In a happy coincidence, two plays by Arthur Miller recently opened here on the same weekend. One, All My Sons, was his first Broadway success. The other, The Ride Down Mount Morgan, is one of the last plays he wrote. The first was given a well-crafted production by the Kirkwood Theatre Guild. It has now closed. The second, staged by the St. Louis Actors’ Studio and featuring some of our town’s finest actors, continues through this weekend.
Arthur Miller is the great moralist of the American theater. At the center of both plays is a man who has been willing to sacrifice others to his own ends. One, Joe Keller of All My Sons, actually sacrifices lives. The owner of a machine shop in a small Midwestern city, he is making engines for the Air Force during World War II. When the engines develop a crack, he fakes illness and tells his partner over the phone to weld over the cracks. When 21 planes and their pilots crash, Joe—fearful of losing his business and having nothing to leave his sons—denies involvement, making his partner take the blame.
Lyman Felt, in The Ride Down Mount Morgan, is a successful insurance executive. With a home office and a wife and daughter in Manhattan, he opens a branch office upstate in Elmira. There, he meets, falls in love with and impregnates a young woman. To keep her from aborting the pregnancy, he agrees to take her to Las Vegas to fake a divorce and to marry her, which he does, illegally. He has two happy homes, with a wife and daughter in New York and a wife and son in Elmira. But one winter night he leaves his house outside Elmira for a ride down Mount Morgan on an icy road, slides off the road, smashes up car and self, and winds up in the hospital. Both wives are notified. They meet at his bedside. Game over.
Joe Keller argues that nothing is more important than family, which must be protected at any cost. Lyman argues that he has given both wives a child and a good, financially secure life. He figures if he’s happy, the wives should be happy, too.
Arthur Miller’s moral position is clear in the titles of the plays. Joe Keller learns from his two sons that those 21 pilots were all his sons, too. Lyman Felt descended from his exalted position in the ride down Mount Morgan, leaving him despised and alone.
All My Sons is an almost perfectly crafted play, right down to a fatal letter, held back until the end. The events unfold logically and chronologically in the Kellers’ back yard, and the Kirkwood staging gave the play a solidly convincing realistic production, with good work all around.
In contrast, Miller uses the fluid style of Death of a Salesman for The Ride Down Mount Morgan, as the scene shifts from Lyman’s hospital room to his memories (and perhaps his fantasies, too). Director Bobby Miller makes smart use of Cristie Johnston’s neutral, multilevel set and of a cast that’s convincing at each moment of Lyman’s descent.
Kirkwood Theatre Guild and St. Louis Actors’ Studio have let us see Miller near the beginning and near the end of his career. And two more of his best plays are coming later this season.
Photo by John Lamb, courtesy of St. Louis Actor’s Studio
