A man under pressure erupts in ‘A View From the Bridge’
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 View from the Bridge” continues through Oct. 22 at APT’s Touchstone Theatre in Spring Green; several performances are sold out. For tickets, call (608) 5882361 or visit americanplayers.org. Read more about this production at TapMilwaukee.com.