"O’Brien’s literal-minded production does not make a resonant case for the drama today...Ms. Bening goes deepest of the four leads in exploring the muck at the bottom of her character’s personality. She also has terrific technique...But the opacity of the production overall means we still can’t read her with any clarity, and the play acquires a weird wobble at its core...The production is almost never moving, except when Ann’s brother, George, shows up intending to expose everyone’s lies."
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“This shattering play about the guilt of seeking to avoid moral responsibility is forever timely...O'Brien expertly modulates the growing tensions of a plot that unfolds with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy...A thrilling cast rise to the challenge of making this entirely believable, fraught and eventually scorching. As matriarch Kate, Bening is devastating as well as devastated...Letts is equally superb...Even knowing the outcome, it's a play that rivets, challenges and disturbs.”
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"There is a real and precious thing at the center of 'All My Sons.' It is the trio of Tracy Letts, Annette Bening and Benjamin Walker...All three are believable in every detail—blockbuster actors dedicated to small, unshowy connections to one another. In scene after scene, they do wonders. Around them, though, is a flatter and falser world...What does work after all the decades is Miller’s stunning climax, a series of emotional explosions."
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"The play’s glaring issues go unexamined...Miller’s not a wit, nor is he particularly agile with seeming small talk or elegant exposition...What does stick out—over and over again—as the play ploddingly establishes its circumstances, is its blithe sexism...While Letts and Walker eventually get to tear down the roof—and it is exciting to watch them do it—it’s a little heartbreaking to witness what the brilliant, incisive Bening is given to work with by comparison."
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"It’s one of the best Miller revivals I’ve ever seen, a staging so magnetic that it overwhelmed my lingering doubts about a play that can feel preachy when it isn’t done as well as this...The supporting cast is uniformly strong, with next-best-in-show honors going to Benjamin Walker and Hampton Fluker, both of whom are more than up to the task of sharing a stage with Mr. Letts and Ms. Bening without getting washed into the valley."
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"Jack O’Brien’s knock-you-from-behind staging is as powerful and sturdy as Miller’s post-war classic itself. And in a shattering performance that adds yet another layer to her quietly remarkable career, Annette Bening finds grace notes in the role of the grieving Gold Star mother that brings the character to vivid, brutalized life...Miller’s genius was in using the old formulas to capture a very unbrave new world."
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"With Letts smoldering away, the whole decency thing is a sham — an affectation, a role Joe has learned how to play. And Annette Bening is not far behind: She elicits relatively little sympathy as Kate...Letts’ performance likely will strike some as odd or disconnected — I find it perfectly in tune with the moment, and there is much to like about Bening’s work, too...Had Letts been given some raging players to match his own buried ferocity, we'd likely have seen even more of his teeth."
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"It still packs a wallop all its own, especially in this wonderfully cast, honestly staged and beautifully presented production...The whole cast makes their characters as well as the play’s melodramatic turns not only credible, but enthralling...Walker brings a genuineness to this sometimes too-good-to-be-true character, making Chris’ private revelations, as someone who has hidden scars of his own, all the more affecting."
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