Review: The NT Live Production of Arthur Miller’s ‘All My Sons,’ at the Barrymore Film Center, Fort Lee NJ

Under the NT Live banner, Britain’s National Theatre has made available live productions to cinemas around the world. Last year, a movie house not far from me, the Barrymore Film Center in Fort Lee NJ, showed a startling production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth starring Ralph Fiennes and Indira Varma. As I am unlikely to visit the UK any time in the near future, I hoped for another such production soon.

It came a few days ago, as NT Live presented the play that started Arthur Miller in 1946 on his career as the bard of modern age tragedy: All My Sons.

Originally, the Barrymore had promoted a 2019 NT Live production starring Bill Pullman and Sally Field. I’m not sure why, but the theater ended up showing one from the 2025-26 season at Wyndham’s Theatre in London’s West End, with Bryan Cranston and Marianne Jean-Baptist in the same roles.

With all due respect to Pullman and Field, it’s hard to imagine how they could equal, let alone surpass, the two more recent leads for shattering impact.

Not all of director Ivo van Hove’s attempts to bring freshness to taken-for-granted classics are well advised, as I noted over the weekend about how he had (mis)handled Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. 

As I began watching this performance, I wondered how the elements of this stage design—a large tree, fallen overnight; an unadorned house front; a lit overhead circular portal—would aid or detract from this viewing experience.

But his stripped-down production of Miller’s first Broadway success enables contemporary audiences to focus on his talented performers, in a way that theatergoers more than three-quarters of a century ago, fresh from reading about war profiteers and experiencing losses in the struggle against totalitarianism, were unlikely to have done.

For me, the revelation here was Marianne Jean-Baptiste, whom I had only seen previously in her Oscar-nominated turn in Secrets and Lies. As Kate Keller, she seems to find untapped reserves of fury and sorrow as a wife and mother unable to deal with the realizations that the crime of her munitions-manufacturer husband and the wartime disappearance of her beloved older son Larry might be linked in some way.

Though Bryan Cranston is familiar to TV viewers stateside from the long-running series Breaking Bad and Malcolm in the Middle, he shows further evidence here that the versatility he displayed onstage in Tony-winning roles in Network and All the Way was no fluke.

He masterfully strips away the thin membrane of respectability surrounding his protagonist, Joe Keller: Seemingly cleared of charges of having okayed a shipment of defective parts leading to the deaths of 21 pilots, he suddenly finds himself facing the unwelcome appearance on his doorstep of the two children of the business partner on whom he laid responsibility for the transgression.

The English actress-playwright Hayley Squires brings the requisite amount of sweetness and steel as Larry’s fiancee, Ann Deever, who, as the first step in turning the page with an engagement to the Kellers’ younger son Chris, must find a way to get Kate to stop denying that Larry is dead. 

And Tom Glynn-Carney is sullen and fierce as Ann’s brother George, who confronts the Kellers with the truth they can no longer avoid.

In some ways, Paapa Essiedu has the trickiest role as Chris, the surviving son at sea: drawn to but bashful about courting Ann, chafing at inheriting from his father a business that leaves him uninspired (“If I have to grub for money all day long at least at evening I want it beautiful”), and loving his father while struggling with the vague sense that something is wrong with the parent. He brings fire to his late moment of revelation and resolution.

The first in a quartet of Miller tragedies (followed by Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and A View From the Bridge) that traced American socio-political dysfunction to a father’s failure to live up to a moral code, All My Sons has been served well by this production that highlights why we are still dealing with the playwright’s theme of corporate irresponsibility and the remorseless pressures of capitalism.

The Barrymore has also done well by bringing it to a select but appreciative audience. I look forward to its NT Live production next month: John Millington Synge’s tragicomedy of Irish country life, The Playboy of the Western World.

Theater Review: Arthur Miller’s ‘The Price,’ From the Roundabout Theatre Co.

Even though it closed a week ago at the American Airlines Theatre, I couldn’t let this season pass without taking note of the Roundabout Theatre Company revival of the 1968 drama The Price. It can hardly be said that Arthur Miller has lacked defenders in the way that, for instance, his contemporary William Inge has. 

