All My Sons is a three-act play written in 1946 by Arthur Miller. It opened on Broadway at the Coronet Theatre in New York city on January 29, 1947, closed
on November 8, 1947, and ran for 328 performances. The
play was directed by Elia Kazan (to whom it is dedicated), produced by Elia Kazan
and Harold Clurman, and won the New York Drama Critics’
Circle Award. Kazan and Harold Clurman, and won the New York
Drama Critics’
Circle Award. It starred Ed Begley, Beth Merrill, Arthur Kennedy, and Karl Malden and won both the Tony Award for Best Author and the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play. The play was adapted for films in 1948
and 1987.
It
was premiered in Coronet Theatre[The Eugene
O’Neill Theatre, previously the Forrest Theatre and the Coronet Theatre, is a Broadway theater at 230 West 49th
Street in the Theater
District of Midtown Manhattan in New York City]. New York City, January 29, 1947. It was set at The Kellers’ yard in late August 1946.
Miller wrote All My Sons after his first play The Man Who
Had All the Luck[It is a play by Arthur Miller, his second major play (after No Villain). The Man Who
Had All the Luck follows protagonist David Beeves’
existential exploration into the enigmatic question of how fate and the human
will interact with each other.] failed on Broadway,
lasting only four performances.
All My Sons is based upon a true story, which Miller’s then-mother-in-law pointed out in an Ohio newspaper. The news story described how in 1941–43 the Wright
Aeronautical Corporation[The Curtiss-Wright
Corporation is a manufacturer and services provider
headquartered in Davidson, North Carolina, with factories and operations in and outside the United States. Created in 1929 from the consolidation of Curtiss,
Wright, and various supplier companies, the company
was immediately the country’s largest aviation firm and built more than
142,000 aircraft engines for the U.S. military during World War II.] based in Ohio had conspired with army inspection officers to approve
defective aircraft engines destined for military use.
Harry Truman’s[Harry S. Truman (May 8, 1884 – December 26, 1972) was the 33rd president of the
United States, serving from 1945 to 1953. A member of the Democratic
Party, he previously served as a United States senator from Missouri from 1935 to 1945 and briefly
as the 34th vice president in 1945 under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Assuming the presidency after Roosevelt’s
death, Truman implemented the Marshall
Plan in the wake of World War II to rebuild the economy of Western Europe and
established both the Truman Doctrine and NATO to contain the expansion of Soviet communism.] congressional investigative board after several Wright
aircraft assembly workers informed on the company. In 1944,
three Army Air Force officers,
Lt. Col. Frank C. Greulich, Major Walter A. Ryan, and Major William Bruckmann were
relieved of duty and later convicted of neglect of duty.
Henrik Ibsen’s influence on Miller is
evidenced from the Ibsen play The Wild Duck[The Wild Duck, It
focuses on the Ekdal family, whose fragile peace is shattered by Gregers
Werle, an idealist who insists on exposing hidden
truths, leading to tragic consequences. The play was written in a realistic
style, but literary scholars have pointed out the play’s kinship with
symbolism.], from where Miller took the idea of two partners in a business
where one is forced to take moral and legal responsibility for the other.
The
criticism of the American Dream[The American Dream is
the national ethos of the United States, that every person has
the freedom and opportunity to succeed and attain a better life. The phrase was
popularized by James Truslow Adams, an American
writer and historian, his three-volume history of New England is well regarded by scholars. He popularized the phrase “American
Dream” in his 1931 book The Epic of
America. during the Great Depression in 1931. The tenets of the American Dream originate from the Declaration of Independence, which
states that “all men are created equal”,
and have an inalienable right to “life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness". Evidence indicates that in recent
decades social mobility in the United States has
declined, Social mobility is lower in the US than in many European countries,
especially the Nordic countries.], which lies at the heart of All My Sons, was one reason why Miller was called to appear before the House Un-American
Activities Committee[Un-American
Activities (HCUA), popularly the House Un-American Activities
Committee (HUAC), was an investigative committee of the United States
House of Representatives, created in 1938 to investigate
alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens,
public employees, and those organizations suspected of having communist ties.
It became a standing (permanent) committee in 1946, and from 1969
onwards it was known as the House Committee on Internal Security. When the House abolished the committee in 1975, its functions
were transferred to the House Judiciary Committee.
during the 1950s, when America was gripped by anti-communist sentiment. Miller sent a copy of the play to Elia Kazan who
directed the original stage version of All My Sons.
Kazan was a former member of the Communist Party who shared Miller’s left-wing views. However, their relationship
was destroyed when Kazan gave names of suspected Communists to the House
Un-American Activities Committee during the Red Scare (McCarthyism, also known as the Second Red Scare, was the political repression and
persecution of left-wing individuals and a campaign spreading fear of communist
and Soviet influence on American
institutions and of Soviet espionage in the United States during the late 1940s through the 1950s. After the mid-1950s, U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy, who
had spearheaded the campaign, gradually lost his public popularity and
credibility after several of his accusations were found to be false. The term McCarthyism is in the modern day, outdated. What became known as the McCarthy era began before McCarthy’s rise to national
fame. Alliance with the Soviet Union,
and with many remembering the First Red Scare, President Harry S. Truman signed an executive
order in 1947 to screen federal employees for possible association with
organizations deemed “totalitarian, fascist, communist, or subversive.”].
Miller was shaped by the Great Depression, which brought financial ruin onto his father, a small manufacturer,
and demonstrated to the young Miller the
insecurity of modern existence. He is best known for Death of a
Salesman (1949). All My Sons (1947; film 1948), a drama about a manufacturer of faulty
war materials that strongly reflects the influence of Henrik Ibsen, was his first important play. It won Miller a Tony Award, and it was his first major collaboration
with the director Elia Kazan, who also won a Tony.
Miller’s next play, Death of a Salesman, became one of the most famous American plays of its period. It is the
tragedy of Willy Loman, a man destroyed by false values that are in
large part the values of his society. For Miller, it was important to place “the common man” at the centre of a tragedy. As he wrote in 1949 : The quality
in such plays [i.e., tragedies] that does shake us…derives from the underlying
fear of being displaced, the disaster inherent in being torn away from our
chosen image of what and who we are in this world. Among us today this fear is
as strong, and perhaps stronger, than it ever was. In fact, it is the common man
who knows this fear best. His father lost his business in the Depression and the family was forced to move to a smaller home in Brooklyn. His 1949 ‘Death of a Salesman’ won the Pulitzer Prize and is considered to be
his most successful play.
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