Blind Passion

By T.E.K.

A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE by Arthur Miller

Some dramatic revivals are like toys in an attic. One remembers them fondly. They look oddly shrunken and faded. At a touch, a faint puff of dust rises.

So it is, unfortunately, with Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge. Though Miller strove for Greek myth, his play is more of a tabloid melodrama. A simple stevedore named Eddie (Tony Lo Bianco) in Red Hook, Brooklyn, allows two of his wife's Sicilian relatives, illegally smuggled into the U.S., to live in his home. The younger one, Rodolpho (James Hayden), falls in love with Eddie's orphaned niece, Catherine (Saundra Santiago).

In his own blind, unrecognized passion for Catherine, Eddie turns viciously against Rodolpho, libeling him as a homosexual, mostly because he sings tenor and cooks. In an impotent fury, Eddie turns informer to the immigration office and triggers his own death.

At least two things now vitiate the play's impact. In 1955, during the heyday of Freudian illumination, when the play first appeared as a one-acter, shortly to be revised and expanded to a two-acter, Eddie's love for his niece possessed shock effect. Incest isn't what it used to be. Furthermore, one doubts whether the current flood of illegal ah'ens cowers before an immigration official as if he had sounded a storm trooper's knock in the night.

What this production does have working for it is Lo Bianco's volcanic performance. His eyes are tunnels without light. He springs at his prey like a tiger. Pathetically, the prey is himself, brought low not by pride but by ignorance.

--T.E.K. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.