But this particular piece—less rhetorical or melodramatic than the likes of Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, A View From the Bridge, or All My Sons—is less showy and undeservedly overlooked.

And so it might have been here, too, except that it gave a ripe, albeit supporting, role to Danny DeVito. Here, the 72-year-old actor got to play a character nearly two decades his senior—the shrewd Russian-Jewish furniture dealer Gregory Solomon, called on to assess the value of materials left in a Manhattan brownstone by the father of two long-estranged brothers, policeman Victor Franz and the considerably wealthier surgeon Walter Franz.

Using the great timing he wielded for years on the TV series Taxi and films like Twins and Throw Mama From the Train, DeVito took with relish to perhaps the only consistently comic character created by Miller in his six-decade career as a playwright. It was a joy to hear him chew over lines like “Anything Spanish-Jacobean, you’ll sell quicker a case of tuberculosis.” For his first appearance on the Great White Way, the veteran character actor was rewarded with Tony and Drama Desk nominations this year for Best Featured Actor.

But, no matter how much he juiced up the proceedings, DeVito was hardly the only reason to watch The Price. In its way, the drama vents, with little of the artifice that marks some of his earlier plays, themes that long consumed Miller: the devastating long-term damage to American psyches left by the Great Depression; the widening ripple effects of family conflict; and the impact of false values on those who hold them. In the hands of Mark Ruffalo, Tony Shalhoub and Jessica Hecht, these concepts were embodied with deep fidelity to dramatic realism.

The play’s title, we realize, with increasing certainty in Act II, refers to not just the total that Solomon might pay for the furniture after intensive bargaining, but also to the cost of the life choices made by the Franz brothers when the Depression undercuts the family’s affluence. Both possessed a talent for science, but Victor (played by Ruffalo) decided to support a father too devastated to work anymore, while Walter (Shalhoub) went to college and became a successful surgeon. The brothers circle each other, in a wary attempt at reconciliation after 16 years, as it becomes increasingly apparent that they will have to work through a lifetime of secrets, lies and illusions. 

(As Victor’s wife Esther, Hecht may have the trickiest role of all: while her character’s desire for a better life is pushing her husband in a certain direction, she also serves as the play’s most decisively moved character and, therefore, as a stand-in for the audience.)

Shalhoub had an easier time with the dialogue than Ruffalo, as Walter is, by virtue of his wealth and years spent in psychoanalysis, more sophisticated and open about his feelings than Victor. But Miller was careful, unlike much of his other, more didactic work, not to give either brother a real upper hand, and I’m sure that many audience members left the theater far more aware of their own family quarrels that are equally uneasy to unknot.

The Price deserves a higher place in the Miller canon. After this revival—exquisitely well-crafted by director Terry Kinney—it is likely to receive it.

Quote of the Day (Arthur Miller, on Memory)

''Memory keeps folding in upon itself like geologic layers of rock, the deeper strata sometimes appearing on top before they slope downward into the depths again.''—Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life (1987)

Photograph of the American playwright Arthur Miller (1915-2005) from the U.S. State Department.

Quote of the Day (Arthur Miller, on How Fear Is Like Love)

“Fear, like love, is difficult to explain after it has subsided, probably because it draws away the veils of illusion as it disappears.”—Arthur Miller, "The Night Edward Murrow Struck Back," Esquire, December 1983

Photograph of the American playwright Arthur Miller (1915-2005) from the U.S. State Department.

This Day in Theater History (William Inge, Pulitzer-Winning Dramatist, Born)

May 3, 1913—William Inge was born in Independence, Kansas, the youngest of five children in a family that would give rise to his prize-winning plays and screenplays involving repression, marital incompatibility, and quiet desperation in the Midwest.

As I entered my teenage years, I embarked on a spree of reading (not attending—back then, I was in no position to pay for this obsession) plays. I became aware that Inge was considered, along with Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, part of a great triumvirate of postwar American dramatists. It came as a shock, then, when I heard the news in 1973 that he had taken his own life.

