By Marty Hughley
The Oregonian
September 11, 2009

The Arthur Miller play "All My Sons" is never going to be one of those entertainments advertised as "the feel-good hit of the summer!" But as the first high-profile production in the Portland fall theater season, it's appropriate for the customary turn toward more serious fare at this time of year.

"An audience should come out of many of Miller's plays almost feeling ill," says director Jon Kretzu -- who must not have run that description by his marketing department. "The appropriate response is to be deeply disturbed."

Amid the seemingly innocent setting of a mid-American backyard on a pleasant Sunday, "All My Sons" tells a story of love and loss, of intertwined family histories and conflicting principles. At its center, it shows a middle-class factory owner named Joe Keller (played here by Michael Fisher-Welsh) wrestling with the legal, moral and emotional consequences of a batch of faulty engine heads his company sold to the U.S. military, causing the deaths of dozens of soldiers. But it also sheds grim light on the choices all of us make about what we owe ourselves, our loved ones and our society.

For this Artists Repertory Theatre production, Kretzu says he drew inspiration from such sources as William Eggleston's color-saturated photographs of suburbia and the opening scenes of David Lynch's "Blue Velvet." The result is a staging that's "hyper-surreal," he says, as if in answer to the question, "If Magritte lived in suburban America, what would it look like?"

All the better to heighten the vexing moral ambiguities and tangled motivations that make Miller's writing so enduringly powerful. "The way Miller gets to the core of who we are, it should shake your foundation," Kretzu says. "And this one does that in spades."