Long Wharf Theatre of New Haven, CT, a major player since its founding in 1965, has opted for an audacious alternative to business-as-usual in an effort to rebound from COVID and build the audiences of the future. Rather than renew the expiring lease on their traditional permanent space, artistic director Jacob G. Padrón, managing director Kit Ingui and team are pivoting into mobility. The plan is to produce theater wherever it’s appropriate within the Greater New Haven area, bringing the art to the folks, as it were.
In this, Long Wharf seems to be pursuing a vision parallel to that of the late Joe Papp in the 1950’s. His Mobile Theater attracted both big-name and burgeoning talent to bring the classics, and eventually new plays, from Central Park to the streets of the five boroughs. (And, some have argued, with an immediacy that was never quite the same once operations became centered in a permanent downtown home.)
The current Long Wharf revival of Arthur Miller’s waterfront melodrama A View From the Bridge occupies an upstairs space in the venerable Canal Dock Boathouse, retrofitted with a lighting grid, stage, risers with seating, and a spectacular view of New Haven Harbor and the famous Q Bridge, seen through a rear wall of windows. It’s not an extreme example of the sort of site-specificity we can hope to see going forward, nor can it be called at all immersive. But at the very least it announces, to the sellout crowds who trudge over from the IKEA parking lot, that there’s a new sheriff in town, one ready to bring out-of-the-ordinary experiences to out-of-the-ordinary locations.
And I’ll tell you what else it does, it continues a seven-decade tradition of excellence. For under James Dean Palmer’s assured direction of a superb cast, this could be the most arresting production of this problematic work I’ve seen in a lifetime of views from various bridges (close to a dozen by quick count).
Miller, always a determined purveyor of moral lessons, went full quasi-Biblical jeremiad on 1955’s View, complete with Cain-like protagonist – Brooklyn longshoreman Eddie Carbone, who covets his wife Bea’s niece and bears false witness against her undocumented-alien relatives – and an Old Testament graybeard, the pontificating lawyer Alfieri, who knows what will befall Eddie yet is powerless to forestall it. Eddie’s downfall is meant to be received as the tragedy of an ordinary man utterly lacking in stature, a concept that generations of critics and dramaturgs (and I) have found hard to accept. You can’t help thinking that if Loretta Castorini would swing by from John Patrick Shanley’s Moonstruck to deliver Eddie a good whack and a brisk “Snap out of it!,” everybody’s problems would vanish.
But they just about pull it off in New Haven. Unexpected, unconventional choices from the cast (with Palmer deserving much credit for this) inhabit a unified heightened-reality style that seems terribly right for the text. The typical Eddie Carbone, for instance, is oldish, stocky, and dull-tongued, nothing of which describes Dominic Fumusa. His Eddie is physically lithe and always smiling, which is appropriate to a guy accepted everywhere as a decent Joe. But it’s a smile with many dimensions, and the neurotic or disturbed ones are made visible only to us. The performance is fiercely restless, born of churning thoughts that Fumusa makes palpable. Just as we get fed up with Eddie’s narcissism and self-pity, the actor prompts a realization that the guy truly cannot help himself; he’s caught up in delusions that he cannot control, and that’s occasion for pathos if I ever saw it.
Those around him also keep surprising and delighting. The estimable Annie Parisse (unforgettable to me as the titular dreamer of Becky Shaw) skillfully navigates the difficult path between scold and enabler that Miller has laid out for Eddie’s wife Bea, while Paten Hughes invests Catherine, Eddie’s obscure object of desire, with equal measures of freshness and simple-mindedness. For once, the character’s acceptance, and later rejection, of her uncle’s pathology are rendered quite believable. And the playing of the Italian visitors is a revelation. Here the family man Marco (Antonio Magro), not Eddie, is the one with the weight of the world on his shoulders, while the blond charmer Rodolpho (Mark Junek) bursts into the room with such enthusiasm for a future in America that Catherine’s ardor and Eddie’s suspicions are both instantly credible. These roles have never come across so forcefully in my experience.
Alfieri (Patricia Black) is another matter. Set aside the unlikelihood of a female longshoremen’s advocate in the 1950s, or the fact that she’d be addressed as “Mrs. Alfieri” or “Ma’am” rather than by her last name. Black and Palmer clearly want to work against the tedious philosophizing that typically slows the play to a crawl. But reconceiving the neighborhood mouthpiece as a wisecracking Eve Arden fails to convince. Her advice for Eddie, who wants to know how the law can be bent to his advantage, is marked by exasperation rather than concern, and Black never really provides a sense that she’s haunted by the events she’s recounting. Oh well, the role is impossible and that’s that, and at least Black’s shadings are novel and strong.
You-Shin Chen’s unit set of the Carbone apartment is spare and workable, with a minimum of props (this is one play in which too much naturalistic detail gets in the way). Risa Ando’s costumes lend authenticity. As for the real-life outdoor backdrop, I wish it could have played a more active role. But by the time a rainy winter matinee was well into act two, the setting sun lent a natural dimension of gloom in keeping with the dénouement to come. Hopefully Mother Nature will prove equally cooperative in support of Long Wharf’s future itinerant peregrinations around town.
A View From the Bridge opened February 16, 2024 at Canal Dock Boathouse (New Haven) and runs through March 10. Tickets and information: longwharf.org
