Taproot Theatre

Through March 1.Before anyone had ever uttered the phrase "military-industrial complex," Arthur Miller penned this potent criticism of war profiteering. The 1947 play was Miller's first commercial success and it's easy to see why. It's an intelligent script that revels in the delusions and denials of "ordinary" Americans. Yeah, it's a melodrama mounted on a soapbox, but All My Sons still manages to have power and relevance today. Corporations that put profits before people, executives who blame underlings... sound familiar?

Living in postwar peace and prosperity, All My Sons is the story of the Kellers, a family that made airplane engines during WWII and profited handsomely. The family is haunted, however, by the death of son Larry, a fighter pilot whose body was never recovered. Mother Kate (Kim Morris) refuses to accept her son's demise while surviving son Chris (Scott Plusquellec) has designs on Larry's old sweetheart, Ann (Jesse Notehelfer). Over the course of a single day, secrets are dislodged, truths are confronted, and tragedy ensues.

The show boasts a big meaty performance by Robert Gallaher as Joe Keller. It's difficult to balance the bluster and blindness of Miller's flawed father figure, and Gallaher does a good job. The rest of the cast, however, is a mixed bag of over-emoting, disconnected gazes, and the occasionally effective dramatic moment. In particular, the younger actors seem unable to handle Miller's creakier lines or poetic flourishes.

Director Karen Lund has a firm grasp on the timeliness of the piece and, for the first two acts, manages to keep the melodrama under control. The cramped playing space bubbles with Miller's secrets and lies and though the staging can get a bit busy, Lund's pacing is masterful. It's only at the end of the second act and into the third that the production boils over. If not for Gallaher's controlled performance they might have lost the theatrical soup.

Toward the end of the play, Miller writes, "Once and for all you must know that there's a universe of people outside, and you're responsible to it." Leave it to Taproot to actually comment on the current corporate drums of war by mounting a show like this. While our bigger and better-funded theatrical institutions remain all but artistically silent on current political and social issues, Taproot has confirmed the relevancy of modern theater and should be applauded for it. It's a brave choice in perilous times. JEFF MEYERS

Taking Sides

ArtsWest

Through Feb 8.When the lights come up on Ronald Harwood's troubling World War II drama, we gaze at an oasis of order in a world turned to rubble. Twisted metal, burnt bricks, and here and there a horribly altered object from a long-lost ordinary life all surround a dingy office in the American zone of occupied Berlin. Scenic designer Melissa Hamasaki has created the perfect setting for an engrossing moral struggle. It is 1946 and Wilhelm Furtwängler, the brilliant conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, is about to be interrogated during the Allies' "De-Nazification" program.

Was Furtwängler simply another victim of Hitler's regime, one who fought to save Jews in the artistic community from certain death while working to preserve the integrity of German culture? Or was he a vain, self-serving anti-Semite whose prominence before the world community lent credibility to the Nazis? His interrogator, Major Steve Arnold (John Murray), believes the latter and batters at Furtwängler's composed façade with the tenacity of a man possessed. This ordinary American, an insurance claims adjuster back home, helped liberate Bergen-Belsen and what he saw there has left him altered, off-balance, and fanatically driven at any cost to wrest justice and meaning from the smoking ashes of what remains.

With his cocky bantam strut, actor John Murray clearly relishes his character's cheerful crudity, but a crucial sense of being haunted is somehow missing. However, John Wray's chilling and sympathetic performance as Furtwängler more than makes up for any of the production's weakness. With his aristocratic bearing and expressive hands, Wray impressively embodies both Furtwängler's arrogance and his slowly dawning sense of shame. This is a "talky" play and it might not be for everybody, but if you enjoy walking out of the theater still mulling over big ideas like art and politics, culpability and compromise, then go see Taking Sides, pronto. TAMARA PARIS

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Book-It at Theater Off Jackson

Extended to March 1.Considered to be Maya Angelou's most important contribution to the black literary canon, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings describes the memoirist's formative years in the Depression-era South. The translation of the book into this new play by Myra Platt is successful not because it's faithful to its great source, whose pleasures are purely literary (the calm then intense rhythm of Angelou's sentences, paragraphs, chapters). It's successful because the dynamic wills of the characters who populate Maya Angelou's first literary world are captured and at times enhanced by this theatrical one.

Like a fugue movement, the play seems self-contained, with actors who are motivated, as it were, by their own internal energies and logic rather than the instructions of the screenplay or the directions of the adaptor. This is the genius of this adaptation; it is deceitfully extemporaneous, as if every gesture, conversation, urgency was generated at the very moment of performance. And though all of the actors make their mark, the powerful presence of the principal actresses--Demene E. Hall (old Maya and Maya's grandmother), Lanise Antoine Shelley (young Maya), and Felicia V. Loud (Maya's mother)--make the play. Even Felicia V. Loud's broken leg did not hamper or burden her performance. Indeed, nothing except closing down the whole damn theater could stop I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings from being what it is: thoroughly engaging. CHARLES MUDEDE