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Patricia D. Denison All My Sons Competing Contexts and Comparative Scales For over half a century,Arthur Miller’s All My Sons (1947) has served as an exemplary instance of melodramatic plotting and prototypical realistic setting.1 With the action of the play set in Joe Keller’s 1940s suburban backyard, the world “green with sod” is, indeed, a decidedly familiar one (5).2 Here, family secrets, hidden in the past, eventually emerge into the light of the present day, aided by repeated coincidence in a linear plot that produces predictable resolution.When, in the final scene, Joe Keller judges his own terrible “mistake” in the past (28), it is as though the play has presented to a jury one self-evident truth: that the consequences of individual actions extend logically and seamlessly from the local context in which they occurred to the much larger social context that includes all of us. In the onstage world, not until the last act is the evidence finally in on Joe Keller, businessman, and judgments are then made. In the offstage world, from the 1940s to the 2000s, the evidence has long been assumed to be in on Arthur Miller, playwright, and one judgment recurs:“Miller is willy-nilly a moralist—one who believes he knows what sin and evil are.”3 Numerous theatergoers, practitioners, and critics have agreed with this judgment, made in the 1970s by Harold Clurman, codirector of the Group Theatre in the 1930s and producer of All My Sons in the 1940s. For admirers and detractors alike,certainty rather than contingency dominates much of Miller’s work. As Clurman observed, “It is the moral stance in Miller, with its seemingly punitive bent, which causes a certain resistance to his work in some quarters,”4 and such resistance continues, even in the response to Howard Davies’ splendid revival of All My Sons, which opened July 6, 2000, at the National Theatre, London. Most reviewers lavishly praised the production—“superb,”“tremendous,”“a revelation ”5—yet some complained of a blatant “Miller Message” in the play.As Charles Spencer puts it,“‘Will you stop talking like a civics book’ 46 says a character in All My Sons, but Miller, the self-proclaimed ‘impatient moralist,’can’t stop talking like a civics book.”6 Another reviewer grumbled, similarly,that Miller the moralist“lets us know thatAllWill Be Made Clear, and lets us know most ofWhatWill be Made Clear.”7 Such comments need to be taken seriously, as diverse character viewpoints and differing moral perspectives in All My Sons do indeed appear to converge. But what is often overlooked is that in All My Sons character, action, and set repeatedly invoke other, less ordinary, contexts. While foregrounding a familiar context, Miller invites us to consider less familiar contexts such as distant battlefields and invisible cosmologies. In a set supplemented with multicontextual meaning and a dialogue charged with competing values, the local realistic environment is not a final destination but a point of departure for realms in which other values are embedded and from which other perspectives emerge. While discussing in 1989 “the question of what is real, how you measure the real,” Miller refers us back to All My Sons: That play took great pains to create a veritable backyard, and people sitting around having very ordinary conversations—the well-known norms of suburbia . . . . I begin with an equilibrium and something tips that equilibrium and interprets it as a result.8 What tips the equilibrium for audience and characters alike are not just the revelations regarding Joe’s business decision duringWorldWar II, but the information from a variety of sources that affects how we view it. Our challenge is to make sense of the verbal and visual dimensions of a drama that take us through the apparently ordinary to a variety of extraordinary contexts. Our task is to move within and among convergent and divergent perspectives that emerge through the characters and action in this“veritable backyard.”The contexts range from familial to cosmological , from individual to communal, from peacetime to wartime, from national to international.What is important here is that every time the context changes, the “equilibrium” shifts, for the values brought to bear upon the situation have themselves changed along with the situation . And in a play that is very much about the process of interpreting and judging, this is a critical point. For this play, like many Miller plays, deals not with delayed judgment upon a single moral axis...

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