performances.

Miller gives them a lot to work with and much for the audience to digest. There are themes of personal responsibility, the complexity of father-son relationships and the conflict between profit and principle and loyalty and denial. The setting is prosaic: the back yard of Joe Keller's comfortably middle class home somewhere in the Midwest. But the issues are exceptional.

Joe (Ted Schneider) owns a company that manufactured parts for airplane engines during wartime. Rather than scrapping a batch of cracked cylinder heads and jeopardizing government contracts, the company sent them out. The result: 21 U.S. pilots died when their planes crashed.

Joe and his partner went on trial. He was exonerated, but his partner languishes in prison. Joe's son Larry, a pilot, has been missing in action for more than three years, and his wife, Kate (Kate Blackburn), clings to the hope their son is alive.

Miller has also woven in a convoluted romantic subplot that helps explore the thematic conflicts in human terms and ease the bleakness of the story. The Kellers' younger son, Chris (John Stange), who is soon to take over his father's business, is in love with the jailed partner's daughter, Ann (Annette Kalicki), who had been his missing brother's sweetheart.

Ann wants to marry Chris, despite objections from Kate, for whom such a union would be an admission that her son Larry is dead. When Ann's brother George (Jerry Casagrande) arrives fresh from a jailhouse meeting with their father, tensions spiral out of control.

The first act begins fitfully, as a weak supporting cast takes up much stage time. Some of the actors struggle with the naturalness of Miller's dialogue, giving equal weight to trenchant comments and offhand remarks. It sounds artificial. (An exception is sixth-grader Jonas Ventimiglia, who briefly appears as a neighborhood kid.)

Schneider's commanding presence eventually dominates, as he creates an unrefined man who is a creature of instinct rather than cunning.

Things begin to spark when Schneider and Stange go head-to-head, their characters poking at each other's emotional wounds. Later, a repeat of that sparring produces combustible results.

Less combustible is the love story. There's little onstage chemistry between Stange and Kalicki, so we have to accept, rather than experience, the idea of their romance.

Kalicki's Ann is a creature of her passions, and her emotional ardor in her scenes with Stange help him transform Chris into a disillusioned but wiser survivor.

Casagrande's entrance as George kicks the cast into high gear. Casagrande crackles with tension and barely controlled rage, which is the catalyst provoking the Kellers and Ann to rip into each other so secrets come tumbling out.

Building inexorably to the end, the play goes out with a bang that might echo in the audience's mind for a while.

"All My Sons" concludes this weekend, performed by Rockville Little Theatre at the F. Scott Fitzgerald Theatre, 603 Edmonston Dr., Civic Center Park, 8 p.m. tomorrow and Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday. For tickets, call 240-314-8690 or go to the theater box office from 2 to 7 p.m. through Saturday. For information, go tohttp://www.rlt-online.org.