Theater review: Long Wharf adds a genuine water view to Arthur Miller’s ‘A View from the Bridge’

The now-itinerant Long Wharf Theatre has shifted a few thousand feet from the building it moved out of over a year ago to a waterfront view just across Long Wharf Drive to present a play that exemplifies the sort of hotly acted, immaculately lit and costumed American dramas that the Long Wharf built its reputation on.

It’s a splashy move.

The play is Arthur Miller’s combative Brooklyn family drama “A View from the Bridge.” The Long Wharf company is performing it in New Haven’s Canal Dock Boathouse through March 10.

If you think that “Canal Dock Boathouse” sounds like a drafty room with creaky floors out on the edge of a pier, rest assured that this is a warm, fancy, modern, carpeted building that frequently hosts weddings, conferences and other events. There’s not a lot of parking there, so the Long Wharf has arranged parking (and ticketholder discounts on food) at the nearby IKEA. They run a shuttle non-stop in the hour or so before showtime (and after the show of course), but it’s also just a short walk across Long Wharf Drive, which has traffic lights and a pedestrian crossing.

As environmental (or site-specific) productions go, the setting isn’t exactly accurate or site-specific. Characters in the play work on ship-loading docks but what’s shown in the play is their home life in an apartment that presumably isn’t right at the waterfront.

The audience is also sitting in a performance space that closely resembles the old Long Wharf Theatre mainstage, with a stage area that thrusts close to the audience and a seating configuration that has the audience surrounding most of that stage.

The space seats less than half the capacity of the old Long Wharf Theatre, so many performances have already sold out. The scale of the set is about the same, though, and the production behaves like many Long Wharf productions of the mid-1960s to mid-1990s era when Arvin Brown was the theater’s artistic director.

The big effect that could not have happened at the old Long Wharf, or virtually anywhere else, is that several scenes are staged outside the building on a balcony area behind large glass walls at one side of the stage area. The audience can easily see these outdoor antics from their seats. Some key moments in the play are enacted in this exterior fashion, sometimes with microphones catching the dialogue and sometimes not. A couple of the supporting players barely make it indoors and spend most of their time ambiently goofing around on “the docks.”

It’s a thrilling new dimension, yet the environmental effect is somewhat diminished by the fact that the play is so old-world melodramatic and theatrical rather than intensely realistic and lived-in. It feels like a play with another play happening next door.

The Long Wharf had a decades-long working relationship with the Pulitzer-winning playwright, a Roxbury resident who used the theater to premiere his 1997 drama “Broken Glass” and who consulted on Long Wharf productions of several of his plays. The Long Wharf’s very first production, in 1967, was of Miller’s “Crucible.” A previous Long Wharf production of “A View from the Bridge,” in 1982, transferred to Broadway.

For our times, “A View from the Bridge” primarily works as a glimpse of the rampant homophobia and paranoia of the 1950s, and of how social stereotyping and conformity blinded some families to the deep psychological problems of their loved ones.

Eddie Carbone is an established New York waterfront worker who lives in Brooklyn with his wife Beatrice and Catherine, a teenager who is the orphaned daughter of Beatrice’s dead sister. This close-knit trio takes in two illegal immigrants, Italian cousins of Beatrice’s, letting them live in their home and finding them work on the docks. The younger of the two brothers, Rodolpho, starts courting Catherine while the older and more responsible one, Marco, sends most of his earnings home to his wife and children in Italy. Eddie doesn’t like Rodolpho and starts questioning his behavior. There’s also a lawyer, Alfieri, who narrates the play and consults on some of its impending conflicts. Miller sets up a world of possibilities with just those six key characters, especially when it is gradually revealed that Eddie’s protective parental interest in Catherine may really be a different type of feeling altogether.

If the scenario sounds melodramatic and soap-operatic, it is. The plot proceeds predictably and inevitably. Like most of Miller’s early hits, “A View from the Bridge” is important because of its glorious, incendiary speeches and its embrace of then-daring topics such as homosexuality and illegal immigration. But its structure is traditional and its bursts of emotion, from stentorian speeches to frantic embraces and fistfights, can seem over the top.

The playwright carefully sets up some seemingly inviolable laws of working class culture, families, Italians, and Brooklyn, summed up in edicts like “You don’t see somethin’, you don’t know nothin’.” Then those unspoken rules and traditions are loudly snapped in two. The results are swift and decisive and violent, making for a whirlwind final few minutes of this two-and-a-half-hour drama.

Director James Dean Palmer treats “A View from the Bridge” like the classic densely scripted drama it is. He doesn’t try to subdue the speechifying or the physicality, just modulates it so that it doesn’t come off as over the top. The waterfront backdrop, the outdoor scenes and the clever concept of having the characters hovering nearby even when they’re not in a scene bring useful modern touches to this hypertheatrical work. It’s not possible to underplay “A View from the Bridge,” but Palmer proves that it is possible to soften it around the edges.

As Eddie, Dominic Fumusa wisely takes a young Marlon Brando approach: tightly wound, clearly seething and simmering even when he’s not speaking. It evokes the Brando of “On the Waterfront,” that other big mid-20th century New York docks-centric drama. That film and the original production of Miller’s play shared a director, Elia Kazan. “A View from the Bridge” has regularly been reinterpreted for changing cultural and technical needs — especially in England, where the original London production was banned by the Lord Chamberlain.

Annie Parisse plays Beatrice as fully invested in the action happening at home, rather than being totally subservient to Eddie’s wishes. The script isn’t always there to support this, but she largely stands up for herself. Paten Hughes’ Catherine seems to mature from a wide-eyed teen to a forthright young woman in the space of a single scene but then she steadies and blossoms, able to confront Eddie powerfully when needed. Mark Junek gives Rodolpho an appropriate air of mystery: Eddie’s obviously wrong about him, but how wrong? Compared to the extravagant acting style of Junek, Antonio Magro is a model of restraint as Rodolpho’s sullen brother Marco. Suspense-wise, he becomes the show’s slow-burning secret weapon.

One of the only deviations from Miller’s script is to portray the lawyer/narrator Alfieri as a woman. Patricia Black takes a no-nonsense approach to the role, letting the others have the hot moments and adding a much-needed sense of moderation and decorum.

Reliable supporting players Mike Boland (who performed at the Long Wharf numerous times in the old days and has also been seen at just about every professional theater in the state) and Todd Cerveris hang outside as dockworkers and plow through the apartment as immigration agents, adding some burly menace to the proceedings.

This is a strong, thought-through, artfully enveloping production of a play that in most other productions is stagebound and shouty. Particular credit goes to Risa Ando’s costume designs which include jeans, overalls, housedresses and aprons that are well-worn without being grubby. The outfits highlight the characters’ working-class circumstances while also being neat and pressed, showing their respect for each other and themselves.

The real-life waterscapes definitely add a strong atmospheric element to the production, and those balcony scenes make sure you notice it. But ultimately of course, these are (mostly) New York actors with New York accents playing New York dock workers of the 1950s, when loading docks looked very different than they do in New Haven today. In most respects this “A View from the Bridge” lines up with classic presentations of plays by Miller (or those who influenced him, like Ibsen and Chekhov) from the Long Wharf’s golden age of the 1980s, more of a nostalgic breeze than a new wave.

The Long Wharf Theatre’s production of “A View from the Bridge” by Arthur Miller, directed by James Dean Palmer, runs through March 10 at the Canal Dock Boathouse, 475 Long Wharf Dr., New Haven. $49-$59, free for youth through Grade 12. (Recommended for ages 12 and up.) longwharf.org/shows-events/a-view-from-the-bridge/.