‘All My Sons’ at Keegan Theatre is satisfying work for director Rhea, a ‘Miller advocate’

Rhea's most recent effort directing Miller was last season's production of "The Crucible." She expected that "All My Sons" wouldn't be too tricky a follow-up.

"I'm not sure I fully appreciated how challenging it is to do the piece," Rhea said, "to keep the balance of the revelations of the play."

Unlike "The Crucible," which is "all caught up in the glamour, for lack of a better word, of the playability of a trial setting [and] this salacious affair, ['All My Sons'] is a quieter piece, and in that way it's more challenging. It all takes place in a back yard," Rhea said.

The pacing, too, can be problematic, as this is a play in which "every page, there's some profound conversation that happens," Rhea said. "The Crucible" takes care of those beats for you; it's not on autopilot, exactly, it just follows every minor fall with a major lift. "All My Sons" requires a more deliberate hand to slow down and speed up scenes accordingly. "[You have to know] when to let a moment breathe, when you have to let the audience catch up with you," Rhea said. "It's very challenging. . . . I did not realize how hard it was going to be to find those moments."

And, she added, there's only one way to find them: "A lot of experimentation. I think it's important to let the actors help you make those decisions." Her cast is led by Kevin Adams as Joe Keller, the plagued patriarch at the story's center. "I just think it's a role he was born to play," she said.

"The eye-opening part" of solving these staging quandaries, said Rhea, is that "you have an instinct about it when you see it." She hopes the audience feels the same way. "We've only had two performances so far and people seem to be really responding," she said.

Though the show leaves no source of sadness unexamined — guilt, grief, envy, rage — "I don't actually think it's as taxing" as one might expect, Rhea said. "You just have to be willing to sit there and feel something."

Nov. 3 - Dec. 1, 1742 Church St. NW, www.keegantheatre.com, 703-892-0202

Bound for Glory

In conjunction with the 100th birthday of Woody Guthrie, "Woody Sez: The Life and Music of Woody Guthrie" is enjoying a month-long run at Theater J.

David M. Lutken, one of the show's devisers, estimates that about 80 percent of the production's text and music is Guthrie's own, culled from his autobiography and a mix of published and unpublished works.

"Woody wrote, they say, 1,000 songs," Lutken said. "And now the modern Woody Guthrie archives people, his daughter, believe it's more like 3,000 songs, now that they've gone through boxes of lyrics or poems. And so in those however-many songs, there are the 50 to 100 that a lot of people know and they're very important songs and poems, [but] there's always those odd things you've never heard of or seen before."

Source: http://www.news.theusalinks.com/2012/11/06/all-my-sons-at-keegan-theatre-is-satisfying-work-for-director-rhea-a-miller-advocate/