The American Clock A View from the Bridge
Wren, Celia
Celia Wren MILLER TIME 'The American Clock" & 'A View from the Bridge' he glittering ball that plummeted toward Times Square on New Year's Eve plunged into the middle of an Arthur Miller...
...Just as Quentin in After the Fall recalls his responsibilities toward his suicidal wife...
...In a dramatic device that seems strikingly clumsy on the surface, the recollections of Eddie's lawyer acquaintance, Alfieri, frame the tragedy...
...The taboos associated with Eddie's pain may make an audience reluctant to identify with him, but everyone can relate to a character whose function is simply to remember...
...This year the Signature is able to bill its playwright as "that Living Legend of the American Stage...
...The tone of The American Clock shifts constantly, moving from the nostalgic to the comic to the brutally dramatic, and the writing is so concentrated that personalities spring to life in the briefest of spaces...
...In some cases, its program has helped guide a lesser-known playwright toward wider recognition...
...In the Roundabout's wonderfully intense production (directed by Michael Mayer), Eddie is played by Anthony LaPaglia, who manages to seem simultaneously confused, clumsily appealing, and desperate, like a baited animal...
...But his unnerving performance may still leave audiences wondering why Miller created such an ostensibly superfluous character...
...Stephen Spinella, who won a Tony award for his role in Angels in America, gives Alfieri a kind of creepy nobility, and makes the tiniest phrase and the slightest movement--a gesture with a cigar, for example--seem oracular...
...Toward the end of the play, the stark black set designed by David Gallo--risers surrounding a central platform--becomes an amphitheater of accusation, filled with staring crowds...
...Memory, The American Clock points out, allows us to detect this kind of pattern in our own past, and in the collective experience of society...
...Commonweal 2 | February 13, 1998...
...when the niece falls in love with an illegal immigrant, Eddie is tempted to a terrible betrayal...
...A skeptic and a prophet, he gains a larger perspective by losing his faith in the American economy...
...The only character to speak from outside the frame was entrepreneur Arthur A. Robertson (Kale Browne), who sells his stock before the Crash, and takes to storing thousand-dollar bills in his shoes...
...Fleeting scenes unveil over forty characters weathering the Depression in varying circumstances, from the headquarters of General Electric to a sweltering Brooklyn townhouse where a family h i d e s from a c o l l e c t i o n agent...
...Memory orders jumbled images--a stolen bicycle, a basket of flowers dropped in the subway--and molds them into a story with a defined shape...
...This year Arthur Miller is around to remind us that each story can be, in its way, a cautionary tale...
...The Signature is an off-Broadway group that focuses annually on a single contemporary American playwright...
...for the same reason that Joe Keller, in All My Sons, rearranges the truth to eclipse a bygone sin...
...The company's real coup may prove to be the March premiere of a new, as-yet-untitled Miller play, but the season didn't begin badly either...
...Men and women in period dress scurry across the stage at the conclusion of every scene, as the clamor of the waterfront-sea gulls, motors, and shouting workers--swells and fades...
...Eddie's incestuous yearning pits him against the community--a vigorous presence in the Roundabout production...
...The answer, again, has to do with memory...
...A1fieri's recollection has a purpose: he replays Eddie's story in order to accept and understand his own guilt in the affair...
...Less experimental than Clock, the 1956 work A View from the Bridge adopts the streamlined form of an Aristotelian tragedy centered around a flawed, selfdestructing hero...
...The protagonist of View is Eddie Carbone, a rough-mannered Brooklyn dockworker haunted by a secret, sinful love for his wife's niece...
...While the Signature season continues with the one-acts The Last Yankee and I Can't Remember Anything, another Miller revival (not part of the Signature season) is playing a few avenues away, at the Roundabout Theatre...
...In other cases, obscure works have received a rare airing: Sam Shepard's bizarre Tooth of Crime mystified audiences in a 1996 Signature coproduction...
...Providing intimacy and continuity are recurrent characters like the fretting Baum family (loosely based upon Miller's own family...
...In the Signature production, Isiah Whitlock, Jr., ushered the audience into Banks's world with this wisp of memory, staring out into space, as if mesmerized by the past...
...In the recent production, which was beautifully directed by the Signature's artistic director, James Houghton, and Commonweal 2 0 February 13, 1998 had a set design by E. David Cosier, a giant picture frame embracing most of the stage alluded visibly to the limits of human perspective...
...The irony that flares periodically, especially when an upbeat song like "Look for the Silver Lining" wraps up a scene about poverty, reminds the audience of the passage of time--only separation, of time or consciousness, makes irony possible...
...Unable to avert the catastrophe he senses approaching, Alfieri is in fact fated to become its instrument...
...so Alfieri, through memory, assesses the moral weight of the past...
...The American Clock, written in 1980 and partially based on Studs Terkel's book Hard Times, is s u b t i t l e d "A Vaudeville," in part because it uses popular songs of the '20s and '30s--"Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries," for example-to link together a series of colorful vignettes...
...Laura Esterman, Jason Fisher, and Lewis J. Stadlen played the roles in the Signature production), and the bright-eyed balladeer Sidney Margolies (Chris Messina), who promises to marry his landlady's daughter in lieu of paying the rent...
...Memory transforms moments of pure time into a larger pattern, into a story...
...Looking back, we may see one kind of belief give way to another as era succeeds era--see in the bleak mornings of the Depression, for example, the moving hand of the American clock...
...As soon as you see him slicing an apple with a dinner knife, in the first act, you know he is doomed...
...The crowd is not alone in registering guilt...
...Then, in September, the Signature Theatre Company launched a year's worth of Miller repertoire with The American Clock, his kaleidoscopic portrait of America during the Depression...
...W iller's views on individual and collective memory surfaced again in the final days of 1997...
...Of course, remembering isn't simple...
...Celia Wren MILLER TIME 'The American Clock" & 'A View from the Bridge' he glittering ball that plummeted toward Times Square on New Year's Eve plunged into the middle of an Arthur Miller revival...
...At one point, for example, Banks, a black veteran, makes one of his few appearances: "Sometimes you'd get the rumor they be hirin' in New York City, so we all went to New York City, but there wasn't nothin' in New York City....I was on a chain gang in Georgia pickin' cotton for four months just for hoboin' on a train....I still hear that train, that long low whistle, whoowoo...
...Speeches segue from the past to the present tense, as the characters first remember, and then re-enact moments of tedium, humor, and despair...
...just as Willie Loman, in Death of a Salesman, dreams of his misguided choices...
...Other past Signature playwrights-in-residence have included Edward Albee and Adrienne Kennedy...
...Horton Foote won the Pulitzer for his overrated play The Young Man from Atlanta while "in residence" at the Signature...
...Often The American Clock seems to be not only about the Depression, but, more generally, about how humans recall and retrieve experience...
...In addition to the film adaptation of The Crucible, the first half of last year saw a distinguished staging of Miller's 1947 work All My Sons at the Roundabout Theatre...
Vol. 125 • February 1998 • No. 3
