Play: All My Sons

Setting and Premise
Set in the backyard of the Keller home in a Midwestern American town shortly after World War II, All My Sons unfolds over a single day and night. The family’s life centers on the absence of Larry Keller, a fighter pilot missing in action for three years. A storm has just blown down a memorial tree planted for him, unsettling his mother, Kate, who clings to the belief that Larry is alive. Joe Keller, the genial patriarch who owns a small manufacturing plant, has resumed comfortable prosperity after being exonerated for wartime charges. His surviving son, Chris, an idealistic veteran, hopes to marry Ann Deever, Larry’s former fiancée, and to lead the family toward a future that acknowledges loss.

Main Characters
Joe Keller projects warmth and common sense, but carries a hidden moral compromise. Kate refuses to relinquish Larry’s memory, using her faith in his return to hold the family’s past together. Chris struggles to reconcile his wartime sense of brotherhood and sacrifice with the compromises he sees in peacetime. Ann Deever has severed ties with her disgraced father, Steve, Joe’s former partner now in prison for shipping defective airplane cylinder heads that caused the deaths of twenty-one pilots. Neighbors orbit the Kellers: Dr. Jim Bayliss and his cynical wife Sue, Frank Lubey and his cheerful wife Lydia, and a neighborhood boy, all reflecting the community’s mix of denial, ambition, and shared history.

Inciting Events
Chris invites Ann to visit, intending to propose. Kate interprets Ann’s presence as a threat to Larry’s memory and resists the match. The fallen tree rekindles the past, and talk of the factory scandal resurfaces. Joe maintains that Steve alone sent out the cracked parts; Joe claimed illness that day and was cleared in court. Ann insists she believes her father guilty and seeks a new life, a stance that bonds her to Chris and deepens Kate’s alarm.

Escalation
George Deever, Ann’s brother, arrives after visiting their father in prison and now believes that Joe, not Steve, authorized the shipment. He confronts Joe, who deploys folksy charm and practical rationalizations to neutralize suspicion. The neighborhood’s small talk, a family dinner plan, and Kate’s superstitions all fray as inconsistencies in Joe’s story appear. Joe admits he called the plant from home on the critical day, pressuring Steve to weld over the cracks and ship the parts to meet an urgent order. He defends himself by saying he did it for the family, to save the business.

Revelation and Tragedy
Chris, shattered, rejects Joe’s family-first defense as a betrayal of the men who died. Yet he cannot bring himself to turn his father in, and he recoils from the idea that his love for Ann might be built on a lie. Ann then reveals a letter from Larry written the day he learned of his father’s culpability; Larry could not bear the shame and intended to kill himself. The letter proves that Larry is dead and makes Joe understand that one of the fallen pilots was his own son. Faced with the realization that responsibility extends beyond blood, that the dead pilots were “all my sons”, Joe withdraws and shoots himself offstage. Chris and Kate are left to confront a future no longer anchored by denial.

Themes and Significance
The play probes the collision between private prosperity and public responsibility, exposing how self-justifying pragmatism erodes moral truth. The intimate backyard setting turns national trauma into domestic reckoning, with language of business and family used to mask complicity in larger harms. Through its final, devastating recognition, the drama affirms that ethical bonds extend beyond the household, and that the cost of ignoring them is measured in human lives.