ALL MY SONS
Vietnam was a long war, and its effects were slow to manifest themselves. But World War II passed swiftly and finished abruptly, leaving its supporters shaken and disoriented, wondering what had happened to them. The fervency with which Americans donned the trappings of normalcy during the 50s–marriage, family, home, cars–reflected the pace of the adrenaline-fueled call to arms.
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Joe Keller’s family is wearing just those trappings in the lazy August of 1947, the setting of All My Sons. Keller paterfamilias has made a tidy profit during the war manufacturing aircraft parts for the U.S. air forces (the Air Force wasn’t a unified body until after the war), and he hopes to pass his thriving business on to his younger son, Chris. Of course, there was that ruckus over a load of defective engine parts that resulted in the death of 21 P-40 pilots, but Joe was acquitted at trial when it was proven that his partner, not he, had given the final approval to ship the damaged products. There is also the matter of his elder son, Larry, missing in action for three and a half years. Everyone is certain of Larry’s fate except his mother, who clings to her belief that her son is alive somewhere.
With no variations in delivery, the actors race through their lines with hardly a pause for inflection or reflection. Details that could orient us to the period are barely brushed in passing (if we don’t know what a P-40 is or remember a time when a pilot-in-training could fly over his own house and be recognized in the cockpit, the actors don’t succeed in making us understand). Lyrical or didactic passages requiring huge amounts of subtextual interpretation in order to sound like natural speech are rattled off like oral teletype. (In light of the usually fine and competent work done by Raven Theatre, one looks for some outside reason for this aberrant performance style–could it have been the noisy air conditioner, the rowdy audience, or opening night jitters?)
