Scarlett Johansson’s Broadway Debut: A View From The Bridge Review

When Scarlett Johansson first appears on the stage of the Cort Theater in what is her Broadway debut, coiffed in an awkward-looking hairstyle (her blond hair turned dark brown) and dressed in form-fitting attire that over-emphasizes her curves, Arthur Miller’s “A View From The Bridge” makes instant sense. We see her character, the 17-year-old Catherine, the way her Uncle Eddie sees her, the way Miller reportedly first saw Marilyn Monroe – as an innocent girl abruptly turned voluptuous young woman, not yet entirely aware of her own allure. If her sweater and skirt are too tight on her, making her almost embarrassingly seductive, it might just be because she has grown out so fast that her schoolgirl clothes no longer fit her.

It is the siren call of Catherine’s beauty that drives what Miller intended as a twentieth century American update of an ancient Greek tragedy, the story of a man who loves his niece in the wrong way, and it is the lure of Scarlett Johansson on the stage that makes “A View From The Bridge” worth seeing.

She is not the only reason. The rest of the cast collectively transport us back to the working-class Brooklyn of the 1950′s. Liev Schreiber’s performance in particular is sure to get high marks all around, and there are a number of surprising performances (though at least one was not a good surprise). John Lee Beatty’s set, which shows a tenement skyline that is almost majestic in its grubbiness, and then revolves to reveal the modest interior of the characters’ home, helps to emphasize that this is a story of plain people caught up in high tragedy. In the end, though, it remains a struggle, if not a stretch, to consider this play the unassailable modern classic that some people seem to be proclaiming it.

Running its bloody course

The plot of “A View From The Bridge” was inspired by a true story that Arthur Miller heard from a labor activist and lawyer while he was doing research for an “On The Waterfront”-type screenplay (which was never made into a movie) in the then-tough waterfront neighborhood of Red Hook, Brooklyn, where most everybody was Italian-American and worked the docks. Catherine is an orphan who has grown up in the Red Hook home of her dead mother’s sister, Beatrice, and Beatrice’s husband, Eddie Carbone, a longshoreman. Beatrice’s cousins from Italy, the brothers Marco and Rodolpho, enter the country illegally to find work, and move in with the Carbones. Catherine and Rodolpho fall for one another, a development that Eddie finds intolerable. Why he finds it intolerable is clear to everybody except Eddie, who instead questions Rodolpho’s motives, and becomes increasingly enraged by their love.

That this will lead to tragedy is made clear from the opening monologue by the neighborhood lawyer Alfieri, who narrates the play like a one-man Greek chorus, telling us he was powerless to do anything as he watched the tale “run its bloody course.”

Power and pretentiousness in previous “Views”

This is the fourth time that “A View From The Bridge” has appeared on Broadway. Its debut, as a one-act play in 1955, was not a success. While the critic Brooks Atkinson saw the story as having “power and reality,” and its characters drawn “with insight and color,” he expressed disappointment at its pretentiousness (although he was too polite to call it that); as a work of art, Atkinson wrote, “it aspires a little above its station. In both the writing and the acting, it is self-conscious, as though both author and actors were always trying for something more exalted than the narrative can yield.” The play, coupled with another Miller one-act, “A Memory of Two Mondays,” ran for four months, 149 performances.

Two years later, the play was staged in London under the direction of Peter Brook, in a version Miller substantially rewrote as a two-act play (cutting out, for example, some of the airier language in the lawyer’s narration). It was this well-received version that made its way Off-Broadway in 1966 and then back onto Broadway in 1983, a production that Frank Rich praised despite “strong reservations about Mr. Miller’s play” – but it too ran precisely 149 performances. “View” returned again to Broadway in 1997, a production I saw starring Anthony LaPaglia as Eddie, Allison Janney as his wife, Stephen Spinella as Alfieri the lawyer and Brittany Murphy in the role of Catherine – another Broadway debut of an actress whose career was established in the movies. This time, there was little talk of the flaws in the text. LaPaglia won the Tony for best actor and the production won the Tony for best revival of a play.

As I hope I established in my review of “A Little Night Music,” I cringe at playing the theater aficionado waxing nostalgic for the finer points of past productions. In this case, though, I saw for the first time how a play that was awkward and old-fashioned when it was written half a century ago, that is set in a community that has since disappeared, and that depends for the logic of its plot on a code of honor that exists now mostly in hokey mafia movies — that such a piece of theater could nevertheless work its magic on an audience.

Fury, lust and magic in the current “View”

The current production, directed by the prolific Gregory Mosher (who is returning to Broadway after a decade’s absence), will be the shortest-lived of all the versions, by design, its limited run ending April 4th.

