If the passage of time has only increased the sanguine myth of the Good War as a heroic interlude in the nation's far from spotless history, All My Sons, Arthur Miller's first major theatrical success, reminds us of a time in the immediate aftermath of the war when such an unprecedented global catastrophe had the more sentient among us supremely worried about the fate of the human race. It was hard to be complacent about a system that, while shifting the blame to the vanquished, implicated almost everyone to one degree or another in the atrocities just past and the ones to come, under the banner of fighting communism in the cold war.

All My Sons, about an industrialist whose wartime profiteering may have played into the death of his own soldier son, tries to delineate an ethic of personal responsibility too often lost in the machinery of modern society and its stock phrases about "doing one's job" or "doing business." Miller wants to show how in modern society traditional loyalties and values can perversely serve as the cloak for complicity in inhumanity.

I admit I found rereading the play a bit frustrating. Although All My Sons has enjoyed major revivals onstage and on-screen, Miller's somewhat kitschy dialogue and clunky melodramatic formulations have a way of bringing hand to forehead in a series of involuntary spasms while simultaneously reducing the significance of his moral. But to my surprise, the engaging aspects of the play turn out to be considerable in the note-perfect production piloted by Kent Nicholson for Palo Alto's TheatreWorks.

Animated by an admirable cast, led by the superb Will Marchetti as businessman-patriarch Joe Keller and the equally fine Carla Spindt as his wife, Kate, Nicholson's faithful rendering affirms that the more timeworn aspects of the play need not get in the way of a solid drama with a simple yet still palpitating message at its core. In fact, the nostalgia factor inherent in the play's postwar setting and perspective may only heighten Miller's intended contrast between the seeming serenity of American middle-class life – a surface as glossy and homey as a Saturday Evening Post cover in scenic designer Andrea Bechert's immaculate suburban backyard – and the bitter strife and disharmony uncovered in the course of the plot.

As the play begins, a wartime scandal has fractured the relationships between and within two families, the Kellers and the Deevers. Joe Keller's factory sent out defective airplane parts that led to the deaths of 21 pilots. Keller has been exonerated from charges of criminal wrongdoing while his partner, Steve Deever, has gone to prison protesting his innocence. Keller's son Chris (Jeffrey Cannata), a war veteran, has returned home with Deever's daughter, Ann (Cassie Beck), as his guest, in the hope of proposing to her. But such a liaison will be challenged on two fronts. Ann is the former sweetheart of Chris's older brother, Larry, a pilot missing in action and presumed dead by all except the emotionally fragile Kate, whose suffocating hold on the family revolves around her delusional obsession with Larry's imminent return. Moreover, Ann's brother, George (Geno Carvalho), soon arrives to take Ann home after a meeting in prison with their father convinces him that, between Keller and Deever, the jury has convicted the wrong man.

It all fits together a bit too neatly, with next-door neighbors crisscrossing the backyard to advance the action at key points. But the methodical way Miller takes a serene Sunday afternoon in Norman Rockwell's idea of paradise, and strips it bare one revelation, confrontation, and pretense at a time, here builds expertly in tension and significance until it attains a powerful dramatic pitch.

With war and war profiteering again ascendant, Miller's interrogation of our loyalties carries added weight. For Chris, the play's moral compass, they should properly lie in a humanitarian direction that, rather than narrowing the concept of the nation, expands the notion of the family. This comes from his observation that soldiers, in the crucible of battle, don't fight for anything so much as for their fellow soldiers.

"They didn't die," he says of the men who served under him. "They killed themselves for each other." Out of that brotherly sacrifice Chris sees a new moral order in embryo, but it's an insight that fills him with guilt on returning to civilian life, where his father's narrower loyalties predominate under the rubric of doing business. Challenging those is, for Chris and for Miller, the first step in ending business as usual.