All My Sons

I saw the new Broadway revival of Arthur Miller's brilliant American tragedy All My Sons tonight.

I sat in my chair at the Shoenfeld Theatre, gripping the armrests, rolling my program, fiddling with my pencap...completely and utterly spellbound. Spellbound by this play--this play that I was supposed to have read in college I don't know HOW many times but never did. Dianne Weist's understudy was good! John Lithgow was positively wrenching! The production, in fact, was so superb, it made me question my place in this big, dumb thing we call The Theatre. It really did.

But as I sat there, another thought passed through my mind. One that eclipsed all the others.

Here was I, watching this play on a drizzly New York fall night...

And somewhere...out there...




Tom Cruise...is REAL.

That's all any of us were thinking! Oh my gosh. That kid is married to Tom Cruise. And she's RIGHT THERE. She's real. He must be real too.

I mean--do you guys see what I'm saying here? If Katie Holmes is real--and she is, I SAW her--then THAT means somewhere out there, there really IS a short, dreamy, sexually confused Scientologist movie star who made that cute girl give him a baby named Suri and jumps on couches and thinks medicine is bad.

I mean...he's not just some image on the Talky Box anymore. He's a real person that you can touch.

And once you come to terms with that, you have to ask, What does he DO?? If he's REALLY REAL, does he do really real things? Like, does he send her flowers to every performance? Does he call her up after every show to ask how it went and make small talk? Did he run lines with her in Beverly Hills? Did he offer up criticism of the play's fictional family, suggesting, perhaps, that these are the sorts of things that happen to people who take aspirin and don't follow Lord Xenu?

It boggles the mind.