Upon entering the University of Rhode Island's Robert E. Will Theatre for its 2015 production of All My Sons, audiences were greeted by the a cappella stylings of The Song Spinners' 1943 hit, “Comin' in on a Wing and a Prayer.” The muffled, scratchy recording of the upbeat wartime ditty, coupled with the inviting, American Craftsman–style suburban home on stage, imbued the production with an immediate air of comfortable nostalgia. The song, part of a family of up-tempo wartime propaganda pieces like “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” tells the story of a crew of American airmen who, through the sheer power of their faith and heroism, safely land their damaged plane after a triumphant air fight. The song's blithe patriotism and chirpy optimism echoed the warm, welcoming portrait of early twentieth-century America on stage, with its upper-middle-class comforts and easy air of security. Yet the play's printed program, adorned on the cover with a crumpled American flag against a stark black background, seemed to pierce through the pleasant nostalgia, especially as its pages pointed to the 1947 play's relevance for a twenty-first-century audience who has “lived through such debacles as General Motors delayed recall of defective automobiles and the news of 64 citizens killed in 2012 by meningitis caused by tainted medication.” Indeed, the aural and visual environment of URI's five-hundred-seat auditorium, like Arthur Miller's play itself, invited audiences to enter an ideal world of tranquil prosperity only to dismantle it with the horrifying truths that lie hidden beneath such idyllic façades.Of course, “Comin' in on a Wing and a Prayer” does more than contribute to a seemingly halcyon portrait of postwar America; it also ironically points to America's sons who did not come in—a nod to the painful truth that the Kellers' seductive backyard escape all but conceals. All My Sons is the story of patriarch Joe Keller, who was exonerated of wrongdoing when his successful manufacturing company shipped out a batch of faulty cylinder heads that resulted in the death of twenty-one American pilots. He has maintained his success and freedom only by assigning his rightful blame to his former partner, Steve Deever, who is currently serving a lengthy prison sentence while Joe enjoys the peaceful perks of upper-middle-class life. Joe's own son, Larry, was also a pilot and has been missing in action for three years, and though Joe and his son Chris assume him dead, Joe's wife, Kate, maintains hope that her missing son will one day return. These dead pilots haunt the actions and interactions of the play, with their presence visually suggested not only by the damaged, downstage apple tree that had been planted in Larry's memory, but also by an unobtrusively placed American flag dangling from the edge of the Kellers' back porch—a set piece not prescribed in Miller's stage direction. The disregarded flag, which remains throughout the production behind the backs of the onstage characters, literally and figuratively looms over the gradual revelation of Joe's guilt and the fragmentation of his harmonious family life. It offers a reminder of the high price that others have paid for Joe's willful ignorance and reckless disregard.All My Sons works best when its staging seduces the audience to the inviting equanimity of ignorance and indifference that sustains the Keller family, when playgoers likewise feel the intoxicating lure of the Kellers' serene backyard and would also like to forget that the rest of the world exists. To that end, set designer Cheryl deWardener could hardly have created a more welcoming, comfortable, and secluded world, with its enshrouding poplars, ivy-covered trellis, and stone-adorned home. The entire set is crafted in calming hues of green and white. When the play opens to find Bob Perry's Joe, a rosy-cheeked picture of avuncular affability, calmly seated in a backyard Adirondack chair and reading his newspaper under a cloudless sky, we understand his inclination when he says, “I don't read the news part anymore.” As his neighbor Frank, played by Reilly Hayes, relays, “it's all bad news,” and given their current surroundings, it's easy to empathize with their desire to ignore the painful realities beyond those towering poplars. When Frank announces the project he has undertaken at Kate's behest—an astrological reading of Larry that might suggest he remains alive—we see in Hayes's portrayal a kind of sycophantic urgency. Young, thin, and quick to motion, Hayes's Frank scurries to please his neighbors and keep their farfetched fantasies alive. Like everyone else who visits the Keller home, he is invested in the sustenance of the façade, because that façade sustains him, too.Philip Ryng's Dr. Jim Bayliss provides a calmer, more measured counterpart to his squirrelly neighbor Frank, yet Bayliss likewise treats Joe's backyard as his utopic escape, which is rendered particularly visible when his wife, Sue, played by Daraja Hinds, interrupts the exchange of patriarchal pleasantries and good-natured ribbing to fetch her husband to deal with an addled patient. That offstage addled patient, like the looming specters of dead pilots, reinforces for anyone onstage or off exactly what kinds of disruption await beyond the scope of Joe Keller's manicured lawn; when, in act 3, Jim reveals that he has known all along of Joe's guilt and that he has masked this knowledge with “a certain talent for lying,” he speaks not only for himself, but for the Kellers and all their circle, even for those audience members who would rather sip grape juice with the Kellers under an ivy-covered trellis than confront the invisible presence of the sick, the dead, and the dying looming somewhere offstage.But it is perhaps Louis Perrotta's George Deever whose act 2 appearance most closely resonates with the audience's own experience. Visually and vocally, Perrotta's entrance immediately signals him as an outsider to the pastoral pleasures of the Kellers' backyard. A tall and brawny figure, he towers over his castmates, and while Kate (Emma Sacchetti), Chris (Diego Guevara), and