A View From The Bridge

Arthur Miller’s classic masterwork, A View From the Bridge, is reaching the tail end of its intense production’s run with a flourish. A truly excellent piece of work, the play’s central theme of the power of bonds come through brilliantly at times in Miller’s words.  While some of the performances come off as very actorly, overall, the work is done more than justice to the piece in the current production running now at the Cort Theatre.

Focusing on an Italian family in Red Hook, the tale of a man drawn to his wife’s niece while harboring illegal alien cousins brings modern parallels and the power of the relationships and desired relationships bring forth so much drama its daunting to imagine a play this powerful and intimate getting developed today.  Liev Scheieber, giving his usual full force performance, inhabits the patriarch quite well and delivers a dynamic, melancholic character that haunts the audience.

Schrieber’s Eddie Carbone is stuck.  A longshoreman who pays for his wife’s cousins to travel illegally from Italy, only to harbor them in his own small apartment in Brooklyn, Eddie is setup to be “a good guy”, but the narrator (Michael Cristoffer’s Alfieri) indicates that he’s only good to a point.  The cracks in the facade expand as his interaction with his wife’s niece, Catherine (played by Scarlett Johansson), alludes to his being creepily drawn to her, who he’s treated as a ward.

The tale of a gentleman being drawn to his ward isn’t new.  Tales of this nature go back quite a bit, and there are so many examples in classic literature, but what stuck out to me was Rossini’s opera, The Barber of Seville.  While that’s set up for comedy, the concept is the same.  A young suitor, whom the older man believes is unsuitable, tries to court the younger woman, and the older man tries to get in the way.  Here, Catherine’s suitor is a man (Morgan Spector’s Rodolfo) Eddie describes as “funny”, which was a clear code for gay, and only wants Catherine as a means to be in the US legally.

Before I get into the illegal alien plot-line, which is a whopper given the current climate around the issue, I want to bring up my only real issue with the old man-younger female ward plot-line.  Its not that it happens, since the audience is clearly supposed to be angry with Eddie for harboring these feelings while still confoundingly sympathetic since Rodolfo is such a problem, its that Johansson is too old for the role.

Johansson gives an excellent performance, hitting all of the character notes quite well.  She’s always been more than capable when it came to intimate roles (and not so much in the bigger, broader commercial pieces), and I wasn’t so sure she could handle a stage role.  But she does, with aplomb.  However, casting such a well-known actor who’s been performing for more than a decade as a female lead in her 20′s as a teenager just was a mistake.  It would be easy to see Schrieber and Johansson in a romantic situation on screen, and it wouldn’t cause a blanch.  Here, though, Johansson’s simply too old for Catherine.  And Schrieber is more attractive than you expect Eddie to be, which distorts just how creepy his character is.  The semi-incestual concern (she’s not his blood relative) is upsetting, but not as powerful because of the casting.

Regardless, the characters of Eddie and Catherine clearly share a bond, and Eddie very clearly misreads the intention of that bond as he contemplates Catherine’s future.  Its surely creepy, and Schrieber is able to deliver a self-loathing factor that grounds the role, and keeps his Eddie from being a complete schmuck.

Given all of the Fox News coverage of illegal aliens, and the race baiting involved, its somewhat startling to consider the mid-twentieth century boom of white illegal aliens.  It simply didn’t dawn on me, and likely others, just how prevalent it was.  There are references to the mob, “the syndicate”, being involved, and its not hard to understand the power involved.  To see the fear in Spector’s eyes as he enters, along with his cousin (Corey Stoll’s Marco), into a world he doesn’t understand, yet wants to firmly hold on to, is uncomfortable yet comforting.  He should want to be here, but shouldn’t want to stay in the manner he came.

Spector’s Rodolfo takes a stay-at-all-costs, marry-for-the-papers stand, whisking the younger Catherine up in a swirl of romantic gestures.  Whether or not he is gay remains unresolved, but his general displacement in the rough Red Hook world is obvious, and to some extent disarmingly sweet, which draws Catherine to him.  Stoll’s Marco, a stereotype of a man trying to provide for his foreign family, fits in easily, and when Eddie eventually turns the two aliens in to “Immigration”, Marco’s anger at his circumstances erupt into a final, dramtic climax.

Eddie’s shattering of his familial bond is palpable, especially since he can comprehend that its a mistake but allows his ulterior emotions to overrun him.  His actual relationship gets trumped by his theoretical one, and it ruins him completely.  Schrieber’s descent into ruin is well-executed, and the final moment is harrowing.

Jessica Hecht’s Beatrice is something of a cuckholded wife, if that’s even possible.  She’s utterly displaced from her marriage in favor of her sister’s daughter, and knows it.  While she has a rather unfortunate Brooklyn accent, Hecht’s emotional range, from somber and hopeful to sorrow and regretful, doesn’t seem like a big step, but she plays it quite well, delicately moving herself to both fight and support her husband’s emotional ruin.  And her performance in the last ten minutes of the play was simply fantastic.  Its really a shame she had such a poor dialect coach, since it certainly impeded her earlier moments.

Overall, Miller’s masterwork is in good condition, and seems to be a timeliness tale of the power of intent and the regret of upsetting the bonds of family.