Walking through the wooden set house onstage, senior Josh Rogers, playing Joe Keller, takes a stiff bite into his blueberry muffin. As each actor in the opening scene comes on stage, he offers them a muffin, spreading the sweetness before the bitter events that occur throughout the play. The advanced acting class performed Arthur Miller’s All My Sons on Nov. 1 and 3.
All My Sons is a play based on a true story and was first performed on Broadway in 1947. The play is centered around the story of the Keller family and the way that World War 2 impacted their lives.
“The amount of work that goes into [the plays] is insane,” said senior and member of the advanced acting class Avni Wadhwani. “The actors in the last two weeks before the plays will be in the theater 24/7 pretty much, and leading up to that it’s just a constant grind.”
Two sophomores, Seth Elkins and Jackson Temple, were pulled up from the acting 3-4 class to play the roles of Frank Lubey and George Deever which is quite unusual, said senior and member of the advanced acting class Margaret Foust.
“I was really excited to see such young actors perform with the the advanced acting class,” Foust said.
Another unusual role was the casting of Olivia Wiebe as Kate Keller, considering that she is typically a very comedic actor and played a very dramatic role in All My Sons, Wadhwani said.
“I was really excited to see [Wiebe] play such a serious character because she’s just such a funny person in real life and the part that she played last year was also really funny so seeing her do something totally new was surprising and exciting,” Foust said.
Rogers said that the most exciting part for him was seeing how many people come out to support the actors.
“I know that all this work is going to be spread, I’m going to be able to share this with a bunch of people,” Rogers said. “Just the gratification that we get from the audience, to know that they enjoyed the show is a huge part for me.”
Rogers said that playing the role of Joe Keller was both intense and emotionally draining for him.
“When you play a character like that and get into the mind of that character, it’s really fascinating to try and build that character because you need you need to show the good parts,” Rogers said. “You need to make the audience have empathy for a person who was fundamentally kind of horrible.”
This play is amazing for many reasons, one being that if Arthur Miller had not succeeded with this play, he would have most likely not continued on to write works like Death of a Salesman and the Crucible, Rogers said.
“The writing of it is so intense, and then it just drops and there’s and there’s a break from the intensity,” Rogers said. “Then it builds, and it builds, and then it ends on the highest build. That kind of writing is is truly truly amazing.”
Foust said that acting teacher Kim Taylor most likely chose this play to perform because she was waiting for strong male leads to act in it and that she also loves the messages displayed by the play.
“One of her favorite lines in the play is when [Wiebe’s] character Kate asks, ‘What more could we be?’ and responds with ‘Better,’” Fous said. “[Taylor] has talked to us a lot about how that line is really important to her and how we should always strive to be better people.”