Ann Deever (Devin Vietri) have changed for an evening dining at the lake, George arrives in a sobering charcoal suit, tie, and fedora; his clothing, along with a hardened sneer of animosity, announce his anything-but-festive intentions. Furthermore, of the entire cast, Perrotta speaks with the most recognizably New England accent, which allows George to become an immediately identifiable figure to his Rhode Island audience; he is, like the audience, a guest in this world, an outsider who remains incredulous at the blind nonchalance that allows this family to laugh and celebrate while twenty-one pilots lie cold in the ground and his father withers away in prison. Perrotta aptly plays his entrance with stern resolution as he has just returned from a visit with his imprisoned father, who has informed him of the extent of Joe's guilt in both the faulty shipment and purposeful scapegoating. George has come to retrieve his sister from what he believes to be a nest of traitors, and Ann's renunciation of her father in favor of the Kellers visibly torments him; Perrotta's expressions during his confrontation with Ann deftly oscillate between rage, incredulity, and heartbreak. But the crux of Perrotta's performance, and the audience's identification with it, lies in his gradual seduction to the illusory promises that the Kellers offer, and Perrotta offers a remarkably believable transition from angry disdain to willing participation. As Kate, resplendent in blue taffeta, deflects George's anger with offers of grape juice, sandwiches, dinner, and even a dinner date, her words become a kind of siren song to the increasingly bewildered George. He remembers his happy childhood playing on this lawn, and we can almost see the memory of his ailing father drift away in a haze of pain-numbing nostalgia, beautifully mirrored by lighting designer Jen Rock's shadowy, disorienting suggestions of dusk. As Perrotta's body and face reveal an inner war of conscience and desire, his broad, tense shoulders sink; a wistful smile creeps upon his face. By the time he agrees to accompany the Kellers to a celebratory lakeside dinner, he appears to have given over entirely to the very charade he aimed to dismantle.Unlike those of Jim and Frank, however, George's stay in the Kellers' fantasy world is rather short-lived, as an offhand comment by Kate reveals a wrinkle in their otherwise smooth façade. “Joe, you're amazingly the same. The whole atmosphere is,” George muses nostalgically; “He hasn't been laid up in fifteen years,” Kate boasts, unintentionally revealing that Joe's alibi for the day those faulty cylinder heads were shipped out—that he was at home with the flu—was a sham. Recognizing the misstep, Perry's Joe offers a wonderfully shaky, “Except my flu during the war”; it's a half-baked attempt to reroute the conversation and restore camaraderie, and Joe knows it. Perry wisely delivers this line as if it were an unsure improvisation, and his nervous discomfort offers a stark contrast to the confident affability he has displayed throughout. It is almost as if Joe has briefly and awkwardly stepped out of character, revealing just how “in character” he has remained since we met him on that Adirondack chair. The moment is ripe with metatheatric reflection, as it becomes clear that Perry has been portraying a character who is likewise playing a character, and as George seems to wake from a nostalgia-induced dream, we do, too; suddenly, Joe's hearty laughter, Chris's overly eager smile, and Ann's flirtatious frocks all seem part of a self-consciously undertaken, yet desperate script. When Kate tells her son, “Your brother's alive, darling, because if he's dead, your father killed him,” we understand everything that rides upon their successful performance.The beckoning light at the center of this communally crafted fantasy is, of course, Joe, and director Bryna Wortman fittingly positions the family patriarch, for most of the play, directly in center stage. Perry, with his robust delivery and warm smile, offers up a remarkably likeable Joe, who is, in many ways, a kind of anti–Willy Loman: where Loman could never embody the high ideals he set for himself, Keller has beaten unthinkable odds to achieve the kind of popularity and success about which Loman could only fantasize. But in order to do so, Joe has had to sustain a thoroughly seductive performance of success and good-spirited likability that could convince an appellate court, his community, his family, and even the children of the man currently serving out his sentence, of his innocence. Just as Loman wished he could be, Joe is a well-liked father, businessman, and neighbor; he is, in fact, so well liked that everyone around him has willingly submitted to a narrative they know to be false in order to continue to bask in the light of his successes.Interestingly, Wortman's production opts to omit the scenes with Bert, the neighborhood boy who plays an imaginary game of cops and bad guys with Joe. The omission does cost the play a moment of artful foreshadowing, but something else is gained in the scenes' absence: an enhanced sense of Joe's paternal nearsightedness, as the audience never sees Joe exercise fatherly affection with anyone other than Chris. Once his guilt surfaces, Joe maintains that he did what he did to secure his family's well-being, but as he accepts Ann's revelation that Larry died on a suicide mission after he had discovered his father's guilt, Joe admits, “I think to him they were all my sons. And I guess they were.” In a beautifully subtle moment of revelation, Joe wanders stage-right from his usual central position to read Ann's devastating letter, allowing him to face the ignored American flag that has hung behind his back for most of the production. In this moment, Joe is finally forced to confront the limited scope of his paternal inclinations, to recognize that he held a duty to all of America's sons and not just to his own, and this rueful recognition becomes a truth too powerful for Joe to bear. Like the audience, the Keller family, and their neighbors, Joe could not see what lay beyond his lawn.