Arthur Miller’s first Broadway hit, “All My Sons,” was inspired by a newspaper account of  a young woman in Ohio who had informed on her father for having defrauded the military during World War II.  In his play, Miller changed the daughter to a son, “because,” he said later, “I didn’t know much about girls then.”

You could say that Julia May Jonas has changed her back. 

“A Woman Among Women,” the first production in The Bushwick Starr’s permanent new theater, is Jonas’s reimagining of “All My Sons” from a female perspective. It is part of her cycle of “response plays” to well-known dramas by male playwrights. (The others she’s responded to are Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” Sam Shepard’s “True West,” David Mamet’s “American Buffalo,” and Edward Albee’s “Zoo Story.”)

Miller’s play focused on a character, Joe Keller, whom he describes in the script as “a man among men.” This is what gives Jonas her title, and her assignment: As she puts it in a program note, her play is an attempt to discover what “a woman among women” might mean.

That woman is named Cleo. In the Miller play, Joe is a largely uneducated, self-made man who owns an airplane parts factory. Cleo has a PhD and runs a mental health wellness center for women

Joe has two sons – Larry, a military pilot who is missing in action and presumed dead, and his brother, who works for Joe and is wooing Larry’s old girlfriend, hoping to make her his wife.

Cleo has two daughters – Josephine (Jo), who is imprisoned with a sentence of twenty years for a violent crime, and Grace, who works for Cleo at her clinic and has become infatuated with Josephine’s husband, Roy.

Joe’s wife disapproves of her living son’s courtship, because she can’t accept that her other son is dead. Cleo is widowed, and has long shared her home with Tina, who, while not her romantic partner, has been in effect a second parent to her children. Tina likewise disapproves of Grace’s infatuation with Roy. But Tina is not in denial about Josephine’s situation. Rather, she’s working to change it.  She and Christine, a neighbor who is a lawyer, are filing an appeal to get Jo released from prison. They don’t believe that Jo was responsible for her actions; she was having a psychotic episode, which is a deep mystery, because Jo had been duly taking her medication. 

Most importantly, Joe and Cleo are both guilty of something they have tried to keep secret. Joe  allowed his factory to send out faulty airplane engines, resulting in the deaths of American pilots in the war, a crime he blamed on his business partner, who went to jail.  Cleo…well, I won’t give it away, but her action also affected other people.

There is a careful correlation between characters in the two plays. Both present ten characters on stage, mostly neighbors, including a doctor and a lawyer, with some biographical alterations: The doctor and lawyer in the Jonas play are both women; the doctor works for Cleo at the Center; the lawyer is married to another woman. Both plays follow the general rules of Greek tragedy, but Jonas also offers echoes of Miller in some very specific moments. At the beginning of Miller’s play, for example, Joe and his doctor neighbor talk idly about how the newspaper is predicting rain that night – to which the doctor replies “Then it can’t rain.” In the Jonas play, Cleo says her phone says it’s raining, and her doctor neighbor Sarah points out it isn’t raining.

These are throwaway moments, but are we supposed to take some deeper (foreshadowing) meaning from them: Things aren’t what they seem? The authoritative isn’t always trustworthy?

As thought provoking as tracking the similarities and subtle differences between the two plays might be, this strikes me as of secondary importance to all but scholars, critics, and Miller enthusiasts — and only avid enthusiasts, at that, since “All My Sons” is not among his most popular. (It’s worth noting that Miller’s “The Crucible” has been revisited by two other women playwrights,  Sarah Ruhl in “Becky Nurse of Salem” and Kimberly Belflower in “John Proctor is the Villain,” which is coming to Broadway in the Spring),  What matters to the average theatergoer is surely that “A Woman Among Women” is more than just an exercise in male-to-female transpositions; it takes on a life of its own– although the gestation period is considerable.

There are pleasures along the way.  There’s a sense of informality in the staging (albeit actually choreographed with precision) that communicates a communal feeling — a feeling that (dare I say it) generally seems to come more easily to women than to men.

The audience sits in chairs arranged in a couple of concentric circles in what resembles a community center, around green carpeting that is meant to suggest Cleo’s backyard. The characters sometimes sit among us, or walk around us, looking at individual audience members directly as they speak. Much of their early conversations come off as idle chatter. Occasionally, they break into song; at one point, they lie flat on the floor while playing their musical instruments in the air. At another, Lane the musician (husband of Sarah the doctor) leads the audience in tapping out a harmony of rhythms with our hands.

But what all this roundabout locution and theatrical excursion mean is that it takes a while to figure out who’s who and what’s what, in large ways and small. The characters talk off-handedly about painting over Jo’s penis, before we eventually get that she was a mischievous graffiti artist. (The symbolism is too obvious.)

 It helps that the cast is terrific, especially Dee Pelletier as Cleo, but almost all of them offer memorable moments, such as those involving Zoë Geltman as Grace: She quotes from Woody Allen; declares “For once in my life I want to do something for me,” to which Cleo responds “What do you do that’s not for you?”; she graphically describes the physical sensations of her attraction to Roy; she confesses her feelings to Gabriel Brown as Roy, whose dumbfounded expression is priceless. The cast as a whole is able to seem playful during the musical interludes, and casual during most of their time on stage, as if just living their lives, but they persuasively inhabit their characters, particularly when things turn tense.

That is most evident in the last fifteen minutes of the production, when the cast rearranges our seats, we are suddenly watching a proscenium stage, and the plot and the point – the full dimensions of the tragedy — come into sharp focus. 

It’s distinctly possible that I enjoyed “A Woman Among Women” more because of where it is being presented– a clean, open, well-lit  new venue (in another poorly lit and forbidding-looking block down the street from the Halsey L stop in Bushwick.) The new space has some elegant touches (a mural, a red velour couch) but they are modest enough so that they don’t feel like a betrayal of the theater’s shambolic roots.  The toilets are “gender-neutral” but not awkward because each is in an individual room with floor to ceiling doors.  The sinks are sleek-looking, modernist and communal.

Everything about The Bushwick Starr, and everybody in it, felt welcoming. 

A Woman Among Women
The Bushwick Starr through November 3. Update: Extended to November 10.
Running time: 100 minutes, no intermission
Tickets: $27.85 – $48.75
Written by  Julia May Jonas
Directed by Sarah Hughes
Scenic design by Brittany Vasta, costume design by Wendy Yang, lighting design by Masha Tsimring, sound design by Jordan McCree,
Cast: Brittany K. Allen as CHRISTINE, Gabriel Brown as ROY, Annie Fang as RIDA/TRISHA, Zoë Geltman as GRACE, Hannah Heller as SARAH, Lucy Kaminsky as TAMMY, Drew Lewis as LANE, Maria-Christina Oliveras as TINA, Dee Pelletier as CLEO
Production photos by Valerie Terranova,
Closed Captioning (English & Spanish) available during the following performances: Oct 21, 24, 27, 31