All My Sons Act One Summary & Analysis

Summary: Act One: from the beginning of Act One to when Kate enters

Joe Keller reads the newspaper in his backyard on a Sunday morning in August soon after the end of World War II. The stage is set to represent the backyard of a two-story house, with garden chairs, flanked by poplar trees. His neighbors Dr. Jim Bayliss and Frank Lubey drop by. The men engage in small talk about tobacco, the want ads, and movies. They observe that a strong wind the night before blew down an apple tree that the Keller family planted in honor of their son, Larry, who has been missing in action for three years. Frank reveals that he has agreed to figure out Larry’s horoscope to determine whether November 25, the day Larry disappeared, was a “fortunate day” astrologically. If it was, it might mean that Larry is still alive, an illusion to which Joe’s wife, Kate, still clings.

The Kellers’ other son, Chris, has invited Ann Deever to their home. They picked her up at the train station the night before. Ann once lived next door to the Kellers but moved away three years ago. Sue Bayliss arrives to tell her husband, Jim, about a patient’s phone call. Lydia Lubey arrives to tell her husband, Frank, that the toaster isn’t working. Chris appears and joins the conversation, too, choosing the book section of the newspaper. A boy from the neighborhood, Bert, enters and converses with Joe. They play an ongoing game in which Bert is a cop and Joe is his boss and they pretend there is a jail in the Kellers’ basement. Bert tells Joe that another boy, Tommy, says a bad word but won’t reveal what it is, and then Bert exits.

Chris tells Joe that he saw Kate in the yard during the storm in the middle of the night. He explains that at four in the morning, he looked out the window and saw the tree crack in the wind, and he saw Kate run inside to the kitchen, crying loudly. Joe and Chris discuss Kate’s unwillingness to accept Larry’s death and admit that they enable her denial. Joe blames her refusal to accept the truth on the newspaper stories about men who occasionally show up after years of being missing. Chris wants to be honest with Kate, but Joe claims that there’s no proof of Larry’s death, citing that “there’s no body and no grave.”

When Chris tells Joe that he intends to marry Ann, Joe questions Chris’s judgment. Chris even suggests that he would leave town and the business that he will inherit to build a family with Ann who was formerly “Larry’s girl.” Chris confesses that he feels like a “sucker” who is tired of being a good son and always trying to please others. When Joe states that he can’t believe that Chris would move away, Chris challenges Joe to then help him stay by supporting his choices: marrying Ann and finally admitting, to himself and to Kate, that Larry is not coming home. [492 words]

Summary: Act One, continued: from when Kate enters to the end of Act One

Joe’s wife, Kate, referred to as “Mother,” enters the yard. She tells Joe that he has mistaken a bag of potatoes for garbage and asks for them back. She has a headache. Kate has convinced herself that Ann is also still hoping for Larry’s return and admires that she remains faithful to him. Kate admits that she had a vision of Larry flying over their house when the tree fell. She heard his voice and saw his face. She claims that they planted the tree prematurely. When Chris leaves to get Kate an aspirin, she tells Joe that she suspects that Chris wants to marry Ann. She reveals that if Larry’s not coming back, she’ll kill herself.

When Chris tells his mother that it’s time they accept Larry’s death, she changes the subject to going out to dinner. When Bert rushes in and mentions the “jail” that he and Joe pretend is in the Kellers’ basement, Kate reacts angrily and demands that both Bert and Joe stop pretending.

When Ann joins them in the yard, she meets Jim Bayless, who now lives in the house in which she grew up. They talk about going out to dinner. Ann is staying in Larry’s old room, which still holds his clothes and recently shined shoes. When Kate asks Ann if she’s been dating, Ann confesses that she no longer waits for Larry’s return, which enrages Kate. Kate explains that she would know if her son were dead.

Ann also meets Frank, who inquires about her imprisoned father, Steve, but Ann reveals that she no longer communicates with her father. Joe recollects the day that he returned home, freed from prison, to rejuvenate his business. Ann recalls that her family were called “Murderers!” by the neighbors. The dialogue here reveals that Ann’s father, Steve, and Joe owned a factory that manufactured aircraft parts. The men knowingly shipped faulty engines to the Air Force that caused the deaths of twenty-one pilots. For this crime, Steve went to prison, but Joe was found innocent and returned to work and his family. Ann wonders if the faulty engines could have caused Larry’s death, a possibility that Joe refutes. Kate retreats into the house.

