Ithaca College

On Sunday, October 18th, On the Verge presented a staged reading of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons at the 2015 meeting of the Arthur Miller Society at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, NY.  The reading was directed by Claire Gleitman (Professor, department of English), and the cast included faculty members (Greg Bostwick, Kathleen Mulligan, Jennifer Herzog, Theatre; Chris Holmes, English) and students (Dan Wisniewski, Hailee Murphy, Justin Albinder, Adam David, and Fiorella Fernandez).

This cast premiered its production of All My Sons at the Handwerker Gallery at Ithaca College on Thursday, Oct. 8.

All My Sons was Miller’s first serious foray into what he described as “the Greco-Ibsen form.” Like Oedipus Rex and A Doll House, many of Miller’s dramas hinge upon a carefully buried secret which resurfaces like the return of the repressed and threatens to dismantle a carefully cultivated social life. The resulting drama becomes a collision between the public and the private self—or between the person the central character claims to be and the person the unearthed secret suggests he is instead.  In All My Sons, the collision more broadly is between self-interest and social responsibility. The action takes place in the back yard of Joe Keller’s suburban home, which is comfortably secluded from its surroundings by a thick stand of poplars and seems to be a bastion of security in an insecure world. Yet the Kellers’ domain also features “a slender apple tree” which has fallen down, with troubling implications: this Edenic realm is emphatically postlapsarian. The reason, it seems, is a collective abandonment of a collectivist sensibility, which All My Sons suggests has devastating consequences for both the public and the private domains. The play is a vigorous critique of the ruthless self-interest upon which the suburban dream depends.