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Oldcastle takes huge step forward
By: Ralph Hammann - October 14th, 2004
“All My Sons”
By Arthur Miller
Directed by Eric Peterson
Oldcastle Theatre Company
Bennington, Vt., through Oct. 17
For a year of increased political awareness, the region’s 2004 theater season offered few productions that dealt significantly with current socio-political concerns. Berkshire Theatre Festival’s “Heartbreak House” and Williamstown Theatre Festival’s “Design for Living” were notable exceptions of plays that resonated powerfully with issues of the day. With its season-closer, “All My Sons,”
Oldcastle makes a distinguished entry into this realm of conscience-driven theater.
Set just after the end of World War 2, Miller’s potent classic about war-profiteering greed and its terrible aftermath remains eerily timely. Joe Keller is an industrialist whose factory manufactured faulty engine blocks that were used in aircraft that claimed the lives of American airmen fighting the war. Exonerated from charges that he was responsible, Joe has returned to his home, where he lives in relative peace and freedom from the guilt. The wrongdoing was attributed to his partner, who has been imprisoned and has earned the disgust of his grown children, Anne and George.
Keller’s precarious peace is interrupted one fateful day, when his son, Chris, announces plans to marry Anne, who was previously engaged to Chris’ brother, Larry, a World War II pilot who is presumed dead by all but his mother, Kate. Anne’s arrival at the Keller homestead sets in motion the gears of an absorbing drama that marks Miller’s first foray into modern tragedy.
While Oldcastle does well enough with the drama, it doesn’t do much more than flirt with the tragic elements.
Lacking sufficient weight to capture the darker side of Joe Keller, Phillip Lance does play the role with conviction and draws an earnest portrait of an ordinary man who is content to be master of his well-groomed backyard. When forced to grapple with larger issues, Lance’s Joe suffers believably but not cathartically. He seems more like a hapless Chekhovian aristocrat than a struggling Sophoclean king.
In this production, more emphasis seems to be given the Kate of Wendy Barrie-Wilson, an actress who tends to dominate the stage but who doesn’t have enough nuance to illuminate it with compelling coloration. Barrie-Wilson offers a passionate portrayal, but it is one that is sometimes marred by indicating emotions more than living them. Where she should hide information, she makes a show of the concealment.
Although he may ultimately be to light for the role’s darkening aspects, more persuasive work is contributed by the Chris of Shawn Davis, even if his muscularity and shoulder tattoo are out of keeping with the time period. Lovely and fragile as a peach blossom, Jennifer Kaeppel looks as if she could have been plucked from the ’40s. The doe-eyed Kaeppel is a striking Anne, and, like Davis, she is an eminently likeable performer. Both, however, need to go a little further in rending and rendering the play’s pith.
The most intense and sustained work is delivered by Kent Burnham as George; it’s just a pity that costume designer Patti Brundige did not tailor his jacket to more effectively hide the distracting bulge of his “missing” arm.
Contributing much to the play’s initial atmosphere of innocence are Doug Ryan and Sophia Garder, whose spontaneity again refreshes.
Also compelling is Richard Howe’s set, one of the best ever at OTC. Howe has boldly designed a bucolic backyard with hints of unrest and danger. An angled bench on a hexagonal dais cleverly suggests a throne that is entirely appropriate to our first visions of Joe as the benevolent ruler of his piece of the land.
It is impossible to regard any version of this play after the magnificent one directed by Barry Edelstein on WTF’s Nikos Stage. While that production released the full force of tragedy that underlies Miller’s work, Peterson’s production comes across more as a serious melodrama that is fairly engrossing but not quite staggering and cataclysmic. Such productions are rare, however, and Peterson’s will suffice as a distinct step in the right direction for his theater company that has been too long in left field.
Ralph Hammann is The Advocate’s chief theater critic. |
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