What Is an Again and Again Moment in a View From the Bridge

February iv, 1983

Arthur Miller's 'View From the Span'

By FRANK RICH

t's thrilling to watch ii long-estranged old friends come up to i another's rescue in their hour of darkest need. And, in a figurative sense, that'southward but what is happening this moment at the Ambassador Theater. The 2 old friends I refer to are Arthur Miller and Broadway. Mr. Miller hasn't had a success in a Broadway house for well over a decade. Broadway is in the midst of its leanest flavour in years. But thanks to the stunning revival of ''A View From the Bridge'' that opened last night, Mr. Miller has found a haven on Broadway once again, and Broadway has found a much-needed evening of electric American drama. I promise no one wakes us up and tells united states that this is all a dream.

Who would have predicted this fortunate turn of events? Not this theatergoer, who has some stiff reservations about Mr. Miller's play, which offset appeared on Broadway as a 1-acter in 1955 and is seen hither in the full-length, at present standard version that Peter Brook start staged in London in 1956 and that Ulu Grosbard mounted Off Broadway in 1966. Those reservations aren't eliminated past this production, which originated last season at New Haven'due south Long Wharf Theater, but they are certainly minimized past the shrewd and forceful direction of Arvin Brown and by the tumultuous star performance of Tony Lo Bianco. Mr. Lo Bianco is such a dynamic and enveloping force that the audience has no hazard to even think of questioning the play until well after it'due south over.

The star plays Eddie Carbone, the Brooklyn longshoreman with a secret, unrecognized passion ''that had moved into his body similar a stranger.'' That passion is an incestuous, possessive honey for the 17-year-former orphan niece, Catherine (Saundra Santiago), whom he and his wife Beatrice (Rose Gregorio) have raised like a girl. ''A View From the Bridge'' is most the destruction the jealous Eddie wreaks on himself and his family once Catherine falls in honey with Rodolpho (James Hayden), an Italian cousin of Beatrice's who is living at the Carbone house as an illegal immigrant. Eddie's reckless path of vengeance leads inexorably to catastrophic violence, but not before he has committed the cardinal sin against his close-knit customs - informing to the clearing police.

Mr. Brown stages ''A View From the Bridge'' for what information technology near successfully is: not a McCarthy-era parable or a universal morality play, but a vivid, crackling, idiomatic psychosexual horror tale. Though the evening eventually builds to an operatic crescendo, the director takes the rise slowly, reinforcing the playwright's souvenir for realism so that nosotros'll be fatigued fully into the sordid chain of events. Mr. Miller's ear for his characters' working-class vernacular is extremely well served, the comic rhythms included. The strategically placed theatrical eruptions come to a boil of a sudden in otherwise small-scale, bawdy domestic scenes.

This is a play that, in its own words, offers ''no mystery to unravel,'' but the air is charged with tension in this production. When Eddie kisses Rodolpho on the oral cavity in the desperate attempt to brand him as a homosexual before his niece, the moment yet catches us unawares and shocks. The spellbinding mood is enhanced by the designers, who give the waterfront a foreboding, motion picture noir aura. Hugh Landwehr frames the shabby Carmine Hook living room and the street exterior confronting the intimidating span of a bridge and a long dark staircase that surely must lead to doom. Ronald Wallace'due south lighting suggests that every playing area, fifty-fifty the corner phone booth from which Eddie makes a fateful telephone call, is illuminated by a single hanging lightbulb.

Mr. Brown's staging is also to be applauded for what it deemphasizes in the text. Along with the contrived plot setups, notably a sudden bail negotiation in Act Two, the trickiest aspect of this play is Alfieri, the lawyer who serves equally a Greek-chorus narrator. Alfieri speaks in the rhetoric of tragedy and constantly makes portentous announcements nigh Eddie'south ''destiny'' running ''its bloody grade.'' But every bit many accept noted, Eddie does not have the grandeur of a tragic hero - he's only a psychotic nearly to be devoured past his long-repressed sickness. To downplay the exalted claims that Mr. Miller makes for his protagonist through Alfieri, Mr. Brown has enlisted that fine actor Robert Prosky to play the lawyer in the most unassuming, intelligently humorous manner imaginable. The strategy considerably lightens the play'due south burden of pretentiousness.

Mr. Prosky's performance typifies the supporting cast's loftier quotient. Miss Santiago makes a very impressive Broadway debut as Catherine. She isn't a Lolita or a fool merely a genuine innocent who just doesn't recognize until also late why her uncle and then domineeringly demands her affection and obedience. Once that recognition comes, the actress blossoms from a girl into a woman, and, by the cease, into a woman old earlier her fourth dimension. As her suitor, Mr. Hayden is also an affecting overgrown child, pathetically clinging to his immigrant's politeness in the face of Eddie'southward repeated taunts - until, finally, he, too, must reach adulthood through rage. Alan Feinstein is charismatic in his delineation of the more brutal expressions of anger that ascertain Rodolpho'due south blood brother, Marco.

As the married woman Beatrice, the play's smartest and most brutalized character, Rose Gregorio is chilling. When she lashes out bitterly at Eddie virtually her own unhappiness, he's too captivated in his own obsession even to expect at her. Forced to come across that both she and her husband are now forever isolated in their own separate miseries, Miss Gregorio yanks her eyes and mouth into slashes of hurting that are horrifying to behold. And she tops this later on on, when she conveys Beatrice'south dawning realization of Eddie's ultimate betrayal by locking herself into her chair, hands on knees, as if the weight of her knowledge is crushing her to death.

It says a lot virtually Mr. Lo Bianco'south performance that, powerful as it is, information technology does non obliterate the others. True to the production, his Eddie is in human calibration. The character doesn't know what's eating him - or at least he's the concluding to know - and the actor uses subtle ways to fill up in gradually the guilt and self-revulsion that just slowly come to the surface.

At offset a jocular if testy neighborhood Joe, Mr. Lo Bianco then seems to drift apart from himself - as if he were outside looking in, trying to decipher with everyone else the unarticulated warped logic that leads him to challenge Catherine's every little effort to venture from the nest. ''His optics were like tunnels,'' says Alfieri, and and then Mr. Lo Bianco's are. Volatile one moment, totally withdrawn the next, the thespian travels within a cloud of impenetrable turbulence that visibly buffets all effectually him.

But fifty-fifty early on, at that place's a hint of the larger explosion to come: nosotros see an undefinable, separate-2nd twist of perverse malevolence to the coincidental hand gesture that Eddie uses to dismiss Catherine'south plea to wear high-heeled shoes. Once Eddie finally does recognize that what he hungers for in life is not the ''respect'' he talks about only his niece, the shattering guilt transforms him into a sweaty, deranged, hissing animal - a rat. Mr. Lo Bianco is a slight, anonymous-looking man, just he looms up to make the theater shake.

Maybe nosotros tin't be deeply moved by this cruel man'southward plight, but we are nonetheless trapped totally within it. What is deeply moving about the evening is the spectacle of seeing our theater lovingly make the absolute most of its still usable and valuable past.

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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/books/00/11/12/specials/miller-bridge83.html