Joe says that while Steve made a mistake, he doesn’t consider him a murderer, adding that Larry never flew a P-40 aircraft, so the connection is impossible. Joe explains that Steve was in the cell next to his when they learned about Larry and that he heard Steve cry for half the night. The group quickly changes the subject and continues discussing their planned night on the town.

Later, alone in the yard with Chris, Ann accepts his proposal of marriage. They kiss several times. They have remained in contact through a series of letters, but they have not declared their love until now. Chris confides that during the war, he led a company of soldiers, most of whom didn’t survive. His guilt over their deaths contributes to his confusion about the war and his family’s role in it.

At the end of the act, Ann receives a phone call from her brother, George. He’s flown in from New York to visit Steve in prison, and now George wants to see her. He will arrive soon. While Ann is on the phone, Joe confides his fear that the courts might reopen the case. He tells Chris that he wants to build them a stone house to make a clean start. He wants to rename the business Christopher Keller, Inc. He wonders aloud if Chris is ashamed of the money he’s made. Chris exits. When Kate tells Joe to “[b]e smart” when George arrives, he reacts angrily and slams the screen door. [629 words]

Analysis: Act One

Act One establishes the main conflicts in the play, between father and son, husband and wife, truth and delusion, past and present, all springing from a crime that was committed three years earlier. The action takes place in the Kellers’ backyard, where nearly all the characters enter, interact, and exit. The audience hears Joe converse with his neighbors, his wife and son, the boy Bert, and Ann, who has just arrived for a visit. Although there are some light moments, the mood is mostly dark and foreboding. Kate’s denial and anger flare several times. Joe’s various triggers are exposed, including Steve Deever, Larry’s disappearance, and Chris’s future. Chris openly expresses his love for Ann, his respect for his father, some skepticism about the past, and his clarity about and acceptance of his brother Larry’s death.

As characters enter and exit the yard, they reveal only parts of themselves as they interact. Kate fears that admitting the truth will kill her and reiterates her vision of Larry alive and flying overhead the night before. Joe deeply wants Chris to stay in town and work at the family business. Ann no longer waits for Larry’s return and is in love with Chris, who loves her in return. George is going to arrive soon, but no one knows exactly what he will want or say when he does. The dialogue among these various characters reveals some of what happened three years ago at the munitions plant, but not the entire reality. The audience is allowed a peek into this family saga, but the metaphorical curtain is only pulled back a bit, just enough to incite curiosity and to reveal that nearly everyone onstage is concealing secrets.

The most significant events in All My Sons happened years before the action on the stage. In Act One, the characters don’t learn much new information, but the audience does. Information is revealed slowly and carefully as characters discuss the present and refer, sometimes obliquely, to the past. For example, when Joe insists that Steve is not a murderer, it’s the beginning of a revelation about himself. On the surface, the Kellers are a loving and respectable family, but underneath is a seething and diseased example of American hubris and gluttony.

If Joe represents the American Dream, it is intact in Act One, but its edges are fraying. Joe is a successful businessman in a solidly middle-class family in a quintessential small American town. By all appearances, life has been good to him. However, as in classical Greek tragedies, something has happened a long time ago that has tarnished the polished dream. The moral order of the universe was compromised by a conscious cover-up that resulted in a deadly sabotage. The irony that Larry may be dead because of the sins of his father is the scaffold that holds the play. Act One pulls back one layer of this reality, and the audience can expect that Acts Two and Three will reveal even more.

When Joe laments, “I had two sons, now I got one,” he is commenting on the tallies of war, but he is also beginning to confess his own culpability in what has happened to his family. He does not yet know the extent or the depth of his personal responsibility in Larry’s disappearance, but he feels the discomfort of knowing that the story of the faulty aircraft engines remains far from over. Joe may not be an educated man, but he is smart enough to know that his own judgment is pending. Kate’s fears are overt and delusional. Joe’s fears are covert and based in hard truths, long overshadowed.

The tension is Act One is offset a bit by the camaraderie among the women and men in the neighborhood, the affectionate flirtation when Ann is present, and the family’s lively plans to go out on the town that night, a plan that never materializes. However, the harsh reality of Steve in prison looms over the action like a ghostly specter from the past. Although Steve and Larry never appear in the play, both characters catalyze and propel the dramatic action. As the act ends, everyone anticipates that George’s arrival will reveal even more about the present, the past, and, most significantly, the near future.

Next section Act Two