E-Mail This Article to a Friend Sons and losers Miller and Ibsen on the summer circuit BY STEVE VINEBERG
	All My Sons By Arthur Miller. Directed by Doug Hughes. Set by Hugh Landwehr. Costumes by Linda Fisher. Lighting by Clifton Taylor. With Richard Dreyfuss, Jill Clayburgh, Sam Trammell, Jenny Bacon, and David Aaron Baker. At the Westport Country Playhouse. (Closed.) An Enemy of the People By Henrik Ibsen. A new version by Christopher Hampton. Directed by Gerald Freedman. Set by John Ezell. Costumes by Willa Kim. Lighting by Mary Jo Dondlinger. With Mandy Patinkin, Larry Pine, Annalee Jefferies, T. Scott Cunningham, Peter Maloney, Dana Powers Acheson, John LaGioia, Bruce MacVittie, and Andrew May. At the Williamstown Theatre Festival. (Closed.)

Both the Williamstown Theatre Festival and the Westport Country Playhouse wound up their seasons last week by staging classic social-problem plays featuring major male stars not generally seen in regional theater. Mandy Patinkin played Dr. Tomas Stockmann in a new Christopher Hampton translation of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. And Richard Dreyfuss took on the role of Joe Keller, the paterfamilias in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, with Jill Clayburgh as Joe’s wife, Kate.

Both are tricky plays — melodramas that can be tiresomely didactic in production if they’re not handled delicately. (It’s no coincidence that among Miller’s most popular pieces for the stage is a version of Ibsen’s play — Ibsen was one of his early influences.) An Enemy of the People is set in a small spa town whose most distinguished citizen becomes a pariah when he discovers that the springs that supply most of its income have been poisoned by waste from the local mills. The play permitted Ibsen to level a full-scale attack on the small-minded, self-protecting bourgeoisie he spent his career fuming against, and here (unlike what he does in Ghosts and A Doll’s House) he presents them at their most venomous and hypocritical. This isn’t one of Ibsen’s more complex works, but the sheer variety of the forces that turn on Stockmann — the government (his brother is the mayor), the property owners, the industrialists (represented by his father-in-law, who owns one of the offending mills), the press, the sheep-like ordinary citizens — makes the work colorful and daring. All My Sons, Miller’s first professionally produced play (he wrote it in 1945, four years before Death of a Salesman), dramatizes the day an idealistic son learns what almost everyone else has known or guessed long before him — that his father and not his father’s imprisoned partner was responsible for selling cracked cylinder heads to the government during the war, an act that led to the deaths of nearly two dozen pilots.

All My Sons can be gripping in production, despite Miller’s use of some creaky theatrical devices, among them a symbolic tree — planted by Kate Keller in memory of her elder son, Larry, a pilot who went missing during the war and whom she refuses to believe is dead — that’s destroyed by lightning the night before the play begins and a letter produced in the last act that reveals what really happened to Larry. Jack O’Brien’s brilliant 1988 TV version realized the play’s tragic potential by indicting not only the wrongheadedness of Joe Keller’s business morality but also his son Chris’s naïveté in casting the flesh-and-blood people around him as either heroes or villains. O’Brien demonstrated that, done well, All My Sons is a far better play than the more often revived Death of a Salesman.

At Westport, director Doug Hughes and his cast made the characters so recognizable, I hoped that he too would be able to navigate the play around the obstacles. He wasn’t, however. This All My Sons was two-thirds of a terrific production. It became shaky as soon as the melodrama kicked in, 10 minutes before the end of the second act. At that point the emotions on stage became a little hysterical, most of the actors began to repeat themselves, and even the staging lost its punch. Act three took the simplest path by ennobling Chris’s idealism — an error directors have probably been making for more than half a century, but one that is no longer tolerable after you’ve seen O’Brien’s production knock down every crutch the Kellers have to stand on, Chris included.

