Out of the Box Theatre Company will present a seminal work of American theatre, Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, an Equity Showcase production featuring actors of stage, screen and TV directed by Justin Bennett, known for The Adding Machine Off-Broadway and The Boys Next Door. The play will be performed in a special Upper West Side production at the Bernie Wohl Center.

When All My Sons first opened on Broadway in 1947, the New York Times’ legendary reviewer Brooks Atkinson (whose name is now immortalized through one of NYC’s best-known theatres) wrote “the theatre has acquired a genuine new talent” and called the play “an honest, forceful drama” and a “pitiless analysis of character that gathers momentum all evening…”

Two years ago, a British reviewer wrote of a revival of the play in Kingston’s Rose Theatre in South West London, “Never has the American Dream been so aggressively ripped apart and turned into the American nightmare as it has in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, full of family deceit, lies and shame.”

Bennett embraced the challenge of directing one of the stage’s true classics from a gut sense that the time was ripe for Miller’s words to be brought to today’s audiences. “This is a play for our time,” says Bennett. “In a way that is true only of Miller’s greatest works, it is ageless, it is timeless, and its themes and story resonate as powerfully today as they did over 70 years ago in the aftermath of World War II.”

Filled with echoes of Greek tragedy, All My Sons speaks of a tragically flawed and failed American Dream, of guilt that courses through families like a disease, of cherished values first frayed, then threatened with annihilation. Assistant Director Lin Snider, who toured nationally with Mitzi Gaynor and has directed over 30 shows and over 60 musicals, adds, “I am confident that our audiences will find the play at once chillingly familiar and newly revelatory.”

Co-producer (with Susan Case) Halina Malinowski notes that Out of the Box chooses its annual productions with scrupulous care. The troupe, which consists largely of actors who are 50+, seeks works that relate to all ages and, says Malinowski, “strike a particular chord with those who would know of this time in American history through the lens of a parent’s reminiscences or even, possibly, through their own childhood or teenage memories.”

The stellar cast of seasoned professionals includes: J.D. Brookshire who appeared in the award-winning (Beaufort International Film Festival) Almost Paris; Matthew Dunivan who has worked in New Brooklyn Theater and performed in Shanghai’s International Theatre Festival; Marie Lenzi who recently appeared in Uncle Vanya and the film No Strings Attached; Susan McBrien who worked in Michael Clayton with George Clooney and Tom Wilkinson; Patrick McGuinness who acted in One-Eyed King with Chazz Palminteri; Anna Marie Sell who has appeared in FringeNYC and the American Shakespeare Center; Jennifer Wingerter from Off-Broadway’s You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown and national tours of Mamma Mia; David Winning who appeared in Virginia Rep’s The Full Monty and in Lifetime’s A Fatal Obsession; and Joe Wissler who appeared in Waiting for the Blackout on film. Award-winning child actor Nirvaan Pal (Access Broadway competition) also plays a key role in the production.

The crew includes: stage manager: Mary Linehan; scenic designer: Joshua Warner; costume designer: Vicky Butler; lighting designer/technical director: Pope Jackson.