NCP’s ‘All My Sons’ features award-worthy performances

NEW CASTLE, Pa. — Last season’s Broadway revival of “All My Sons” was praised for British director Simon McBurney’s post-modern interpretation of Arthur Miller’s Tony-winning 1947 play. McBurney mixed Brechtian devices (the cast sat on a visible line of chairs even if they weren’t directly involved in the action) with cinematic effects such as underscoring and projected images to heighten the drama.

None of those froufrou touches is evident in J.E. Ballantyne Jr.’s production of “All My Sons” that opened Friday night at the New Castle Playhouse’s Annex Theater. Instead of McBurney’s artsy visual and textual experimentation, Ballantyne serves up a foursquare rendering of Miller’s first masterwork. The play’s one set — the backyard of an Ohio family’s home shortly after World War II, nicely realized by Paula R. Ferguson and George A. Orr — has a simplicity and elegance that doesn’t distract from, or compete with, the play’s verbal gymnastics.

And though Cherie Stebner’s splendid costume design does a nice job of capturing the late-’40s period, it never calls undue attention to itself. Yet the primary reason Ballantyne’s “Sons” succeeds, despite its stubbornly old-fashioned approach, is the extraordinary cast.

The community theater calendar year has just started, but it’s doubtful we’ll see performances as vividly drawn and truly lived-in all season. As Joe Keller, the owner of a machine-parts plant whose defective aircraft-engine cylinders were responsible for the deaths of 21 American pilots, Westminster College Professor Scott Mackenzie brings such an impressive degree of naturalism to the role that you’d never guess he’s acting.

Mackenzie is matched by Molly Galano’s heartbreaking, marvelously subtle turn as Joe’s loyal-to-a-fault wife, Kate. Still grieving the loss of her son Larry — MIA for three years when the play begins — Kate still clings to the hope that he’ll return someday. It’s Kate’s dogmatic refusal to face reality that prevents her from accepting the fact that Ann (Caryn Nicholson — superb), Larry’s childhood sweetheart and the daughter of Joe’s former business partner, intends to marry her surviving son, Chris (Stefan Lingenfelter in a spectacular NCP debut).

Compounding everyone’s emotional paralysis is the fact that neither Chris nor Kate is willing to accept Joe’s culpability in those servicemen’s deaths. (Ann’s father is serving a prison sentence for his involvement in the tragedy.)

On paper, “All My Sons” might sound such as a particularly overripe oedipal melodrama. But Miller’s scholarly influences — both classic Greek tragedy and Norwegian dramatists like Henrik Ibsen — helped him finesse literary metaphors better, and certainly more artfully, than any post-war American playwright.

In “All My Sons,” Miller turned the near-existential malaise experienced by many U.S. soldiers returning from World War II into a scathing critique of the fabled (and already fraying) American Dream. (Miller, of course, would continue his deconstruction of the American Dream two years later in his greatest work, “Death of a Salesman.”) Amazingly, Miller’s message remains as spookily relevant today as it was 60-plus years ago. Wartime profiteering (think Halliburton or Blackwater) and the betrayal of a nation’s honor and trust by “upstanding,” paternal types such as Joe Keller — or Dick Cheney? — are still very much a part of our national fabric.

Thanks to the bravura performances of Mackenzie, Galano, Lingenfelter and Nicholson, you believe and feel every soul-wrenching emotion and spoken (and even unspoken) plaint. Equally impressive is Jeff Carey — another terrific NCP first-timer — as George, Ann’s disgruntled vet older brother, whose surprise visit to the Keller home has seismic ramifications.

Also very good are the always-welcome Alan McCreary (neatly understated as family friend Frank Lubey) and South Range Middle School fifth-grader Donny Wolford (utterly charming and unaffected as neighbor-kid Bert).

With three acts and two 15-minute intermissions, “Sons” does make for a lengthy sit, particularly on the Annex’s somewhat punitive folding chairs. But I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, and neither should anyone who treasures award-caliber acting.

“All My Sons” runs through Sept. 6 at the New Castle Playhouse Annex.

For tickets and showtimes, call (724) 654-3437.