A View From the Bridge

This is a play about a man who feels a great deal and understands very little. It focuses on just one event in his life, probably the only event we might find interesting; we watch him as he drives himself towards tragedy. The nearer he gets the more emotionally fixed upon his course of action he becomes. Finally, he destroys life in the very way that is most repugnant to his society. Having betrayed his own code, he himself no longer has any right to go on living.

Miller hopes his dramas will yield more than that "proper purgation of pity and fear" that Aristotle called catharsis. He hopes they will bring enlightenment to his audience. Peter Skolnik's production is loaded with pity and fear. He has put together an altogether stunning show. But understanding there is none. I left the Loeb as confused as Eddie Carbone.

Eddie is a longshoreman. A simple man, he is defined by his function. "I work on the waterfront," he says. He has, with much struggle, raised a niece. She has grown into a beautiful 17-year-old and, had there been a resident psychiatrist in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, he might have pronounced Carbone a substitute parent, with an unhealthy incestuous fixation.

Two cousins smuggle into the country on a cargo ship. Catherine (Eddie's niece) falls in love with the younger one--blond, a singer, weak, a maker of dresses. "The guy's not right," Eddie cries, and soon he is obsessed with breaking up the match. At last, he anonymously reports the illegal entry to the Immigration Bureau.

Yet somehow I found myself entering into Eddie's misperception. When his wife mourned, "Whatever happened we all done it," I half believed her, though I knew in my head, with Catherine, that Eddie was a rat who belonged in a sewer.

Whatever the passions, whatever the pressures, it is impossible for the stool-pigeon to be anything but loathsome. But dammit, I couldn't hate Carbone. He was too pitiable. Bill Seres--racing through his early speeches, throwing away the trivial lines in polished Strassberg style, and finally crying, with the whimper of his whole being for "respect"--suckered me into loving him. The secret hopes and anxieties locked within him, isolating him from his wife, from his fellow workers, were too human for me to resist. How could I bring myself to admit he deserved to die? I couldn't. So I left the Loeb confused, instead of enlightened.

The fault is at least half Miller's. He knows too well that there is no simple choice between conscience and giving oneself over to the opposing forces, internal and external. That equilibrium is too much to expect from a man alone.

But it is Skolnik's fault as well. Miller wrote two versions of the play and perhaps Skolnik hoped to incorporate the best of each. He has had trouble deciding whether to mount a naturalistic production that might present rather than interpret, where Eddie might live out his horror in the reality of familiar surroundings; or a poetical, highly theatrical one, such as Miller first intended. His compromise--a fine, realistic set with no top but a darkened sky; and the inclusion of a windy narration--proves more distracting than illuminating. It was Miller's error to keep reminding his audience of their presence in a theatre. Skolnik should not have compounded it. The Greek Chorus effect just isn't worth the interruptions.

With the exception of Daniel Freudenberger as Alfieri the lawyer-narrator who seemed dimly aware that his part didn't belong in the play, the leads were uniformly splendid. Maeve Kinkead (Catherine) played a flighty coquette in the early scenes, perhaps, and Anne Bernstein (Bea) was a bit too much the sit-down, have-some-soup Molly Goldberg--but both more than redeemed themselves in the second act, which built enormously on all levels.

The truly enduring quality of Miller's first plays, the almost prehistoric, concentrated expression of aggression and pity, has been somewhat vitiated in his more recent attempts to write plays that are socially useful. Here, Skolnik has mounted an ambitious production that tries to present considerably more than an indictment of the squealer, and the society that pressures, then closes in upon, him. The moral "message" has been obfuscated in the process, but it was blurred before Skolnik set his sights on it.