The Man Who Had All the Luck

July 13, 2024

Sean Holmes' perfectly pitched, beautifully acted production inaugurates the playwright's enduring themes -- fathers and sons, the struggle between collective and individual responsibility, the role of fate, the American dream -- and compels in its own right as the story of a lucky man struggling to accept his good fortune.

The first of Arthur Miller’s plays to be produced on Broadway, “The Man Who Had All the Luck” nearly became his last: The disastrous reception to its 1944 premiere almost stopped Miller writing any more plays. Sean Holmes’ perfectly pitched, beautifully acted production argues persuasively, however, that the play does not deserve its back-catalog status: It inaugurates the playwright’s enduring themes — fathers and sons, the struggle between collective and individual responsibility, the role of fate, the American dream — and compels in its own right as the story of a lucky man struggling to accept his good fortune.

Here, he gives this situation a strikingly original twist: David Beeves (Andrew Buchan) is a young man who turns his seemingly natural good fortune into a burden. Guilt-ridden because he gets his girl and a thriving business while the dreams of everyone else around him are truncated or squelched, David starts overreaching financially to trigger the turn of bad luck he increasingly feels must be inevitable.

This is, of course, a powerful metaphor for early 1940s America, a lucky country that ended up on the winning side of two world wars without ever enduring a battle on its own soil (save Pearl Harbor) and which attempted to erase the nightmare of the Great Depression by embracing capitalism and individual success as its defining values.

Wisely, Holmes trusts auds to comprehend these resonances (and their contemporary applications) themselves, and focuses his production on the depiction of a believable, empathetic community of characters, with only small and well-chosen dashes of visual and aural symbolism.

Props and set-pieces are handsomely realistic, in particular a classic Marmon car which descends magnificently from the flies into David’s mechanic shop. The back wall of Paul Wills’ set is made up of horizontal slats, allowing Paule Costable’s lighting to shine through and create different moods. All design elements, including Christopher Shutt’s subtle sound work, come together most impressively in a final-act electrical storm that underlines the climactic action.

The production is extraordinarily well-cast across the board: Rising star Buchan has the corn-fed good looks and sense of simple solidity that David initially requires, but he also proves brilliantly able to embody the character’s decline into self-doubt and, perhaps, incipient madness.

Michelle Terry is equally good as David’s loving girlfriend-then-wife Hester, forced to discover depths of strength and anger as David’s demons threaten the equilibrium of their shared life.

The play’s central subplot concerns David’s baseball prodigy brother Amos (Felix Scott), whose life is dominated by the obsessive desire of their father (Nigel Cooke) to get him into the big leagues. Both actors are heartbreaking as men who desperately want to be someone they’re not, their physicality beautifully observed down to period-perfect haircuts.

Shaun Dingwall brings great wit and dignity to the intriguing role of Austrian immigrant mechanic Gus Eberson, who brings a European perspective and some of the play’s best lines.The sensitive playing of actors in smaller roles creates a strong sense of easy intimacy and draws attention away from Miller’s perhaps schematic attribution of a fatal weakness to each character.

In its slightly predictable structure, its leisurely pace (particularly the first act) and the inclusion of characters with very little stage time, the play feels old-fashioned, but Holmes’ loving production turns this quality into a virtue. The situations and characters are so well drawn that the twists and turns of the final scenes are genuinely gripping and the optimistic ending feels like an unexpected gift.