A View from the Bridge

Mike Fischer – Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge has been adapted for opera not once, but twice.  No surprise there: Even when gauged by the standards of a playwright addicted to melodrama, Bridge plays big – despite being inhabited by characters who live small and don’t always have words for what they feel.

In another triumph for one of American Players Theatre’s best directors, Tim Ocel teams with a cast led by a great Jim DeVita to exploit that disconnect between cramped circumstance and operatic passion. The result is a devastating Bridge, in which titanic onstage emotion continually engulfs the audience within APT’s intimate Touchstone Theatre. 

We first meet Eddie in the place where he’s most himself: on the docks abutting Brooklyn’s Red Hook slum, re-created here by scenic designer Takeshi Kata as towering pallets that fill the stage until they’re laboriously moved upstage by two dockworkers (Kipp Moorman and Tim Gittings).  Those pallets remain there throughout the play, marking the perimeter of Eddie’s narrow world.

His home within that world has been shrinking by the year, as the 17-year-old niece he and wife Beatrice (Colleen Madden) have raised – and whom Eddie loves much more than he should – comes of age.

“It’s wonderful for a whole family to love each other,” Madden’s Bea says to niece Catherine (Melisa Pereyra), in as close to a heart-to-heart talk as she can manage.  “But you’re a grown woman and you’re in the same house with a grown man.”

It’s Bea who sees furthest; like most of Miller’s women (think Kate Keller and Linda Loman), there’s also little she can do about it.  But Madden doesn’t play patsies, and it’s no surprise that this Bea radiates intelligence, fierce determination and anger.  She’s bowed but not beaten; Madden’s scenes with both Pereyra and DeVita register because this Bea has skin in the game.

She needs all of it to get through to Eddie, in denial about what he feels for Catherine and how that’s related to his increasingly aggressive treatment toward Rodolpho (Will Mobley) – given sanctuary in the cramped Carbone household alongside his brother Marco (Casey Hoekstra), even though both are illegal immigrants.

Catherine’s growing love for Rodolpho sends Eddie into a tailspin.  Feeling as much as any great Shakespearean character but without the language to express it, Eddie is a kettle without a valve, waiting to blow. In a fine performance as a one-man Greek chorus, Brian Mani gets it right as a lawyer telling us he himself knew from the start how this story had to end.    

Good as he’s been with words throughout his storied career, DeVita is even better here as a man with almost none.  He fully inhabits an Eddie at war with himself, as frustration and anger combat shame and remorse. Like every Miller protagonist, this Eddie wants way more from life than he’ll ever get. But DeVita also suggests a man who hates himself for wanting so much.

Caught in the middle, Catherine isn’t quite sure what she wants as a woman who doesn’t see or understand as much as she thinks – she’s no Bea – even if she understands much more than Eddie. Pereyra gives us this layering: she’s both Daddy’s little girl and a grown woman, craving Eddie’s love and attention even though she knows it’s time to move on.

Good luck with that; Ocel’s staging makes clear that this entire community is caught in a trap, where everyone has kept quiet about too much, for too long. “Whatever happened, we all done it,” Bea says to her niece. “Don’t you ever forget that.” Not likely, any more than you’ll ever forget the view from this “Bridge.”   

A Greek Tragedy: As made clear through an essay published in 1955 – the same year that the original, one-act version of Bridge opened on Broadway – Miller hoped to inject Greek tragedy into American plays.  As he rightly recognized, that meant defining tragedy in communal rather than merely individual terms; one must sense a moral and ethical balance between an individual’s fall and the values of the community from which that individual is expelled. 

Bridge comes closest of Miller’s major plays to achieving that balance; one feels for Eddie as a man trapped by his life, while recognizing the integrity and worth of the communal values he’s violated. DeVita ensures we empathize with the man. Madden is a towering force embodying the community he betrays. Ocel’s staging gives that community full-blooded life, from the docks where Eddie works to the men working there with him. They will encircle the stage from positions within the audience, standing guard as silent sentinels marking boundaries that cannot be transgressed.

Will Mobley and Casey Hoekstra: As the illegal immigrants being sheltered under the Carbone roof, Rodolpho and Marco are not only integral to the plot. They’re also a means of gauging whether Eddie will honor his commitment to his community, which offers such men sanctuary even when the law demands they be turned in. Giving strong performances, Mobley and Hoekstra help us register why such a commitment matters and what breaking it means.

