A View From the Bridge
Eddie Carbone–an Italian-American longshoreman with a more than avuncular passion for the niece who lives with him–ultimately decides to betray everything in his life to prevent her from leaving him to get married. If you feel I’ve now spoiled the ending, don’t worry: Miller does much the same, providing a narrator, the lawyer Alfieri, who foreshadows the action with all the subtlety of Brechtian supertitles. Playing the part, John Mohrlein has the thankless task of intoning, “I could see where this was headed” and “So Eddie Carbone faced his destiny–though what did a man like Eddie Carbone know of destiny?” (Miller used a similar narrative device in After the Fall; it worked equally well there.) There’s no need to liken the Carbones’ experience to Senecan tragedy unless incest, betrayal, and murder become trivial when the participants are “just” working-class Italians.
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From the standpoint of maintaining dramatic tension, though, Kiely’s direction falls short in only one scene. At the end of the first act Marco challenges Eddie to lift a chair by one leg. This turns out to be extremely difficult, and the fact that Eddie can’t do it and Marco can is the insult to Eddie’s masculinity that bears poison fruit in act two. In a recent New York revival, Eddie made many increasingly desperate efforts to lift the chair, so that when eventually Marco raised it in triumph, the moment felt like the final punch in a fight to the death. In this production, Eddie makes only a couple of pro forma attempts and Marco succeeds immediately. Both actors invest the scene with suitable gravitas, but in Kiely’s interpretation the men are engaged in a test of skill–Marco knows how to do this and Eddie doesn’t–rather than the test of strength Miller intended.
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