“The guy ain’t right . . . He has blond hair . . . He looks like a chorus girl . . . He sings . . . He cooks . . . If ya close the paper real fast, you could blow him over!”
The litany of sniping remarks that Brooklyn dockworker Eddie Carbone (Richard Baird; "The Rainmaker") makes about his wife’s immigrant cousin Rodolpho is a virtual catalogue of gay stereotypes.
What makes Arthur Miller’s A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE famous in the history of gay representation in theater is that in 1955, when the play premiered on Broadway, such insinuations were indeed lethal weapons.
For the audience, the climactic moment when Eddie attempts to “prove” Rodolpho’s closeted queerness by planting a kiss on his lips could not have been more horrifying than if he’d hacked him to death with a machete.
The character of Rodolpho was never acknowledged to be gay anyway, yet the play was widely considered to be “about” homosexuality, with so much imputation that England’s puritanical public censor, Lord Chamberlain, initially banned it from the London stage. Today we understand that the play is indeed about insecurity, jealousy and betrayal, but also homophobia, a term that hadn’t entered public discourse until psychologist George Weinberg coined it in 1969.
Consumed with a perverted, guilty desire for his teenage niece Catherine and with sexual dysfunctional with his wife Beatrice, Eddie turns to gay-bashing rather than face the painful truth about himself. Catherine’s coming of age has put a strain on what you imagine has always been an uneasy household, given Eddie’s combustible presence. He adores his niece, and Beatrice has started to worry about the possessiveness of that adoration.
David Ellenstein’s superb revival at the Laguna Playhouse (now playing through November 17th) reveals layers of psychological complexity that other Miller productions barely touch. Rodolpho is often cast and played as vaguely effeminate, allowing the audience to consider that Eddie’s accusations might be justified. Here, Rodolpho (Coby Rogers; "Deathtrap") comes across as a bit mincing, but assumed to be straight. But he’s no knight in shining armor either: when he tells Catherine (Marie Zolezzi; "Big Break") “Don’t cry . . . you’re my little girl now,” the director lets us see that Rodolpho quite possibly has some of the same infantilizing, patriarchal attitudes toward women that Eddie does.
Miller's writing style is often characterized as a mixture of tragedy, realism, expressionism, and capitalism. And in this production, he gives us a real appreciation for the richness of his characters. In Mr. Baird’s excellent performance, you see that Eddie’s driven not by malevolent ignorance but by stunted passion, his relentless denial of which fills the room with almost unbearable tension. He’s more than matched by Margot White’s (Brdwy: "Farinelli & The King") awe-inspiring turn as Beatrice, who calls Eddie for what he is without ever surrendering her compassion or her dignity. And Ms. Zolezzi, making her Laguna Playhouse debut as Catherine, embodies adult flirtatiousness dangerously wrapped around a child’s need for affection.
Veteran actor Frank Corrado (Recipient: The William & Eva Fox Foundation's Distinguished Achievement Fellowship - TCG), himself a director/producer/playwright for well over a half century, transforms himself into the tough-talking Brooklyn lawyer Alfieri who doubles as Eddie’s therapist as well as the play’s narrator. Here, Mr. Corrado speaks as ponderously of bearing witness to the inevitable pain of fate as any Greek chorus ever did. In effect, Alfieri becomes our conduit into a world where irrational passions trump even the instinct to survive. That’s the world of the dockworker Eddie Carbone, Beatrice, the wife he loves too little, and Catherine, the niece he loves too much.
Perhaps the most startling accomplishment of Director Ellenstein’s play is that it not only justifies Miller’s use of the character, Alfieri, but also makes him absolutely essential to our experience of the play. Mr. Corrado’s Alfieri begins the play, like us, as an observer, protected by the civilized spectator’s distance; by the evening’s end, he has entered the ring — literally — and joined the bloody fray at its center. He cannot help himself, and we completely understand why.