Mobley’s Rodolpho is playful and exuberant, but he’s no child; Mobley makes clear that Rodolpho is less naïve and much more thoughtful about what he wants and how to get it than he first seems. Eddie isn’t wrong in speculating that among the reasons Rodolpho wants to marry Catherine is because it will allow him to stay in America; Mobley suggests a man who might simultaneously love Catherine and have his eye on this civic prize.

Hoekstra, who has continually impressed me since debuting at APT last year, exudes purpose and accompanying menace; this is a man on a mission who one shouldn’t ever cross. But he’s also no archetype; as a husband and father, he exudes a warmth and care that extend beyond duty.  It makes us like him more; he’s a version of the good man Eddie once was – and, in many ways, still is.

Prisoners of the American Dream: What immigrants like Rodolpho and Marco want isn’t all that different from what Eddie himself wants: a chance to live the dream that America promises and rarely delivers. Miller’s men pursue that dream through their children: Joe Keller through Chris in “All My Sons,” Willy Loman through Biff in “Death of a Salesman” and Eddie through his surrogate daughter in A View from the Bridge.

Yes, Eddie loves Catherine more than he should; remove the sexual component and one could say the same of Joe or Willy in relation to offspring who are similarly infantilized in ways that stymie their continued growth.  

In each case, members of the next generation embody their parents’ hopes and dreams involving who those parents themselves had aspired to be; when those hopes are thwarted, the search for scapegoats begins. Eddie’s scapegoat is an illegal immigrant, who he believes is “stealing” from him and all he’s worked for.  He’d be right at home in Trump’s America.

Justice and the Law: Eddie makes that complaint about stealing to Brian Mani’s Alfieri, himself an immigrant from Italy who is now a lawyer and who, as noted above, serves as the play’s Greek chorus.  I’ll confess he hasn’t always worked for me as a character when watching productions of Bridge; he can present as a stuffy windbag who slows the action and has little to say.

Not so here. Describing the disconnect between true justice and the law, Mani’s Alfieri helps us grasp the corresponding disconnect within a man like Eddie between what he feels and how he must live. Between passion and reason. And between the physical – very much in evidence, here, in a production where so much is expressed through faces and fists – and language. 

When Mani tells us that we must live our lives by learning to “settle for half” even as his furtive eyes betray a hunger for more, we understand how this play is about us as well as Eddie; we, too, live in a world where we regularly trim our passions and measure our words so that we’re not blown away by life’s storms. We live according to the law, because we must. But as theater regularly reminds us, the law doesn’t tell the whole story regarding who we are and what we want. It regulates how we behave. But it doesn’t define us.  And it isn’t always right, even when it’s righteous. 

A View from the Bridge: Miller’s title ostensibly refers to the Brooklyn Bridge, from which one can indeed look down on the Red Hook neighborhood in Brooklyn where Miller sets his play (itself close to where the Brooklyn-born DeVita’s family once lived).

But Miller’s bridge is also a connector joining hostile shores – or, if you’d like, suggesting a view that fosters multiple ways of seeing.  That empathy allowed Miller to better see Eddie – a man who, like Miller during the year Bridge opened, was consumed by illicit passion (Miller was then involved with Marilyn Monroe while still married to Mary Slattery).  Eddie is also a man who, like Miller’s onetime ally and brilliant director Elia Kazan, named names (Kazan did so when testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee; called before the same Committee four years later, Miller refused to cooperate).

“It was only during the latter part of its run in New York that, while watching a performance one afternoon, I saw my own involvement in this story,” Miller would write in explaining why he revised what had been a one-act play into the two-act piece now on stage in Spring Green.  “Quite suddenly the play seemed to be ‘mine’ and not merely a story I had heard.” 

It’s to Miller’s credit as a man that he offers this admission; it’s a reflection of his artistic integrity as a playwright that his ensuing revisions of Bridge made Eddie, in Miller’s own estimation, “more humanly understandable and moving.” Reflecting his confused feelings regarding Monroe and Kazan, Bridge is one of Miller’s least preachy, most morally conflicted plays. That’s among the chief reasons it’s also one of his best.

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