It had seemed so different in the spring of 1962, when the playwright had seen his four consecutive Broadway successes of the Fifties—Come Back, Little Sheba, Picnic, Bus Stop, and Dark at the Top of the Stairs—adapted into equally notable films, and an original screenplay, for Splendor in the Grass, had netted him an Oscar to go with the Pulitzer he had achieved for Picnic.

Since then, it has become all too plain to me why Inge was driven to despair a decade later: the popular and critical failure of his more recent plays; an inability to chart a new direction as a novelist; his homosexual orientation, at a time when there was much less acceptance of it; and alcoholism.(When it premiered in 1950, Come Back, Little Sheba was one of the first Broadway plays to deal with the disease so extensively and searingly.)

What I still don’t understand, though, is the continuing slippage of the reputation, and even memory, of his plays. Rest assured that the celebration of the centennial of Inge’s birth will be decidedly less widespread than that a few years ago for Williams (who, incidentally, championed his work as a neophyte), or even for Terrence Rattigan, who, though a Briton, paralleled Inge in his rise and fall.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Like Inge, Williams and Miller suffered through critical neglect in the 1960s. The reputations of the latter two, however, revived, even if what they wrote in their remaining years never really equaled what they produced at their youthful peaks.

In the last three decades, the frankness with which Williams addressed homosexuality has been more generally accepted. Even plays written during his decline, such as The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, have been staged once again, now seen as a continuation of his general themes. As for Miller, continuing relevance has been found in Death of a Salesman (particularly during the recent economic malaise) and The Crucible (the guilt-by-association theme was less remarked upon in the late Nineties than the middle-aged protagonist’s public shaming as a result of involvement with a Lewinsky-like younger woman). 

In his history of the Broadway drama in the Forties and Fifties, All That Glittered, Ethan Mordden offered up one means by which Inge's most autobiographical play, Dark at the Top of the Stairs, might have, along with Patrick Dennis' considerably more lighthearted Auntie Mame,  continuing meaning for our time: the message that "the unconventional family cell might succeed and the conventional one fail."

It has been said that Inge never really got beyond one or two themes, but how many writers really do? Inge might have tried to get away from his small town—first as a drama and music critic in St. Louis, then as a playwright and screenwriter in New York—but he came to realize that his best material lay back in the heartland—a realization that had also struck the novelist Willa Cather several decades before, under similar circumstances.

The Roundabout Theatre Co. mounted a fine revival of Picnic earlier this year (see my review here), and Come Back, Little Sheba was restaged several years ago with S. Epatha Merkerson of Law and Order in the role that Shirley Booth played so magnificently on stage and screen. But if Inge's reputation is to undergo a serious reevaluation, he will, once again, have to attract continued attention of top-notch actors and directors ready to rediscover him, as Jason Robards and Jose Quintero did with Eugene O’Neill starting with their reworking of The Iceman Cometh--and the way Inge himself attracted talents such as directors Elia Kazan and Joshua Logan, and actress Kim Stanley (who gave a career-making performance as the tomboy kid sister in Picnic).

Theater Review: ‘Enemy of the People,’ at the Manhattan Theatre Club

There are two really good reasons why fans of good theater should make their way to the Manhattan Theater Club (MTC) for its new adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 play, An Enemy of the People. The first is the opportunity to see a rarely performed play by this 19^th-century master of realistic drama in something akin to the spirit in which it was written. The second is the chance to see—for the umpteenth time on a New York stage—an actor whose underemployment on TV and film has made him the darling of Gotham theater aficionados: Boyd Gaines.

An Enemy of the People might be my favorite Ibsen play, but in three decades of theatergoing I had never seen it performed until the preview performance by the MTC a couple of weeks ago.  Directors have taken to other plays by the Scandinavian playwright, seeing in them feminist rallying cries (A Doll’s House), early warnings about religious extremism and untruths about sexually transmitted diseases (Ghosts), dissections of capitalism (John Gabriel Borkman), or even vehicles for exploring bipolar disorders (Hedda Gabbler).

