ARTHUR MILLER'S TIMELESS "VIEW"

The late Arthur Miller has once again confounded critics who claimed that his plays would not stand the test of time. A revival of “A View from the Bridge”, his dark domestic drama set in 1950s Brooklyn, has just opened on Broadway. In a recent preview of this production, directed by Gregory Mosher, a packed audience sat transfixed as the woeful narrator warned of the show’s “bloody” preordained conclusion.

The show has already enjoyed quite a bit of press for marking the Broadway debut of Scarlett Johansson, who stars opposite the brilliant Liev Schreiber. Given the power of Hollywood starlets to pack theatres, regardless of their skills on stage (a mediocre Katie Holmes helped sell out a limited run of “All My Sons” on Broadway in 2008), sceptics were quick to roll their eyes. Yet Johansson-reined in with modest clothes and dark hair—makes for a convincing 17-year-old Catherine, the fraught object of her uncle’s desire. Schreiber, as the tormented Uncle Eddie Carbone, swaggers about the stage and once again steals the show. But Johansson certainly holds her own.

“A View from the Bridge” is not as well known as Miller’s “The Crucible” or “Death of a Salesman”. But like the others, it captures the tragedy in the ordinary. With the lyricism of an epic poem (complete with a one-man Greek chorus-Alfieri, the lawyer-narrator, played by Michael Cristofer), Miller tells a simple story that leads unswervingly to its nightmarish end.

The plot concerns the forbidden passion of a hard-working longshoreman. But it is also, obliquely, about the paranoid McCarthy era. The idea for the play came to Miller from an anecdote about a man who turned his cousins over to immigration authorities in order to prevent his niece from marrying one of them. Miller leapt at the chance to dramatise the illusion of America’s freedom, the empty promise of the American dream. At the centre of this faux ideal is Eddie Carbone: tormented, perverse, honest, occasionally heroic. Directed by Mosher (a veteran director who knew Miller well) and inhabited by Schreiber, this Eddie is potent with earnest desperation.

The set is a powerful rendering of 1950s blue-collar New York, full of red-brick facades, dreary Red Hook avenues and the cramped rooms of its hardscrabble residents. Some of the strongest scenes take place between Eddie and his wife Beatrice (played reliably by Jessica Hecht), who comprehends their doomed fate before anyone else.

Miller once observed that the essence of the tragic hero is in his attempt to evaluate himself truthfully and justly in an environment that makes this impossible. This is an indirectly optimistic view of humanity, as it suggests a wilful struggle for something better than what is. It is in this light that we must understand Eddie Carbone, Miller’s poignant anti-hero.

"A View from the Bridge", at the Cort Theatre, New York, limited run

~ KATHERINE RYDER

Picture Credit: Joan Marcus