The director of All My Sons, Valerie Curtis-Newton, explained to the Seattle Times that part of the justification for setting Arthur Miller’s play in a Central District home owned by a black industrialist (its original setting is the house of a Midwestern white industrialist) was this: “I learned that in 1941, President Roosevelt signed an order banning discrimination in the US defense industry. So there could have been black military contractors like Joe.” She shouldn’t have said this. The fiction of a black industrialist, played convincingly by Chuck Cooper, needs no historical validation. Why? Because the fiction of a black man owning a factory that manufactures parts for the air force makes more sense than the striking absence of such a man from the historical record. Truth is more in the play than in history. (Intiman Theatre, 201 Mercer St, 269-1900, 7:30 pm, $10–$50)

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...