Excellent acting supports family in 'Sons'

When All My Sons, Arthur Miller's first successful play, premiered in 1947, countless college-age Boy-Scouts across our nation must have raised glasses of grape drink in triumph. A new king of earnest melodrama had arrived—someone who was willing to smooth out some of his hero's emotional complexities in order to raise a bold cry for principle and communal identity. Some degenerate urban sophisticates must have been a bit annoyed.

REBECCA ROSENTHAL/YH 'Come on, you usually do it for free!'

Still, even if years of decadence and corruption have aligned your sympathies firmly with the latter group —even if you have never developed a taste for second-rate philosophy—you would be a stale biscuit indeed not to thoroughly enjoy the production of the play currently running at the Off-Broadway Theater Space.

Whether by accident or by design, the venue perfectly fits the play's setting: a spacious suburban backyard. Because the stage is so wide and deep, the blocking remains clear and uncluttered, even in the numerous scenes with four or five characters. In scenes with only two or three characters, the sprawling stage allows the director, Rachel Watson, CC '03, to visually dramatize shifts in sympathy with a broadness that matches Miller's script. Occasionally, this broadness becomes overly melodramatic, especially when characters speed to their marks with suspiciously unnatural alacrity. More often, though, the patterns emerge naturally and gracefully, sometimes with stunning effect. In one scene, father and son drift unnoticeably away from each other as their wife/mother slowly reveals an awful secret. Suddenly, the men find themselves on opposite sides of the stage, and the woman who has destroyed their relationship stands in the middle, separating them.

As much as such scenes owe their power to the director's skill, they also demand excellent acting to make them effective. Fortunately, none of the actors disappoint, at least not at crucial moments. Nicholas Tucci, SY '04, gives a remarkable performance as Joe Keller, the family patriarch and a successful self-made businessman. Tucci captures the mixture of insecurity and defiant pride that defines Joe's interactions with his more sophisticated, better-educated son. When Joe's dark past begins to surface, Tucci succeeds in making him a more sympathetic character than Miller's script seems to allow, adding to the moral complexity of the play's conclusion.

To praise Tucci's performance is not to imply that the other performances are anything less than satisfying. It is only to imply that they are not as consistently convincing, that Tucci falters less often in his pacing, his gestures, the volume of his voice, or even his breathing. Randolph Frazier, SM '03, whose performance as George, the son of Joe's old enemy, is second only to Tucci's, moves in his first scene with an abruptness more evocative of determination than fury, though his character is almost uncontrollably angry. Grace Kuckro, BK '03, who plays Ann, a young woman who plans to marry Joe's son, captures the tones of her character's lines well but sometimes exaggerates them, so that her transitions are excessively jarring, and the character appears more emotionally unstable than the script warrants. And Benjamin Woodlock, ES '02, in his role as Joe's son Chris Keller, has trouble overcoming Tucci's presence, so that even as he advances on Joe during a confronation, he looks markedly less dangerous than his ostensibly frightened father.

These points are minor, though, and serve mainly to show how good the acting is overall. Like the costumes, which seemed to be at odds with the period—would a young businessman in the late 1940's really have worn his shirt untucked?—the faults of this production are so inconspicuous and relatively unimportant that they detract very little from the show.

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