Quote of the Day (Mary McCarthy, on Making 'A Realistic Decision')

“If someone tells you he is going to make 'a realistic decision,' you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad.”—American novelist and essayist Mary McCarthy (1912-1989), “American Realist Playwrights,” in On the Contrary: Articles of Belief, 1946-1961 (1961)

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 soon, 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.

Quote of the Day (Louisa May Alcott, on Volunteering as a Civil War Nurse)

“The sight of several stretchers, each with its legless, armless, or desperately wounded occupant, entering my ward, admonished me that I was there to work, not to wonder or weep; so I corked up my feelings, and returned to the path of duty, which was rather ‘a hard road to travel’ just then. The house had been a hotel before hospitals were needed, and many of the doors still bore their old names; some not so inappropriate as might be imagined, for my ward was in truth a ball-room, if gun-shot wounds could christen it. Forty beds were prepared, many already tenanted by tired men who fell down anywhere, and drowsed till the smell of food roused them. Round the great stove was gathered the dreariest group I ever saw–ragged, gaunt and pale, mud to the knees, with bloody bandages untouched since put on days before; many bundled up in blankets, coats being lost or useless; and all wearing that disheartened look which proclaimed defeat,  more plainly than any telegram of the [General Ambrose] Burnside blunder. I pitied them so much, I dared not speak to them, though, remembering all they had been through since the route at Fredericksburg, I yearned to serve the dreariest of them all.”— American fiction writer—and Civil War volunteer nurse— Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888), “Hospital Sketches,” first published in 1863, reprinted in A Strange Life: Selected Essays, edited by Liz Rosenberg (2023)

The image accompanying this post shows where Little Women author Alcott served as a nurse: United States Hospital (formerly the Union Hotel) in Georgetown. Though her service only amounted to several weeks starting in December 1862, she became in her way as much of a casualty of the conflict as the men she tended.

Bad ventilation, unhealthy food, and 12-hour shifts undermined her health, as did the medication she was given: calomel, which we now know was a poisonous mercury. According to Rachel Williams’ February 2016 blog post for the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, the writer “was never fully well thereafter.”

Memorial Day originated following the Civil War as a communal remembrance for those who fell during that conflict. Today is an appropriate time to recall not only the sacrifice of those who suffered and perished in these and other American wars, but the nurses like Alcott who endured their own traumas in tending to them.

Photo of the Day: ‘Last Stop USA,’ John F. Kennedy Memorial Park, Piermont NY

“GI Joe,” the waving soldier in this statue in upstate New York’s Rockland County, represented a common figure in World War II: the 1.5 million GIs who, after training at Camp Shank in nearby Orangeburg, would embark from Piermont Pier for the European theater.

Though a half million disembarked at the conclusion of the conflict, all too many others never made it home. It is they, as well as all the others who perished in American wars, that we remember and honor today—and pray that their supreme sacrifice may never be repeated.

Photo of the Day: 7 Gifts of the Holy Spirit, Pentecost, St. Cecilia Church, Englewood NJ

A number of people, including myself, lined up after morning Mass on Pentecost Sunday in front of this display at my longtime spiritual home, St. Cecilia Roman Catholic Church of Englewood, NJ. 

The white tags here, in English and Spanish, list the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit” understanding, wisdom, knowledge, counsel, fortitude, piety, and fear of the Lord.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Acts of the Apostles, on the First Pentecost)

“When the day of Pentecost had come,
  they were all together in one place.
And suddenly from heaven there came
  a sound like the rush of a violent wind,
  and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. 3
Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them,
  and a tongue rested on each of them.
All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit
  and began to speak in other languages,
  as the Spirit gave them ability.”—Acts 2: 1-4 (New Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition)

The image accompanying this post, Pentecost, was created in 1545 by the Venetian Renaissance painter Titian (c. 1485–1576)

This Day in Theater History (Henrik Ibsen, Playwright-Provocateur, Dies)

May 23, 1906—Characteristically exclaiming Tvertimod! (On the contrary!”), playwright Henrik Ibsen, who influenced the international theater scene by overturning expectations and confronting audiences with controversial subject matter and greater realism, died in Oslo, Norway, at age 78 following a series of debilitating strokes.

In 25 plays written over nearly a half century, Ibsen moved from historical and/or verse dramas to challenging contemporary tragedies shot through with verisimilitude, psychological insights and symbolism.

Carefully studying the works of Shakespeare in his long initial theatrical apprenticeship, he ultimately was exceeded only by The Bard as the most performed playwright in the world.

 His work influenced such later playwrights as August Strindberg, Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, Eugene O’Neill, Clifford Odets, and, perhaps most powerfully, George Bernard Shaw, whose essay “The Quintessence of Ibsenism" expounded his importance as a dramatist of ideas.

In his youth Ibsen was a political radical, and in the plays of his maturity he was unafraid to embrace iconoclasm.

In A Doll’s House (1879), he dared to show a housewife willing to leave not just her husband but her children in making a bid for independence.

As if in answer to those who protested that decision, he outraged public opinion even more by presenting in Ghosts (1881) a wife who stayed with her husband and suffered the consequences: a son suffering from syphilis, which she believes he inherited from his philandering father.

When that predictably brought down on him a storm of criticism, he responded with An Enemy of the People (1882), which displayed contempt for representative democracy (“What is the majority? The ignorant mob. Intelligence is always to be found in the minority”).

Paradoxically, this nonconforming playwright grounded much of his work in what would have seemed familiar to audiences of his time: the well-made play featuring plot exposition (often with long-concealed secrets) and clear denouements.

I wonder if those traditional elements may account for why so many performances of his plays stateside go beyond normal translations into English to more freewheeling adaptations meant to recreate the sense of shock experienced by his own Victorian audiences.

In the case of A Doll’s House, for instance, Ingmar Bergman and Amy Herzog, among others, have trimmed the text and even eliminated characters. 

Herzog and Miller, understandably unnerved by the advocacy of eugenics in An Enemy of the People, jettisoned the concept, but in the process downplayed the satire that even took in the play’s hero, Dr. Thomas Stockmann.

Even when playwrights have delivered adaptations with less stilted dialogue that retain the plots, they can be undermined by wayward directors. Ivo van Hove, working with Christopher Hampton’s serviceable 2004 adaptation of Hedda Gabler, undercut it b subjecting his lead, Elizabeth Marvel, to a tomato dousing.