All My Sons
In this play, we find ourselves looking in on two families torn apart by the war in a specific way. Joe Keller runs a machine factory that was refitted to build airplane parts during the war. The factory came under fire when a shipment of faulty parts that led to at least 29 deaths of airmen. Consequent of that Joe Keller was tried but exonerated when a second in command took the fall. The general belief is that Joe was innocent and the fallguy legitimately was responsible. Also consequent to this is that Joe’s son Larry is a pilot who went missing late in the war. The family partially holds out hope that Larry is alive somewhere and will return, but Joe’s other son, and the imprisoned second in command’s daughter do not hold out that hope. Ann is in love with this other son, which wouldn’t be an issue if she weren’t involved with Larry before his disappearance.
The central conflict of the play is about the two lovers trying to present their upcoming marriage to the Kellers. This is further complicated by the arrival of Ann’s brother George, who has recently talked to their father in prison and no longer buys the party line that Joe Keller is innocent of the deaths of the airmen. The other looming presence is the question over whether the parts failure might have led to Larry’s death.
The play feels like a very choice role in a couple of ways and clearly speaks to the uncomfortableness with American mythology about the war.
The Price
In this play, we begin with a middle aged man looking over his parents’ belongings after their death and having to find an assessor to either give him a price for the total value of the lot or make on offer to take it off his hands. The lot is full of older furniture pieces and sentimental pieces. Both of these elements create some issues in the future once a number is named and considered.
He hires an assessor, who arrives, and who ends up being a much older man than expected. This man explains that he’s interested in the job even though he’s retired so they proceed. It becomes clear that the appraiser is not thrilled to give the number when he begins to look over everything. We don’t quite know the tension yet, but given the sentimentality and later, the financial need of the son, we begin to understand his reticence.
He gives a number, and the number is significantly less than expected. He carefully explains why he’s not cheating or underselling, but that the lot is old and will be hard to off-load. He explains that he can give a bigger appraisal but he can’t offer to buy at that number. So a choice is needed.
Arriving soon after this moment is the son’s wife, and his estranged older brother. What we come to learn is that the older brother left the family, and the younger brother felt like he was responsible for his father, and this led him to drop out of college and become a police officer. The brothers begin to sort out their issues, and the money comes up. The older brother offers to buy the lot, using a very high appraisal number in order to use it as a write-off. It becomes clear that taxes might not be the only thing he’s looking to write off.
The Ride Down St Morgan
At some point in this play, and this is a later Miller play from the early 1990s, that she is reminded of an Isaac Bashevis Singer quote when someone asked him why her husband might have left her. He said: “Maybe he wanted another _____” and she was shocked, but now she gets it.
The setup for this play is that a middle-aged man who works in advertising is driving in the country when he has a car accident and lands in the hospital. As he’s first coming to, he thinks he’s hallucinating when the nurse tells him his wife and daughter are there. The issue is that they shouldn’t have driven so far away to see him, because, and here’s the rub, his other wife is there and much closer.
He begins to realize that his accident will cause the two halves of his life to collide in a huge way. He’s had two wives for a while now, not actually being legally married to one, having told her that he was divorced, and despite their having a son together, that one needs to end.
It’s interesting of course that one of the wives thinks of the IB Singer quote, because of course one of his more famous novels involves a man with 2-3 wives by the end of the novel.
After the Fall
This play was written and produced just a couple of years after Marilyn Monroe died. It’s not entirely about her, but one of the major characters in the play is directly modeled off of her, and you’d be unsurprised to learn that the portrayal could be more sympathetic than it is. The whole of the play involves a 40 year old man who is beginning to question certain parts of his life. His first marriage is clearly coming to some kind of end and he’s processing that. But also he’s been asked recently to testify on behalf of an old friend who has recently been called in front of HUAC and he’s waffling about whether or not feelings he once felt should compel his actions now, given the cost.
The second half of the play involves him meeting a young from his office’s secretarial pool, almost sleeping with her, realizing his wife is not going to give him much credit for that, and then ultimately marrying her after his divorce. She wants to be a singer, and in his capacity a lawyer, he looks to guide her career.
Another throughline in the play is a trip to Auschwitz after the war and a woman he met there who is a kind of looming presence in his other relationships.
Incident at Vichy
As the title indicates, this play takes place in France in the early days of Nazi occupation. A group of men have been brought into a local jailhouse in order to be questioned. They are not entirely sure why, and even though they have heard rumors, they are still just rumors. The men come from many different backgrounds, walks of life, and histories. As they sort things out, one by one of them gets called into question. They don’t return, which of course sets off their worst imaginative impulses.
Along with them, they begin to slowly rope in the local police officer, who is acting under orders to bring the men together, but not with larger mission in question.
The Man with all the Luck
Miller’s first play, which was a flop, but is an interesting play. It’s also not very Miller like, and perhaps feels like it borrows heavily from someone like Eugene O’Neill. Our play begins at a service station where a group of locals set the scene. The mechanic at the shop, a young golden boy, is planning on finally telling her girlfriend’s father that they are going to get married. Everyone else is dubious. He’s tried this before and it didn’t work out. The other men at the shop include the shop’s owner who wants to introduce the boy to a local big farmer who needs a mechanic for all his farm equipment. The young man’s father is also there, along with his brother, a high school baseball star who is looking to try out for the bigs. When his girlfriend shows up, they plan to go together, but then her father shows up. He confronts the boy, forbids the marriage, and then goes off and dies in a car wreck, freeing them up to be married. Along with this, the boy is asked to fix the rich farmer’s car, and we later find him in the middle of the night struggling to do this, but then a German immigrant who used to work in a car factory and now wants to open a shop shows up and helps him…..and we keep going from there.
The play is about luck, and about always having it. This is played as a kind of sword of Damocles situation, because our golden boy keeps feeling like something bad is around the corner.
The Crucible – 4/5
The Crucible is both a wonderful play that really speaks to the cruelty and wantonness of the witch hunt, and witch hunts that would occur later mirror these same issues. Greed, position, influence, and other human frailties are posed as tenets of faith and religion and then used to imprison and murder people. It’s also a desperate self-serious and almost silly play at times. It’s funny because we constantly read the book with kids, which is good, but the subtlety of some of the events in the book are often lost. You probably won’t be shocked to find that the kids don’t know how to think complexly about the affair between Proctor and Abigail (and I mean the one presented in the play. Again, another issue both kids and adults have is placing the real life terms of the events onto the play and holding the play accountable for what it decided to do differently).