You’d think that Ibsen’s dramedy about a doctor’s environmental crusade would be made to order for today’s theater world. But the content has erected powerful obstacles.

For those who want their protagonists one-dimensionally heroic, Lillian Hellman’s stage manifestos are more congenial than Ibsen’s complex work that satirizes its hero when it is not attacking the townspeople who make him an outcast. And Dr. Thomas Stockmann’s scathing criticism of “the damned, solid, liberal majority”—backed by the playwright’s problematic belief in a superior mind produced by a Darwinian survival of the fittest—might as well be Kryptonite for today's theater professionals.

When people have had the chance to watch the play over the years, there’s a good chance that it was Arthur Miller’s 1950 adaptation, not Ibsen’s version. No matter what the playwright’s significant strengths, a willingness to take a point of view seriously before knocking it down was not among them. His version of Enemy of the People is a prime case in point, written at the height of McCarthyism, with Thomas Stockmann analogous to blacklist victims of Miller’s time.

The creator of Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and A View From the Bridge will likely continue to be performed till the end of the lifetime of children now growing up, but the adversaries of his heroes are one-dimensional. He simply could not conceive of the strident dissident that annoys the very people he wants to help. His is a theater of straw men, inspired less by the complexity and good humor of Ibsen and Shaw than giving rise to the self-righteous Aaron Sorkin of The West Wing. What Miller’s Enemy gains in ditching in ditching Ibsen’s diatribes against the leveling influence in democratic societies, he loses in presenting an entirely one-sided argument without psychological dimension.

And so, this production, based on a new adaptation by British playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz, was all the more necessary. Sure, there’s the occasional anachronism (“cash cow”). But with help from director Doug Hughes, we finally have an Enemy of the People close to what the playwright intended.

Consider a short but telling exchange. Dr. Stockmann’s hero-worshipping daughter Petra, marveling at her father’s energy, blurts out that he’s been “working like a maniac” lately. Stockmann’s wife quickly hushes her up. It’s a hint that the doctor’s prosperity as staff physician at the municipal baths has been hard-won not simply because of his diligence, but also because his last medical stint in a rural Norwegian village likely ended in his nervous collapse.

This production is exceptionally well served in its lead, Gaines, who invests Dr. Stockmann with the energy of a mad stalk. This actor, perhaps known to TV viewers as Valerie Bertinelli’s husband on One Day at a Time nearly three decades ago, has graced New York theaters since then with one outstanding performance after another, in the likes of Company, Contact, Pygmalion, and 12 Angry Men, winning four Tony Awards in the process.

The complexity of Dr. Stockmann’s position can be seen here in his relationship to his brother Peter, who, as mayor of the town, is also Thomas’ boss. Prior translations of Ibsen emphasized Peter’s pomposity as much as Thomas’ heedlessness. To be sure, as played here by Richard Thomas (The Waltons’ John-Boy Walton, well into middle age), he is caught up in the perks of his position. But he’s also seriously angered that the sibling he helped rescue from penury now stands opposed to what had promised to be the mayor’s greatest achievement: the baths (advocated originally by the doctor himself, then placed, unbeknownst to him, in a mill that pumps its wastes into the pipes) that once promised to boost their coastal town’s economy.

Where Thomas thinks little of expenditures by either himself or the town, Peter is fixated on keeping both in check; where Thomas is utterly impolitic, Peter is the consummate politico, watching his every word and move. They are on a collision course, ending in a climactic battle just before intermission that is acted by Gaines and Thomas in a manner that heightens the overtones of this Cain-and-Abel relationship.

Hughes stages the town meeting where the tensions between the brothers break out publicly in all its raucousness and irony (the only dissenter in the proceedings—all stacked against the doctor—is the town drunk). It’s an event that leaves Dr. Stockmann perilously alone, but for his family, at curtain time—an appropriate, if subdued, ending to a show that convincingly highlights the enduring predicament of a whistle-blower in a democracy whose majority can be all too easily manipulated by leading citizens into self-destructive choices.