I would like to say, straight off the bat, that it was fabulous. It takes a lot of energy, emotion, and very fine acting to properly carry off an Arthur Miller play, and the RC Players’ production of A View From the Bridge had all three of those elements.
The set was static, as is the case with the two other Miller plays I’m familiar with. Miller is always incredibly specific about his stage sets, and the production followed his direction. What was novel about this one was that the balcony was actually closed off, providing space for the performance to extend around the audience. So, for example, as the play began, one actress hung out clothes on the balcony rail, while another actor leaned against the same rail, reading a book. Similarly, during the scene involving the immigration raid, action happened on the staircase up to the balcony, which was located behind some of the audience, and in one of the aisles behind the entire audience. Such breakages of the fourth wall are always intriguing, since each production can do something different to achieve the same effect, and they were put to very good use here, especially as they were done most noticeably at the times of greatest tumult in the play.
Costuming and makeup were similarly intriguing. The women’s costumes were quite typical of the time period (the 1950s); however, the men were sometimes dressed in jeans, which brought a slight anachronism into the performance. Granted, jeans were originally working trousers, which was most likely the desired effect here, but given that they’ve become so mainstream, it’s difficult to remember that. In terms of makeup: Miller explicitly states that Eddie and Beatrice are forty years old, and that Alfieri is fifty. Surprisingly, there appeared to be no age makeup involved in this production, the use of which would have helped emphasize the strangeness of Eddie, at age 40, falling in love with his niece Catherine, who is seventeen.
However, this was only a passing curiosity of mine, since the actors had more than enough skill to put on a fantastic show, age makeup or not. The interpretations they gave their characters were nuanced and profound. Reading the play beforehand, I took away the impression that Beatrice was simply a housewife, so overshadowed by Eddie that she could do no more to defend Catherine than a few mildly resentful comments. Emma McGlashen, who played Beatrice in the show, gave her character so much more depth. McGlashen’s Beatrice is a woman who loves her husband and her niece, who simply wants the tense undercurrents in her family to fade away, and who (a facet I didn’t see in the script) is not afraid to speak up for herself. She is the one person who sees that Catherine has grown up and encourages her to make that clear to Eddie: “You got to give him to understand he can’t give you orders no more,” she says. She is the only one that sees that Eddie’s protectiveness of Catherine is turning into passion, and she neatly sums up the tragedy in the play when she says, “You want somethin’ else, Eddie, and you can never have her.”
Catherine, as she was played by Suzanne Wdowik, is also different from how I interpreted her character in the script. When reading the play I saw Catherine as assured and self-confident, as a girl who wanted to enjoy her life. Wdowik brought to Catherine a childlike quality I didn’t anticipate, giving her a certain fragility and stripping away the self-confidence I thought was there. At the same time, especially in the second half, when Catherine becomes more directly involved in the plot, Wdowik exposed a core of steel in her that was hidden under her fragility and innocence in the first half. She is a young girl just coming into her own, deeply attached to her family and to Eddie, unsure of herself, perhaps, but able to make her choices independently and fight for them.
The third unexpected aspect of the portrayals in the show was the unexpected amount of laughter in the first half. As soon as Rodolpho entered the play and began delivering lines, the audience began to laugh: at his accent, at his manner of delivering his lines, at the astoundingly good yet humorous rendition of “Paper Doll.” I’ve been at plays before where lines that were not intended as humor became funny in the eyes of the audience. The recent production of Antigone here in Ann Arbor, directed by Ivo van Hove, experienced the same phenomenon the night I went to see it, and Antigone is even less humorous than A View From the Bridge. One of the actors mentioned in an interview, however, that this varies by audience, and that in America it happens more often that in uncomfortable situations audiences seek to relieve their discomfiture through laughter.
I think it speaks to the quality of the performance. The very fact that the show caused enough emotional upheaval that the audience was laughing before the upheaval began indicates the talent of the actors and the success they had in setting up a dissonant undercurrent without even making that explicit. I couldn’t have asked for a better first experience of A View From the Bridge.
