In Arthur Miller’s 1946 play “All My Sons,” sins of omission and commission twist two neighboring suburban families into a double helix conflict, rife with tragic consequences. War-time business partners Joe and Steve have a small-scale aircraft cylinders plant. While pressed to deliver parts, they knowingly ship defective ones that have cost the lives of soldiers in combat.
In Act I, we learn that Steve is doing time, but somehow, Joe isn’t. Steve’s daughter Annie, and Joe’s soldier son, Larry, were engaged to be married, but Larry is now missing in action. His mother Kate insists that he is alive and expects him to come home. His brother Chris, a returned veteran, has fallen in love with Annie, and is determined to propose to her. This two and three quarter-hour Berkeley Rep production is directed by David Mendizabal. It stars Jimmy Smits as Joe Keller and Wanda DeJesus as Keller’s wife, Kate. Smits and DeJesus are life partners, off stage. I was able to interview them at Berkeley’s Jazz Café, on March 5, 2026.
Toba Singer: Jimmy, does your character Joe believe the version of a story which has his jailed business partner paying the dues for a crime both partners should be taking responsibility for? First there’s the crime, then a miscarriage of justice and the consequent punishment. How does the seemingly average Joe manage to lead (and justify) a double life?
Jimmy Smits: What we talked about during the rehearsal process Is that life carries shades of narratives people tend to stick to, no matter what. We see it every day in the news. Things happen. “Did someone tell you to do that?” “No, but I knew that’s what they meant.” People stick to their narratives. We have two families that have been allowed to come up in the world economically because of the war effort. The women’s voices are so strong because women’s voices changed and became a lot stronger during the war, in tandem with the roles they began to play. Kate has an inner strength, not simply as it appears—that she’s just overloaded with grief. There is also something else percolating In Joe’s mind. He has convinced himself that he has done something that represents a greater good for his family, to help them live the American dream. He says it: “If you blame me, you have to blame the whole system.”
Wanda DeJesus: The text supports this. In rehearsal, we spoke about family history related to the legal system. Two men in business go to trial with two separate lawyers. It starts unraveling. Steve is fallible as well; he can’t accept blame, either. His daughter Annie says, “You know how he could lie.” He didn’t take on responsibility with a different narrative. It went down like crabs in a barrel [crabs trying to escape the barrel, drag down any crabs that climb higher than they can or do.]
Kate’s pain is because her son Larry is missing. Now her other son, Chris, wants to marry into a family that has done damage to theirs. Georgie, Steve’s son and Annie’s brother, arrives looking for Annie. He has visited the father she refuses to visit, and is hell bent on protecting his family. Joe, on the other hand, prefers to believe the narrative that when Steve gets out of jail, he will be able to enjoy “what we Kellers have been working away at giving him back”—his former life.
JS: In Joe’s mind, he’s going to give him a life when he gets out of prison.
TS: Is the play based, as I have read, on a true story?
JS: Miller read a story somewhere. It was about a small factory that contributed nuts and bolts, so when it was determined that defective ones caused the deaths, they got the guy who made the cylinder heads.
WDJ: The way he constructed the play, everyone says something that can’t be proven or disproven by another character. He takes himself out because he learns that our son committed suicide, and not because of the black man in jail.
TS: Does the audience get that?
WDJ: The whole family talks about suicide. It’s 1947, post war. There is major PTSD.
TS: My father, was an Army medic under combat at the Battle of the Bulge, then stationed in Maastricht, and in Hamlin. He came home saying, “Never blame German people for what happened to the Jews. Given the same conditions, it could have just as easily happened here.”
JS: It can make you fearful, looking at the rhetoric and demonzation of the “other.”
WDJ: The war is a character in the play. You hope the audience gets that he takes himself out because he realizes that his son committed suicide. Neither Larry nor Chris are able to see his higher calling.
