Liev Schreiber and Scarlett Johansson enhance ‘A View From the Bridge’

Vivid performances illuminate Arthur Miller's 1950s Brooklyn tragedy

BY MICHAEL SOMMERS

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

BROADWAY REVIEW

Ever since the Greeks, tragedy often sees a mighty man brought low by his own mistakes.

That's certainly the case for Eddie Carbone, the hulking longshoreman of "A View From the Bridge" as powerfully played by Liev Schreiber in a solid Broadway staging of Arthur Miller's tragedy.

A big man with brutish features, Schreiber easily embodies the dockworker while his artistry as an actor reveals Eddie's tender qualities. Eventually destroyed by his repressed passions for the teenaged niece he has raised since childhood, this poor guy simply cannot face up to his worse urges. Schreiber renders Eddie's inner turmoil with a choking voice and a touching sense of stubborn confusion.

Set on the Brooklyn waterfront in the 1950s, the drama features overtones of Greek tragedy. Director Michael Mayer's 1998 Roundabout revival, which starred Anthony LaPaglia, emphasized that quality. In the new production that opened Sunday at the Cort Theatre, director Gregory Mosher grounds the play firmly among the red bricks and blue collar accents of Brooklyn.

Making a worthy Broadway debut as the niece, Scarlett Johansson vividly depicts Catherine as a very nice girl who gets too angry over Eddie's increasingly hostile treatment of her boyfriend to be creeped out overmuch when she at last comprehends his desires. Quietly but snugly dressed by designer Jane Greenwood, the brunette Johansson appropriately manages to be demure yet fetching.

Watchfully hovering about as Eddie's wife Beatrice, Jessica Hecht presents an anxious woman whose keen eye soon spots the ugly trouble festering in her household. Like Schreiber and Johansson, Hecht speaks the flat Brooklyn dialect believably, but she also brings a lovely, subtle note of urban poetry to her words.

Narrated by a haunted-looking Michael Cristofer as the neighborhood lawyer, the drama unfolds quickly as Beatrice's two impoverished Italian cousins are smuggled illegally into the house and the younger one awakens Catherine's interest. Eddie's muddled but growing animosity towards the interloper eventually ends in betrayal and blood on the sidewalk.

Written by Miller with an inexorable sense of doom, "A View From the Bridge" is a drama where viewers realize early on that something bad surely is on the way and yet can't help but hope the flawed hero somehow will avoid catastrophe. Schreiber's sensitive, deeply-felt portrayal of inarticulate Eddie Carbone only increases one's pity for this good-hearted man wrecked by a love gone terribly wrong.

"A View From the Bridge" continues through April 4 at the Cort Theatre, 138 W. 48th St., New York. Call (212) 239-6200 or visit www.telecharge.com.