Award-winning actors Annette Bening and Tracy Letts return to Broadway in the play that launched Arthur Miller as the moral voice of the American Theater. In the aftermath of WWII, the Keller family struggles to stay intact and to fight for their future when a long-hidden secret threatens to emerge - forcing them to reckon with greed, denial, repentance, and post-war disenchantment across generations.
O'Brien's production includes actors of color in important roles. Hampton Fluker plays George and Chinasa Ogbuagu plays Sue Bayliss, a neighbor with sharp opinions on the Keller family's self-deceiving ways. The casting, neither colorblind nor thematic, is part of a theatrical tradition that has become more or less standard. If the company seems unsettled, the issue isn't race but style. O'Brien's ensemble mixes realism with contemporary classicism in a catch-as-catch-can way. It's the acting equivalent of a mixed salad.
Aplay about the rancid heart of the American dream, Arthur Miller's early tragedy, All My Sons, is rebirthed on Broadway, looking like it never left. Thrillingly acted - with performances that threaten, tantalizingly, to go over the top, but stop just short - Jack O'Brien's production for the Roundabout is a vigorous anatomy lesson, a show about how guilt and transgression can rot a family from the inside, spoiling everything they touch.
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