Review: ‘A View From the Bridge’ is Shattered Globe’s masterful return to Arthur Miller’s tragedy

Here’s a way to make a critic feel old. Director Louis Contey has returned to Arthur Miller’s masterful “A View From the Bridge,” a production he first staged for Shattered Globe Theatre 30 years ago, and he has done so with a member of the original cast, Eileen Niccolai, still playing the same role.

I was there 30 years ago in the old Shattered Globe on Halsted Street and, Tuesday night, there I was again at Theater Wit watching the pathetic longshoreman Eddie, now poignantly played by Scott Aiello, thrashing and flailing as his young niece Catherine, played by Isabelle Muthiah, grows up and away from him.

I suppose it should be noted that Niccolai was a little young for the role of Beatrice, Eddie’s wife, 30 years ago and maybe a little old for the part now. But it’s a measure of her brilliance as an actress that any age disparity was not evident 30 years ago, at least as far as I remember, and it sure as heck is not evident now. She offers a phenomenal blend of sadness, resignation, regret and anger at that which she feels she cannot control. The great tragic condition, writ very small, precisely as Miller intended.

Contey’s moving “A View From the Bridge” also features a uniformly excellent ensemble including the laconic John Judd (as the narrating lawyer Alfieri), Mike Cherry as the hefty Italian immigrant Marco and Harrison Weger as Rodolpho, the vulnerable object of both Catherine’s desire and Eddie’s hatred. This is an intimate show with a focus on intense scene work.

I note that partly because “A View From the Bridge” can be performed at operatic scale, to marvelous effect on Broadway in 2015, and or via the gut-wrenching William Bolcom opera seen at the Lyric Opera in 1999. This is not such a production: it is all raw, simple and potent, recognizable humans, a platform, a table and a few chairs. That’s not to say design is non-existent: there is a moment in the play where Miller wrote that Eddie has eyes like tunnels, and that is exactly how Aiello’s eyes look at that moment, thanks to the lighting design by Shelley Strasser. Scene design is by Shayna Patel.

All plays shift with the moment, of course, and it is impossible now not to see this work from 1955 in the context of the current migrant crisis in Chicago. In this work, migrants of a different era cause the kind of upheaval that threatens those who wrongly think the world is not constantly spinning forwards, leaving behind those with an inability to cope.

But this is not a polemical drama; Miller had sympathy for everyone, the kind now rarely dispensed for some, just as he had blame to spread all over Brooklyn.

Most importantly, though, he knew how humans fail to understand the inevitability of change and loss and how fear can manifest as violence. This play, as with so many of Miller’s masterworks, is suffused with dread. “There are times when you want to sound an alarm,” Alfieri says, Judd here drawing out the words as if from the bottom of his aching stomach, “but nothing has happened.”

Alfieri, a kind of prophet, knows it will. By the end, so does everyone. No wonder the cast looked so exhausted at the bows.

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

cjones5@chicagotribune.com

Review: “A View From the Bridge” (3.5 stars)

When: Through Oct. 21

Where: Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont Ave.

Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes

Tickets: $40 at 773-770-0333 and sgtheatre.org

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