A View from the Bridge

Founded in 1950, the Douglaston Community Theatre holds the distinction as the oldest active community theatre in the New York City borough of Queens. The troupe offers three productions every year, mostly comedies and dramas from the twentieth century and contemporary American play catalog. In his director’s note in the program for the spring production of A View from the Bridge, Danny Higgins explained his personal connection to Arthur Miller’s famous play set in Red Hook: “My family is from Brooklyn. My father, my grandfather, and my great grandfather were all born and raised there. My family raised me Roman Catholic, and I spent twelve years in its educational care. In many ways, I see this play as a homecoming, an opportunity to investigate an ancestral association with both Brooklyn and my raised faith.”Higgins’s personal connection was quite evident in his directorial approach to Miller’s Italian tragedy, especially the crucial role that religion plays in the lives of this Sicilian-American community. The production begins with dramatic religious music and a lighted cross hovering above the simple set of the Carbone kitchen. Higgins’s clear intention was to see the central immorality of the play—Eddie’s desire for his wife’s niece Catherine—as sin. But the complexity of A View from the Bridge lies in other immoral acts: Eddie’s verbal and physical assault on Rodolpho, Eddie’s treatment of Beatrice, and especially Eddie’s snitching to immigration authorities on his own relatives, which also led to others being taken in the subsequent raid. Thus, we are forced to consider how these acts may also be seen as sin and how religious law coexists (or doesn’t) with American civil law and the tribal law of the Sicilian neighborhood in Brooklyn. Higgins’s approach also highlights many aspects of the play that do not usually get emphasized, such as the old woman telling Alfieri to pray for Eddie, the Bolzano boy’s confirmation at St. Agnes, and Marco praying in church before he comes to exact revenge on Eddie.In many productions of A View from the Bridge there is often commentary on the actors’ ability to approximate the Brooklyn accent that existed in the 1950s time of the action. Reviewers of the 1956 premiere of the two-act version in London highlighted how the English actors created a dialect that approximated this. Big Apple natives can perceive a false accent in a New York minute, but this New York based production featured local actors who needed little vocal coaching because their so called accents are genuine. Of note are Queens’ natives Cathy Chimenti (Beatrice) and Michael Chimenti (Alfieri). Cathy Chimenti, in particular, captured the rhythm and cadence of the Italian American Brooklyn housewife of Beatrice’s era, and Michael Chimenti provided just enough of a suggestion of the accent that Alfieri would have retained as an Italian immigrant to make him sound fully authentic.Higgins cast actors who not only strongly filled the roles as Miller conceived them, but also added nuances to their performances that very much enhanced their characterizations. Of particular note is Cathy Chimenti who embodied Beatrice’s complexity as she is torn between her love for Eddie and shock—even disdain for his actions—and her duty and love for Catherine. Chimenti also exhibited Beatrice’s acute perception of Catherine’s and Eddie’s conflicting feelings. Her Beatrice was not at all submissive; she loudly verbalized truth to both Catherine and Eddie. Angelo DeBiase portrayed Eddie in the macho Italian vein that we often see, and this production did not at all highlight the language that strongly suggests Eddie’s homoerotic feelings for Rodolpho. What was quite effective, however, was the way in which the audience literally sees the mania that possesses Eddie. DeBiase projected a physical change in Eddie; indeed his eyes were like the tunnels that Alfieri describes. In the same vein, we literally see the change in Marco’s (Giovanni Marine) attitude in the final scene of act 1 when Eddie punches Rodolpho. Marine absorbs a power as he holds the chair over the now helpless Eddie. Steven Gregory is quite convincing as the joyous Rodolpho, and his outrage over Catherine’s suggestion that they live in Italy is palpable. Special note must be made to the consistency of Marine and Gregory’s Italian accents. Jaime Nicole Riggs downplayed the complete innocence we often see in Catherine. The play effectively shows her growth and awareness to womanhood, but in Riggs’s iteration, she is already on her way even before the curtain rises.Higgins conceived a stripped-down production that eliminated the role of neighbors such as Louis and Mike. Their scenes provide important context for seeing Eddie in relation to his community, but their elimination did not dramatically upset the focus of the play. However, one scene cut was troubling. For me, the scene when Eddie makes his fateful telephone call to the immigration authorities is crucial. Eddie commits many violations in the play; arguably the most serious is his snitching because it goes against the code of his entire community, something he himself explains early on in the play. In the 2010 Broadway revival, Liev Shreiber as Eddie literally retched on the stage before he made the call, as if every fiber of his being resists doing it. In this production, Higgins eliminates the phone call, transitioning immediately from the scene with Alfieri to the next scene when Rodolpho and Marco have been moved to an upstairs apartment and the immigration authorities arrive. The cut seemed particularly egregious to me, but I reasoned that Higgins perhaps could not figure out a way to perform the phone call in the simple set design. Of course, in that scene Beatrice realizes what Eddie has done when the knock on the door comes. I attended the show with four friends who were not at all familiar with the play, and when I mentioned the edit during our after-show conversation, they related that they all understood that Eddie was going to snitch after the scene with Alfieri, so when Eddie panicked over the other submarines being in the upstairs apartment they knew he had made the call.For the play’s final dramatic fight scene, Higgins somewhat re-created the scrum of characters of Ivo Von Hove’s groundbreaking 2015 production, but with a flashing lights effect as the spots turned on and off. The music for this final scene was not religious, but rather the often heard “O Fortuna” from the cantata Camina Burana by Carl Orff, a selection quite appropriate for this production. The song laments Fortuna, the Roman goddess of fortune, whose wheel symbolizes her capricious nature which can bring joy and sorrow, property or ruin. In this context, we can question whether Eddie’s tragic downfall is the consequence of his own action or the consequence of fate. However, in the Catholic milieu of this production, the consequences of Eddie’s action do not end with his death, but also in his damnation, not only in the eyes of his community, but also in the eyes of God—and that is Eddie’s real tragedy, which Alfieri recognizes and can only mourn.