Archives for January 29, 2010

Yeah, I know, I’m the guy who dumped on Arthur Miller when he died, but exceptio probat regulam, as they say, and the new Broadway revival of A View from the Bridge, as I explain in today’s Wall Street Journal, is something to shout about. Not so, alas, Time Stands Still, Donald Margulies’ new play. Here’s an excerpt from my review.
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Theater offers few pleasures so immediate as the joy of watching a show in which absolutely everything works, all the way from the first line to the final curtain. Gregory Mosher’s revival of “A View from the Bridge,” Arthur Miller’s 1955 play about love and death on the Brooklyn waterfront, is that kind of show, a flaw-free production of a well-made melodrama. The play itself isn’t even slightly profound, but it is, almost alone in Mr. Miller’s oeuvre, largely devoid of pseudo-poetry and wholly to the dramatic point, and Mr. Mosher, who has returned at last to Broadway after a decade-long absence, has staged it with a lean, clean, deceptively soft-spoken intensity that pulls you straight to the edge of your seat and keeps you there until you get up to go home. Fold in the dead-center acting of a first-string cast led by Liev Schreiber and you get a production so hard-hitting that you’ll want to see it twice–assuming that you can get tickets, which I very much doubt.
Regular readers of this column will know that I don’t have much use for Arthur Miller, but I’m happy to make an exception for “A View from the Bridge,” in which he tells the tale of Eddie Carbone (Mr. Schreiber), a middle-aged Italian-American longshoreman who lusts after his young niece (Scarlett Johansson). Unable to sleep with his wife (Jessica Hecht) and tortured by his dark longing for his niece, Eddie informs on her fiancé (Morgan Spector), an illegal immigrant, then finds himself frozen out by his fellow longshoremen, for whom ratting on a buddy is the ultimate, unforgivable sin….
All this is the stuff of old-fashioned verismo opera–so much so that William Bolcom wrote a highly effective musical version of “A View from the Bridge” a decade ago–but Mr. Mosher and his colleagues have opted for understatement instead of red sauce and garlic, in the process vastly strengthening the punch of the play’s bloody climax, a shockingly believable-looking knife fight. It had never occurred to me that you could perform “A View from the Bridge” in a subtle way. Nothing is exaggerated, nothing italicized, nothing blown out of proportion. Instead of being shoved in your face like a pie, the terrible things that happen in the play are simply allowed to happen, the way they do in real life….
I wish I could say something nice about a play that stars Laura Linney, Alicia Silverstone, Eric Bogosian and Brian d’Arcy James. No can do: Donald Margulies’ “Time Stands Still” is a predictable piece of middle-of-the-road Pulitzer bait that has nothing to recommend it beyond the cast, Daniel Sullivan’s staging and Mr. Beatty’s set, all of which are exemplary.
Mr. Margulies, it seems, has reached the decadent stage in a playwright’s life when he starts writing plays about writers. In “Brooklyn Boy” he told us how hard it is to be a best-selling novelist. Now we get a play that revolves around a pair of tough yet sensitive journalist-lovers (Ms. Linney and Mr. James) who exchange one-liners in a really cool-looking loft (much obliged, Mr. Beatty) and care about the human race so much that they can’t stop covering wars, even though their last visit to Iraq left one of them half-crippled and the other half-crazy….
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Read the whole thing here.

“To hell with all this caution! To hell with this ‘academic’ approach! There are times when nature is dull: change it.”
Stanley Cortez (quoted in Charles Higham, Hollywood Cameramen: Sources of Light)