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A review by tatianareadsbooks
All My Sons by Arthur Miller
5.0
Easily the best play I’ve read all year and a contender for my all-time favorite (as well as my favorite playwright). After reading I got to experience the full-cast performance by L.A. Theatre Works with James Farentino as Joe Keller, Arye Gross as Chris Keller, and Julie Harris as Kate Keller. This production was incredibly moving and raw with emotion. There’s portions I had to stop and reread, getting that painful feeling in my throat as I empathized with characters. You can feel the pain of war from every perspective here amplified by the dynamic between fathers and sons.
Favorite lines:
Chris:
“that’s the kind of guys I had. They didn’t die; they killed themselves for each other. I mean that exactly; a little more selfish and they’d’ve been here today.”
“And then I came home and it was incredible. I . . . there was no meaning in it here; the whole thing to them was a kind of a—bus accident…I felt . . . what you said . . . ashamed somehow. Because nobody was changed at all. It seemed to make suckers out of a lot of guys. I felt wrong to be alive, to open the bank-book, to drive the new car, to see the new refrigerator. I mean you can take those things out of a war, but when you drive that car you’ve got to know that it came out of the love a man can have for a man, you’ve got to be a little better because of that. Otherwise what you have is really loot, and there’s blood on it. I didn’t want to take any of it.”
“Then what’ll I do it for? We used to shoot a man who acted like a dog, but honor was real there, you were protecting something. But here? This is the land of the great big dogs, you don’t love a man here, you eat him!”
SPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILER SPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILER SPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILER SPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILER
“I know you’re no worse than most men but I thought you were better. I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father.”
Favorite lines:
Chris:
“that’s the kind of guys I had. They didn’t die; they killed themselves for each other. I mean that exactly; a little more selfish and they’d’ve been here today.”
“And then I came home and it was incredible. I . . . there was no meaning in it here; the whole thing to them was a kind of a—bus accident…I felt . . . what you said . . . ashamed somehow. Because nobody was changed at all. It seemed to make suckers out of a lot of guys. I felt wrong to be alive, to open the bank-book, to drive the new car, to see the new refrigerator. I mean you can take those things out of a war, but when you drive that car you’ve got to know that it came out of the love a man can have for a man, you’ve got to be a little better because of that. Otherwise what you have is really loot, and there’s blood on it. I didn’t want to take any of it.”
“Then what’ll I do it for? We used to shoot a man who acted like a dog, but honor was real there, you were protecting something. But here? This is the land of the great big dogs, you don’t love a man here, you eat him!”
SPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILER SPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILER SPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILER SPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILER
“I know you’re no worse than most men but I thought you were better. I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father.”