All Summer Long (adapted by Robert Anderson from a novel by Donald Wetzel) tells, on the surface, at least, a very different story from Playwright Anderson's Tea and Sympathy (the longest-run dramatic play currently on Broadway). It chronicles a summer in a Midwestern household which proves a particularly disturbing summer for the family's twelve-year-old son. Young Willie at times achieves a new awareness of some of the facts (and fictions) of life, and at other times has awareness thrust upon him.
He lives in a house whose physical foundations are being eroded by the river that flows by it, which no one...