The major strength of the Westport All My Sons was Dreyfuss, who didn’t sound a false note as the aging industrialist whose morality doesn’t extend beyond his family. The actor made Keller unmistakably Jewish; the musicality of his readings lifted Miller’s lines above banality by locating a cultural source for Joe’s unimaginative, vernacular-strewn, homiletic language. Dreyfuss gave a marvelous and very touching performance. In the TV version, Michael Learned’s Kate was fearsomely protective, keeping Ann — the daughter of Joe’s incarcerated partner, once Larry’s girl and now Chris’s — at bay while using every sentimental resource in her arsenal to dismantle Ann’s crusading brother, George. Clayburgh shaped the same elements in Kate’s behavior to portray her as neurotic, and except for a few moments when she veered slightly out of control, she gave a fine performance. Sam Trammell, as Chris, seemed well cast, but he and the talented Jenny Bacon (Ann) were the main victims of the show’s third-act troubles — and it didn’t help that Trammell came up with so few ideas about how to physicalize his character. On the other hand, though David Aaron Baker, dressed in a suit and a rumpled fedora that made him look as if he’d stepped out of a road company of Guys and Dolls, made an over-the-top entrance as weak-minded George, his performance grew as the play moved toward its conclusion.

Hughes’s own work reached its high point in the complicated scene where the family rallies to deal with George, who has just come from visiting his father in jail and now believes, for the first time, that Keller sold his old partner out. I wish I could report a single scene in Gerald Freedman’s An Enemy of the People that suggested the kind of precision and command that Hughes showed for most of All My Sons. The Williamstown show was, both in concept and on stage, a loud, long mess. (It limped to curtain after three painful hours.) John Ezell’s set was a cracked mirror reflecting the audience; actors filled the aisles and hovered at the back of the theater during the climactic town-meeting scene where Stockmann is shouted down by his neighbors after his brother (Larry Pine) orchestrates public sentiment against him. If these choices were meant to indict us — that is, our contemporary society — they didn’t work because, since Freedman hadn’t shaped the dramatic action, it was impossible to get interested in what was happening on the stage. The script by British playwright Christopher Hampton (it’s billed as "a new version," but really it’s just a translation) seemed drab and academic, but who could tell for sure without a director at the helm? Most of the actors looked lost, including the remarkable Hartford Stage actress Annalee Jefferies as Mrs. Stockmann. I don’t think it could be her fault; the show felt calamitously underrehearsed, and not even Larry Pine (the unforgettable Astrov of Vanya on 42nd Street) could sustain the wit that fueled his performance for his first couple of scenes. The only actor who survived was Peter Maloney, whose portrait of the printer Aslaksen (his watchword is "moderation") was fresh and satirical.

And how about Mandy Patinkin, the drawing card of this revival? He gave perhaps the most disgraceful performance I’ve ever seen on stage from a gifted actor. When John Glover played Stockmann on television in 1987 (in a superb production directed, once again, by the ubiquitous Jack O’Brien), the good doctor appeared as a well-intentioned naïf who figured every burgher in town would be overjoyed to learn the scientific truth about the springs. Glover created a marvelous arc for Stockmann: you could see the man grow up and into a genuine heroism. With Patinkin, I didn’t have the faintest idea what motivates Stockmann. There was no evidence that the actor had ever thought about the character. He simply declaimed his lines, one after another, like an uninspired preacher, and when he got tired of all that undifferentiated recitation, he screamed.

In the meeting scene, Patinkin’s screaming was interrupted every few minutes by yelling and whistling from the ensemble at the back of the house. This ear-splitting display (which went on for nearly half an hour) was the production’s substitute for drama; it was meant to bully us into believing we were hearing something terribly important. Patinkin’s star presence and his aggressive non-acting milked a partial standing ovation out of the crowd the night I attended. But on the way out, I didn’t hear a word about the play or about Patinkin’s performance — every one of the six or seven conversations I overheard focused indignantly on the cell phones that kept going off in the last act. At least those damn phones gave people something to talk about on the way home.