When the play first appeared, it was viewed as an implied parable about McCarthyism — Eddie’s ratting on Rodolpho to immigration authorities was the equivalent of “naming names.” Given such topicality, you might expect A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE to be hopelessly dated. But just the opposite is true. After all, betrayal wasn’t limited to the ‘50s. Nor was homophobia, and the havoc it has wreaked on households and communities in contemporary society.
David Ellenstein, Laguna Playhouse’s brilliant Artistic Director (who also serves North Coast Repertory with the same title), has fully exposed the bare bones of Miller’s self-imploding Brooklyn longshoreman. What he and his cast, led by an astonishing Richard Baird, finds beneath the play’s period trappings and kitchen-sink naturalism is a pure primal force. And in this present political climate, Arthur Miller’s exalted notion that classic tragedy and the common man can indeed coexist has never seemed so organic.
The music we hear catches us off guard. A light “Let it Snow” from Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn. A few off-putting remarks in the beginning, but no throbbing requiem. More like an Archie Bunker episode at first without so much humor. As the night wears on, the taunting jibes, contempt and indictments become more pronounced, our mood darkens, our nerves become frazzled and we sense a state of perpetual foreboding. The audience desperately wants to be lulled into the hope of a happy ending. But we have been fully warned right from the beginning.
Yet despite that blunt declaration of intent, the play holds us with the tenacity of one of those violent, slow-building quarrels that have perhaps even erupted within your own family, poisoning the atmosphere for weeks before and after.
What remains unspoken among the three becomes destructively obvious after the arrival of Beatrice’s Sicilian nephews, Marco (Lowell Byers, who plays Jed @thechosentvseries) and Mr. Rogers' Rodolpho, who have come to New York illegally to find work. The Carbone family’s protection of their foreign relatives is a point of honor, one that disastrously conflicts with what a self-deluding Eddie believes is his duty to Catherine.
The entire cast — which also includes Steve Froehlich ("Sweat") and Matthew Salazar-Thompson ("The Car Plays") as the immigration officers — gives full weight to every emotional nuance, until shades of familial love and hate burst into white-hot flame. Alfieri aside, however, none of its characters are grandiloquent, and much of the play’s power comes from the aching gap between simple words and vast, complex feelings.
With a simple one-set scenery of inside the family home, a large picture of a bridge looms high overhead. The performers are attired (by Elisa Benzoni) in clothes similar to the low economy blue-collar work force of the ‘50s, but they seem to exist with no particular time stamp: completely in the past, in the moment and in eternity. As Director Ellenstein arranges them into squirming, heartbreaking tableaus of affection and hostility, of dominance and submission, a single chair held high in the air becomes an Olympian emblem of one man’s terminal defeat. A dinner table scene in which the family tries to make soothing chitchat finds poses of bleak isolation, as the silence between their words keeps widening into uncrossable chasms.
There’s a sense of tightness so acute that you can’t imagine it being sustained for any great length of time, and even gets more relentless as the two acts bear down on its fatalistic somberness, as if in perpetual anticipation of some great, annihilating gladiator match. That such a confrontation will come is signaled by Mr. Baird’s hulking, battle-ready physique and eyes that are, as Alfieri says, “like tunnels.” Yet, although most of us don’t operate — thank God — at Eddie’s sustained level of ecstatic anguish, it is almost impossible not to identify with him.
A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE, Written by ARTHUR MILLER; Directed by DAVID ELLENSTEIN; Playing November 3rd through November 17th at LAGUNA PLAYHOUSE. Scenic Designer MARTY BURNETT; Costume Designer ELISA BENZONI; Lighting Designer MATTHEW NOVOTNY; Sound Designer IAN SCOT; Prop Designer KEVIN WILLIAMS; Hair/Wig Designer VERNON WILLET.
STARRING: RICHARD BAIRD, LOWELL BYERS, FRANK CORRADO, STEVE FROEHLICH, COBY ROGERS, MATTHEW SALAZAR-THOMPSON, MARGOT WHITE & MARIE ZOLEZZI.
For Tickets, see: https://lagunaplayhouse.com/
Chris Daniels
Arts & Entertainment Reviewer
The Show Report
PHOTO CREDITS: Jason Niedle/TETHOS
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