Liev Schreiber is an exciting actor; his Eddie cries convincingly, shouts red-faced in fury, spits and gags and vomits until you wonder how he can do this every night. But he is also in great shape and full of vitality even when he’s standing still. It is hard to be completely revolted by the idea of a love match between him and Johansson, 17 years younger (he’s 42, she’s 25), and indeed more difficult to see him as a father figure to her than it was the bulkier LaPaglia to the just-past-teenage Brittany Murphy. In Schreiber’s performance, we see Eddie’s fury at Rodolpho, his inability to listen to advice (he does a good dolt), and his guilt at his own actions. But, unless I missed it, Schreiber has decided not to do much with Eddie’s lust for his niece, except in the one moment when the stage directions explicitly call for it.

The absence from the stage of such subtext by gesture or expression might matter less if this Eddie’s interaction with his wife were as nuanced and explosive as was the case between LaPaglia and Janney. It would be unfair to say that Jessica Hecht (last on Broadway as the widowed sister in “Brighton Beach Memoirs”) plays Bea with only one note, but her range strikes me as limited to a couple of chords of anger, bitterness and then horror. (The rousing applause she received at the end made it clear to me that this is a minority opinion.) Schreiber chooses to play against her by having his character shut her out; he rarely looks at her when they talk. This might offer a psychologically accurate picture of certain estranged couples, but it’s not all that involving to watch.

Other members of the cast are welcome surprises. Michael Cristofer, who is best-known as a playwright (he wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Shadow Box”), plays a gruff and imposing Alfieri, whose street-wise delivery helps make the flighty language of the lawyer’s narrative seem down to earth — all but the last monologue, which remains profound-sounding gobbledygook. Of special note is Morgan Spector as the blond-haired romantic Rodolpho. Until a couple of weeks before the opening, Spector was the understudy for the role. Santino Fontana, a veteran of both “Billy Elliott” and “Brighton Beach Memoirs” was cast as Rodolpho but got injured during rehearsals — surely during the boxing scene between Rodolpho and Eddie — and was forced to drop out. (The superstitious might view the part of Rodolpho as jinxed in the way that Superman is: The Rodolpho of the 1983 Broadway production, James Hayden, died shortly after the run from a heroin overdose.) “A View From The Bridge” marks Spector’s Broadway debut, and it is an auspicious one.

His of course is not the only one. It was evident to me from her performance in “Girl with a Pearl Earring” in 2003, the same year she co-starred with Bill Murray in “Lost in Translation,” that Scarlett Johansson was an actress of major talent, not just star quality. She was 19 then; she had already been acting professionally for a decade. As Catherine, Johansson must be a sheltered girl who receives two shocks in quick succession – the jolt of love and the thunderbolt of betrayal — that force her to figure out how to grow up quickly; it is riveting to watch her do so.

“A View From The Bridge,” though, is supposed to revolve around Eddie Carbone, and that is much of its problem. “Eddie Carbone had never expected to have a destiny,” Alfieri intones at one point. “A man works, raises his family, goes bowling, eats, gets old, and then he dies.” But Americans do expect to have destinies — the expansion of the nation was based on an imperialist precept called “manifest destiny.”; how many people do you know who plan only to work and go bowling? — but they are destinies of their own making, rather than pre-ordained. Director Mosher has decided to have Eddie and the other characters (except the two Italian immigrants) talk in broad Brooklyn accents, which are at least better than the ones in “Brighton Beach Memoirs.” It doesn’t bother me that Eddie speaks Brooklynese; I mind that he sounds Greek.

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A View From The Bridge by Arthur Miller
at the Cort Theater (138 West 48th Street)
Directed by Gregory Mosher
Scenic Design by John Lee Beatty; Costume Design by Jane Greenwood; Lighting Design by Peter Kaczorowski; Sound Design by Scott Lehrer; Hair and Wig Design by Tom Watson; Associate Scenic Design: Kacie Hultgren; Associate Costume Design: Ward Laboissonneire; Associate Lighting Design: John Viesta; Associate Sound Design: Alex Hawthorn
Cast:
Scarlett Johansson as Catherine
Liev Schreiber as Eddie
Jessica Hecht as Beatrice
Alex Cendese as Submarine
Michael Cristofer as Alfieri
Anthony DeSando as First Immigration Officer
Antoinette LaVecchia as Mrs. Lipari
Mark Morettini as Mr. Lipari
Joe Ricci as Mike
Morgan Spector as Rodolpho
Corey Stoll as Marco
Robert Turano as Louis
Marco Verna as Second Immigration Officer
Running time: two hours with one intermission
Ticket prices: $42.50 to $126.50
Rush tickets as low as $26.50, premium seats as much as $251.50