A View from the Bridge

Like much of Arthur Miller's other work, A View from the Bridge belongs to the Drama of Embarrassment--almost the dominant American genre--where the hero makes a spectacle of himself while his wife wishes he would behave, and all the people onstage (and not a few in the audience) are highly uncomfortable. This sort of thing can be gloriously transfigured, as in Long Day's Journey into Night and Death of a Salesman, but in the present case it becomes a slow buildup to a series of emphatic but unreverberant wallops.

These last few walloping scenes can be spendid entertainment. Their blend of unacknowledged incestuous desires, suspected homosexuality, actual heterosexuality, jealousy, revenge, and murder is, even in this production, lively and brisk. But these scenes, in order to make the evening fully worth while, demand emotional acting on a grander scale than the present Warrenton Street group can manage.

In order to bring off an Embarrassment Drama, its actors must be perfect masters of tenement realism, capable of perfectly shaping quiet moments as well as completely uninhibited crises. They need to maintain an appearance of complete fidelity to the surface of lower-middle and working class life. (A life-sized statue of Lloyd Warner will be awarded to anyone who can tell the lower-middle from the working class without a scorecard.) In this second offering of the pre-season season at the Charles Playhouse (the season opens later this month), a group of good actors, capable of many fine strokes and perfectly caught inflections, miss just often enough to prevent our believing in the Brooklyn waterfront tenement they are trying to create.

Moreover, this sturdy little play aspires above its station. Obviously affected by delusions of tragedy, Mr. Miller has outfitted his work with a one-man chorus named Alfieri, who takes a small part in the action (he is a waterfront lawyer), but spends most of his time making superfluous references to the passionate nature of the Mediterranean peoples and the inevitable doom of Eddie Carbone. This device imparts to the play an air of pretentiousness, which Joseph Plummer does not dissipate by playing Alfieri like the dear old professor of a very recondite subject.

Mr. Plummer also directed, and his work is decent and creditable, if, as I suppose, his many miscastings were forced upon him. As the starcrossed longshoreman Eddie Carbone, Nick Smith is, among other disabilities, twenty years too young. Ruth Bolton Brand, Francesca Solano, Johnny Bell, and Stanley Young are also estimable but over parted in various ways. They get across a good deal of what is in the script, but View from the Bridge is not so stuffed with dramatic riches that any company can afford to let so much of it get away.