Santa Monica Daily Press:
Reviews

A View From The Bridge

“The staging is impeccable, the acting’s top notch. Congratulations to Artistic Director Marilyn Fox for both the play’s direction and the company’s.” and that might be good for the quote on the main page.

All in the family

It’s a rare play these days that can cause an audience to gasp at a kiss. This actually happened.

Playwright Arthur Miller, best known for “Death of a Salesman” and “All My Sons,” writes about everyman characters whose lives become tragic.

In “View from the Bridge,” now onstage in a critically-lauded production at Pacific Resident Theatre in Venice, we meet Eddie Carbone (Vince Melocchi), a Brooklyn longshoreman who considers himself an honest provider and husband, who gives without asking for anything in return.

His wife’s cousins from Sicily are coming to stay with them in their tiny apartment, and Eddie lectures the family never to answer questions if immigration officials come to their door because these cousins will be here illegally. The cousins have taken the risk because they and their war-torn nation are desperately impoverished. Marco (Satiar Pourvasei) has a family and a sick son whom he hopes to support and return to; young Rodolpho (Jeff Lorch) is a freewheeling, high-spirited young man, who loves to sing, and wants to “make it” in America.

Eddie has raised his niece Catherine (Lisa Cirincione) since her mother died, but lately his concern for this affectionate, grateful and now fully-developed young woman, has become fierce within him, making him overly protective of her virtue, a fact duly noted by his long-suffering wife Beatrice (Melissa Weber Bales), who comments that they haven’t been intimate for many months.

Rodolpho wins Catherine’s heart, inciting Eddie’s jealousy. He tells Catherine Rodolpho only wants her to gain citizenship, and accuses Rodolpho of being “not right” (i.e., gay) because he likes to sing and has a way with clothing.

The story’s arc is no surprise having been foretold by the lawyer Alfieri (Robert Lesser), who serves as the Greek Chorus, giving us the bigger picture as the play unfolds, and asking us to consider what it means to be a good man.

Eddie will incur the wrath of Marco not only for insulting his brother Rodolpho, but because Eddie has done the unforgiveable: he has called immigration on them himself.

The tragedy unfolds as you’d expect it to, but the greater tragedy is that Eddie’s passion for Catherine has blinded him to his own flaws, his hypocritical self-righteousness and his failure to do the right thing by her. Eddie cannot tell himself the truth and it destroys him.

The staging is impeccable, the acting’s top notch. Congratulations to Artistic Director Marilyn Fox for both the play’s direction and the company’s.

“A View from the Bridge” runs at Pacific Resident Theatre, one of our local treasures, located at 703 Venice Blvd., in Venice. Performances are Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 3 p.m. Purchase tickets online at https://pacificresidenttheatre.org or call (310) 822-8392.