TS: No, and I’m wondering whether the audience gets that this is not a slam dunk appraisal of Joe. Finally, he admits what he did. A big swath of the audience observes this through an upper middle class-refracted lens. They get the answer their self-righteousness has been clammoring for: the reveal of what really happened to and with these individuals. It makes you want to ask, “Yes, something very bad happened here, but don’t you see what this system makes people do that crushes families under its weight?”
WDJ: That is why as Kate I say to my son Chris, “You have to be practical.” Chris comes back at her with, “Cats clashing in the alleyway are ‘practical.’”
JS: Joe’s mantra has been, “I did it for you.” It’s a rationalization. I did it for the children. I’m doing my part in the legacy, the American Dream.
TS: Children are never happy to star in that rationalization, especially those who have seen the American Dream scheme played out at close range.
WDJ: I don’t know whether it’s a double life, but it’s his narrative.
TS: Wanda, why did Miller write George as Kate’s ally when he’s so hardline against Joe? George bursts onto the scene. His intention is to hold the Keller family’s feet to the fire by shocking them, because he wants to win his sister over. He comes at Chris and Annie hard but then pivots to accommodate Kate when she disarms him with her “remember when” bear hug. The characters can go there, but doesn’t that create cognitive whiplash for the audience?
WDJ: Based on her history, Kate could be manipulative or a charmer in this production. The history is that my son Larry is missing. Kate has a thing about soldiers; “I told him, ‘Marry that girl and stay out of the war.’” It has always been a question for Puerto Ricans, (which is what the Kellers are, given the casting of this production): Why are our children dying for this war? It’s just like in Vietnam. Kate diapered him, took care of Georgie, he ran in and out of our yard, there’s history, a connection. When he comes back and I see him, he looks a little too good. Given what he’s gone through. he should look more worn around the edges, greyed out, but I play the moment of a soldier who has come back, whom I know and love and that’s my hope for my son Larry, too. Brandon Gill, who plays George Deever, sees that, the history, the conflict in my eyes. He tears up every night. We both tear up every time because there’s the love. He’s protecting his father, who I don’t like, but I love Georgie!
JS: He comes in with a mission, confronted with the history . . .
WDJ: . . . which is me. He has buckled, becomes funny and laugh-y.
JS: Joe sows seeds of doubt in him concerning their shared history. So, George doesn’t get to execute what he came there to do.
WDJ: We wanted to play the complicated people with histories that are at odds with each other, so what do you do?
TS: Joe opens the wounds.
WDJ: We could have made the choice of going disingenuous, but we chose the open wounds.
TS: When Joe finally gives it up, where does that admission, and all that proceeds from it, take the audience? Do they feel empathic enough to exonerate him or do they share the characters’ stung feelings of betrayal? Do they lay the entire responsibility at Joe’s feet, or do they blame the system? Did the system distort the family relationships or did the family become one with the system, like a fish that doesn’t realize it’s in water, and goes with the flow?
JS: Those contradictions are part of the reason we wanted to do this great American cannonical play. Miller structures it so there are different things that resonate for different audiences. They’re going to get at you in different ways.
WDJ: Taking a guess, I think we’re assimilated enough that we went with the flow and paid the price.
JS: We bought into the American Dream. You have Chris talking about “idealistic.” Chris tells us, “If everyone does their little part, it would be better for humanity.”
WDJ: There’s no easy answer. The revolution is also internal. That doesn’t mean that change just happens, but an awareness, not a cultural awareness necessarily, but a consciousness arises, and it’s something that parents can impart it to their children: universal truths, humanity, starting with what is universally right and wrong, personal accountability, and that’s how revolution and resistance can get rolling, whatever the system hands you, not so much via ideology, but laying out the shades of grey, and picking the better of those shades.
TS: I’m sure you often get the question, “Isn’t it hard on your relationship that you are both professional actors?: There’s the competition, differing interpretations of roles, what happens to you as a couple during the process of working with a cast and director. I want to ask a question that pivots in the opposite direction: How does your relationship with each other benefit from those things that arise in your professional lives that raise the level of discourse between you, allow you to step back from day-to-day pressures into a specie of discussion that you can’t have with anyone else?
