Miller’s crossing

EVERY MOTHER’S SONS Janet Ulrich Brooks rehearses for TimeLine’s production.

Now that one of the greatest American plays to condemn ruthless capitalist greed seems timelier than ever, everybody wants to produce the thing. But merely wanting to produce a play is just the beginning of a process that can be lengthy and heartrending, as artistic directors Nic Dimond of Strawdog Theatre and PJ Powers of TimeLine Theatre learned this year.

Strawdog’s 2008–09 season announcement included a production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, helmed by Kimberly Senior, for February 2009. Those plans were hampered by last fall’s Broadway revival starring Katie Holmes. Dramatists Play Service denied Strawdog the rights, ostensibly due to the New York production’s potential touring plans. Strawdog and Senior switched to Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard, which went on to critical acclaim.

Yet Dimond still wanted to produce Miller’s 1947 play, about a war profiteer who destroys his family by shirking his responsibility for WWII pilots’ deaths. “When I read All My Sons, it actually tore the breath out of me,” he says. On October 16, 2008, the Broadway revival’s opening night, Dimond waited (breathlessly) for reviews; New York Times critic Ben Brantley’s summation that Simon McBurney’s production left him “stone cold” seemed to seal the show’s fate. Dimond was thrilled: A tour would be far from likely.

“Within days of that review,” Dimond says, “we started saying ‘Hey, we’re still here!’?” But he encountered what he calls “a bunch of runaround” from Dramatists regarding Chicago rights to the play. The revival closed on January 11 after just 101 shows, but Strawdog was still having no luck.

Around the same time, Powers was revisiting his company’s long-standing interest in the property. While the company produces historical plays, its preference for scripts with timely themes meant All My Sons would often be put on the shelf during season-planning meetings. But it “kind of leapt back to the forefront after watching a year of corporate scandal and Ponzi schemes and public official after public official losing their moral compass,” Powers says. “And the one moment that underscored that for me was the inaugural address, with Obama calling for a ‘new era of responsibility’—which is almost a direct quote from Act III.”

Powers approached Senior, who had directed for TimeLine before. When Senior, a Strawdog artistic associate, told him of Dimond’s concurrent bid, Powers says he felt sick to his stomach. “The admiration I have for Nic is extreme. You don’t hear too many talking shit about Nic Dimond,” he says. As they competed for the rights, Powers and Dimond kept the lines of communication open.

While TimeLine won in the end, All My Sons was still “the hardest show we’ve gotten in the past 13 years,” Powers says. Only in the 11th hour did he find out by chance that a local “to-be-unnamed very large theater” had been sitting on the rights for years. The licensing company never mentioned that to either artistic director; nor were the two men told why that company let Sons go or why TimeLine got it. (Dramatists didn’t respond to a request for comment.) “I wish I could intern at one of those places for a week to find out what magic things tip the scales,” Powers says. (For her part, Senior says, “I’m happy to finally do it.”)

Dimond is still smarting over Strawdog’s loss and the sense that Dramatists misled him last fall but says he’s happy to see Senior’s show. “TimeLine’s one of the companies in town I respect the most,” he says. “If it has to be anybody, I’m pleased it’s them and not who had the rights on supersecret lockdown for five years.”

TimeLine’s All My Sons starts previews August 27 at the Greenhouse Theater Center.

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