Avenging Fury ALL MY SONS

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

The opening moments of Arthur Miller's first great play sketch a leafy backyard world as lazily enticing, and as deceptive, as the small-town dream that unfolds in the 1986 film Blue Velvet. As these neighbors in shirt sleeves slowly survey the morning, meander through a newspaper, savor a cigar, audience members cannot help longing to live in this clapboard paradise. . Until, that is, they find out what it is really like. The corruption beneath the surface in Blue Velvet is trendily psychosexual. In All My Sons it is economic and political. At the root of the play's evil is the tribal impulse that allows a man to think only of himself and his family rather than his duties as a citizen of the world. When a machine-shop owner whose patching over of defective cylinder heads sent 21 pilots to their deaths voices the repentant opinion that they were "all my sons," this simple compassion seems to him earthshakingly new.

All My Sons has widely been regarded as dated. But this year it has enjoyed two exceptional revivals, a PBS production starring James Whitmore and a staging by New Haven's Long Wharf Theater that opened on Broadway last week. Both demonstrate that it is a timeless story of self-delusion. The Broadway version, directed by Arvin Brown, evokes an America struggling to believe in itself. At center stage are an old hand, Richard Kiley, as the machine-shop boss, and a stunning newcomer, Jamey Sheridan, as the son who has always sort of known about, but never allowed himself to acknowledge, his father's crime. They share an easy masculinity, a love of argument, a trust more primal than mutual understanding. Their collisions are brutal. At his best Miller has been an avenging fury, and this All My Sons is Miller at his best. W.A.H. III