JS: The good thing is that because of common and shared professional choices, we’ve had both individual experiences and shared ones, of success and disappointments. It’s good to be able to share these with someone in your life who can communicate understanding in the only way you can because you are both living it. Any character that I’ve done, Wanda is a part of. It is so good to receive feedback from someone who has a perspective on an artistic life, open to another opinion, a joy, or she does something on stage or I do, giving us a moment we recognize.
WDJ: There are the times I can say that I saw it in his eyes and said it’s this and he said, “You got it!”
JS: This business is a roller coaster ride, so to have someone who is pragmatic, who shares the artist’s life with you, be it as an actor, a dancer, a painter, or a writer, makes it so much more resonant and meaningful, practically and artistically.
TS: What is the hardest thing to bring to the stage every night that puts the greatest pressure on the actor in an ensemble?
JS: We just talked to a bunch of high school kids at the show today. They are preparing to become professionals as theater majors. One of them asked, “What happens when you get stuck?” Our answer was: You go back to basics. What does the playwright say or what are the characters saying to one another? So, that’s what you want to do on stage. How do you offer their humanity to an audience, something they can relate to by means of laughter or grief, or their approach to a dilemma, to better comprehend the choices people make, the very thing that Miller brings to light.
WDJ: For me, it’s authenticity. An audience can tell when you’re real, what Jimmy’s alluding to when he says, “humanity.” So every night I’m like, “Please God, keep me real and open, so they can receive and understand our own humanity.” In anything I do, I need for you to believe who we are.
TS: What about vulnerability? I often found it hard to let vulnerability show itself on stage.
WDJ: If you’re believable, you’re opening up, and your vulternability is there, you’re being yourself. It encapsulates all of what delivers believability, including vulnerability.
JS: If you’re the supposed antagonist, you have to find that character’s vulnerability, their reason for doing what they’ve done or are doing. People make choices. The bad guy is not doing it from “I want to be evil.” And it’s not about making the character someone to be liked, but finding his self-justification in the work is to find the justification for his character in the story.
TS: You want to find what people fight about within themselves to drive what they do or fail to do, or to see a shadow of yourself in the character.
WSJ: There are two kinds of actors; hit your mark and project something you’re not, or hit your mark and tell the truth within the realm of your character.
TS: I had an experrience where I wasn’t feeling truthfulness from my scene partner. I had to shift my focus from their result to finding a path to respecting how they were working to find their way, even if it didn’t succeed in harvesting a truthful result. I told myself, “My job is to accept that and ask myself what the best way is to get through this scene as her character’s mother, hold my own moment by releasing what I’m not getting from her, and by listening, react even to her mannered “playing of the result.” The answer invoked acting’s gold-standard rule, “Act and react.”
JS: Yes, you have to use what is in that moment to get you where you have to go.
TS: I confess to having had in hindsight one hesitation about the first act: that the blocking overtook the scene at times, becoming a mechanism for building the illusory happy family, to the exclusion of other avenues.
JS: The first act is just another Sunday in life of these people who live on a technicolor grass set, and then it unravels. In the second or third acts, they plant themselves as they actually are, either negating or trying to find the truth.
WDJ: The first act is about repression, It goes deep, this tension about mother and son. And the fiancée, Annie, why did you invite her?—for Kate, and I have a dream—for Chris, foreshadowing a yet-to-come revelation. It’s a happy neighborhood, maybe too happy. If you look at all the family members and allied characters, there’s the woman who laughs all the time who had too many children, and another taking guitar lessons so that she has something in common with her husband. There’s Annie, who clearly knows something and is flirting with the wrong son. The audience does not yet know there’s repression. Maybe it could have been more salient, but the “funny” informs you that it’s a play by Arthur Miller, so there’s going to be much more in store.
Toba Singer
