The Arthur Miller play, All My Sons, directed by Robin Lefevre, has one more week in its long-extended run in the Gate before it finishes on July 4. It is an ironic date on which to end a play that portrays the rottenness at the heart of how one man achieved the American dream.

I went to the play ignorant of the story. I am less consciously critical of a production if I am unfamiliar with the play, so when I heard the production was good, I stopped reading reviews; I didn’t want to know what happened.

All My Sons is about a family in small-town America after World War II. One son, Larry, is missing, presumed dead by all but his mother. The other, Chris, is in love with Larry’s former girlfriend, Annie. Annie and Chris’s fathers were business partners, but during the war their factory supplied faulty parts to the US Air Force, causing the deaths of twenty-one pilots. Both men were found guilty, but Joe Keller (Chris’s father) appealed and was found innocent. The play opens with the news that Annie is coming from New York to visit Chris. She has not been back since her father was convicted and her visit is the catalyst for the internal breakdown of the Keller family.

Miller builds the potential for conflict into each character’s motivation, and in the second half of the play these private conflicts swell to blight every relationship onstage. The first hour of the play held me gripped until Garrett Lombard, as Chris Keller, first utters his love for Annie.

Lombard plays very convincingly the part of a mild-mannered young man, overshadowed by the memory of his brother, gentle with his parents, honest, honorable, and still disturbed by his part in the war. However, the portrayal of deep emotion is beyond him. When it came to telling Niamh McCann’s Annie that he loved her, something astonishing happened. I can only say that I thought at once of Terminator: Lombard’s voice deepened, his American accent became hugely pronounced and he roared out the words. The audience roared back with laughter; it felt like pantomime. McCann couldn’t hide her anger.

During the second half, revelations occurred. One is that the elder brother is dead – he committed suicide because he knew his father was guilty.

Suddenly the Terminator returned: this time Lombard lost hold completely of his American accent as he stormed about the stage and reduced everyone onstage to tears. In the audience, meanwhile, people attempted to stifle the kind of nervous giggles that come out when you are learning to drive and find yourself somehow in the path of oncoming traffic.

The set was also disappointing. I am always interested in if, and how, actors use the set to contribute to meaning. I want to see a little inventiveness and innovation in this matter, but the set felt stale and recycled. The clapboard house, outside which most of the action takes place, certainly brought to mind the disastrously melodramatic production of Hedda Gabler last October, and the front steps smacked of the early 2008 production of The Glass Menagerie, in which Lombard also starred.

A rifle is mentioned in the first ten minutes of the play. I’d been waiting since then for two things: to find out who would say the words “all my sons,” and who would shoot himself/herself with the gun. You only find out right at the end. – Susan Leahy