Review: Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge Gets a View of the Harbor

In 2022, Long Wharf Theatre gave up the lease on its longtime storefront on Sargent Drive and became an itinerant company. The move allowed the theater to better serve its community in New Haven, Connecticut, and to make use of more performance spaces in the downtown corridor.

Another benefit of this choice is its ability to foster creativity, especially in the context of revivals staged with fresh eyes. For a new production of Arthur Miller’s 1955 play A View From the Bridge, Long Wharf’s troupe has taken up residence at the Canal Dock Boathouse, where New Haven Harbor literally serves as the backdrop for this explosive drama of lust, jealousy, and betrayal.

From a visual standpoint, you couldn’t ask for a better view. At the matinee performance I attended, dense fog blanketed the harbor, although freighters could still be seen gliding by in the distance through the performance space’s tall windows. Visible, too, was the actual long wharf that gave the theater its name. New Haven Harbor stands in for the docks of Red Hook, Brooklyn, where the action takes place, and scenic designer You-Shin Chen smartly extends the playing area to the balcony just outside the makeshift auditorium. Weathered crates and buoys represent the lives of the longshoremen who spend their days unloading cargo from ships, and a pay phone grounds us in an earlier era.

Director James Dean Palmer transports the audience back to the conservative Italian American community of 1950s Brooklyn, where longshoreman Eddie Carbone (Dominic Fumusa) and his wife, Beatrice (Annie Parisse), have raised their niece Catherine (Paten Hughes) since her mother’s death. On the precipice of womanhood, Catherine has unlocked uncomfortable feelings inside her uncle, which are confounded when two of Beatrice’s cousins, Rodolpho (Mark Junek) and Marco (Antonio Magro), arrive from Italy to find work. Rodolpho and Catherine quickly become a couple, which sends the entire family down a dangerous path.

The production itself suffers some of the difficulties of working with found spaces. Chen’s design for the Carbone apartment, mounted on a long, airy riser, feels far too open and expansive for the pressure-cooker events that Miller depicts – hard to do when there are no walls. Lighting designer Kate McGee does her best with a makeshift setup, but again, she runs into the challenges of a space that is not inherently set up for modulations of color and shadow. To capture dialogue that takes place outside on the “pier,” sound designer Jane Shaw sometimes resorts to overamplification.

Still, within these confines, Palmer crafts a gripping human drama, due largely to a trio of strong performances. Fumusa captures Eddie’s destructive pride and passion without overplaying his emotions. He keeps Eddie’s combustible energy at a bare simmer until he finally, tragically boils over. As Beatrice, Parisse finds sympathetic notes amid a column of strength. In a strong American stage debut, British-Italian actor Magro is both pitiable and frightening as Marco, who longs to make a better life for his family but has his own hot temper.

Hughes and Junek don’t rise to the same engrossing level of their co-stars. The production also reimagines Alfieri, the Greek Chorus narrator and local lawyer, as a woman, played by Patricia Black. The choice works fine in Alfieri’s establishing monologues, but it strains credulity when Eddie visits Alfieri for private counsel, which Alfieri gently rebukes. In a community where gender is deeply regimented and reminiscent of old-world customs, it’s hard to imagine a man like Eddie confiding lecherous feelings toward his niece to a woman.

A View From the Bridge is a Greek tragedy at heart, so the audience can intuit the fatal ending long before the characters onstage have any idea what will befall them. It’s also a play of its time, with outsize emotion and edge-of-your-seat moments of volatility. Palmer leans into these elements and delivers a satisfying, memorable production, despite the challenges provided by the performance space. But at the end of the day, you still can’t beat the view.