Several years ago, in my review of a production of Arthur Miller’s timeless drama All My Sons, I noted that there is no playwright who can match Miller’s unique gift for writing the great American tragedy. But that doesn’t mean his works can’t inspire young writers from adapting Miller’s themes in a more contemporary setting and style. Last season’s John Proctor is the Villain was an intriguing spin on Miller’s The Crucible. And now Julia May Jonas’ play, A Woman Among Women, filters Miller’s moral conundrum in All My Sons through a feminist lens. Instead of fathers and sons, her version concerns mothers and daughters. And while I applaud the effort, the work falls well short of its ambitions.
If it seems unfair to draw comparisons, Jonas’ play features numerous parallels to the Miller classic. The title comes from Miller’s description of his protagonist, Joe Keller, the owner of an airplane parts factory as “a man among men.” Jonas’ protagonist, Cleo (nicely played by Dee Pelletier) runs a wellness center in her Northampton, Massachusetts community. And it is quite a community. Jonas crowds her stage with ten characters, presumably to match Miller’s cast of ten. But there is a big difference. For the bulk of the 100-minute play, the characters interact casually about random subjects and it takes a long time before we’re able to figure out who’s who and how they relate to one another. In between they frequently break the fourth wall, and there are all manner of gimmicky distractions, such as a couple of scenes in which the actors don early American costumes and dance for no apparent reason. And there’s a musical sequence in which the audience is asked to participate by rhythmically rapping on their laps.
A program note says that the play asks what it means to inhabit a role within a community and to define oneself against or within expectations of others. It’s a vague notion and director Sarah Cameron Hughes’ staging doesn’t help to clarify the point of spending so much time on unrelated activity. The playing space – in the round with audience members seated along the periphery – offers no sense of time or place. The play begins as the actors enter from all sides setting up lawn chairs alongside the seated audience members. If intended to create a communal effect with the audience, it mostly causes confusion. And unlike in All My Sons, most of Jonas’ characters are peripheral to the story.
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★★☆☆☆ review here.]
The main folks, beside Cleo are her younger daughter – Grace (Zoë Geltman) – the overlooked good one – who works at the clinic with her mother. There’s also Cleo’s domestic partner Tina (Tina Chilip) who helped to raise the daughters, and Roy (Gabriel Brown), the husband of Cleo’s elder daughter Jo who’s bipolar with violent tendencies. We don’t see Jo because she is serving a 20-year prison sentence for beating up an elderly man with a crow bar. That key plot point is only explained in the play’s last half hour.
When it does kick in, there’s a deliberate shift as the actors move some of the seated audience members to another side of the stage in order to make room for a realistic proscenium style backyard porch setting that slides in from behind curtains. It’s the very same setting Miller describes in All My Sons. The house lights dim and suddenly it feels like we’re in a very different piece of theater.
I won’t go into specifics but this is where Jonas attempts to make a direct comparison to the moral and ethical dilemma in Miller’s play. Joe Keller is revealed to be morally corrupt, a selfish man who makes a tragically consequential decision motivated by greed, and he is rightfully shunned for it. Cleo’s actions, intended to mirror Joe’s failings, don’t compare at all. Her consequential decision is largely justified, if unfortunate, and motivated by a selfless act of good will. It certainly doesn’t rise to the level of tragedy. And yet Jonas contrives an ending to match Miller’s resolution which feels entirely undeserved.
Jonas is clearly a canny writer with a facility for picking up on cultural touchstones. Throughout, she studs the play with thoughtful and humorous gems such as this line from Grace as she reveals to Roy her longtime crush on him: “Other than fucking you, I just want you to be happy.” In another sequence, she has a character sing about the challenges of teaching her young daughter to be a contributing citizen. It’s insightful but like so much of the text, it comes out of nowhere.
A Woman Among Women is part of Jonas’ cycle of plays inspired by other classics. True West and Long Day’s Journey into Night among them. I don’t know how well those other plays turned out but with A Woman Among Women, she seems to have bitten off more than she can chew trying to match Miller’s immaculately constructed masterpiece. Given her particular talents, she might consider tackling a Chekhov work which would be more suited to her intuitive gifts for writing about disparate characters interacting in confined settings. She wouldn’t have to work so hard forcing dramatic parallels that just don’t fit.
A Woman among Women opened June 4, 2026, at the Claire Tow Theater and runs through June 28. Tickets and information: lct.org
