On Stage
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE By Joseph T Shipley A. Miller Must Learn to Grind A View from the Bridge. Two plays by Arthur Miller. Presented by Kermit Bloom-garden and Whitehead-Stevens. At the Coronet...
...While it may seem, to some, surprising that a warehouse run by such persons could last a score of years, it seems on the other hand that a quarter-century later the same sort of entangled humans will still be there, drifting and drinking through their sterile hours...
...The second is a melodrama of fierce passions, such as are associated with Sicily throughout its long history, transported to the Brooklyn waterfront of today...
...While padding out is abominable, thinking out may have value...
...the boy is wounded, but Eddie dies...
...When this does not part them, Eddie makes an anonymous call to report the illegal entry...
...He tries to separate the couple by sneering at the boy as a homosexual and--in a scene the full horror of which the production does not attain--pressing a kiss fiercely on the astounded boy's lips...
...Miller, in both his dramas, has chosen the easier way of writing as they came to him...
...One of the two women, a doomed old maid, lavishes her concern and care in fluttery attentions to the men, who casually accept her ministrations with no regard for her person...
...The first is a gallery of portraits, of persons bogged down in the morass of meaningless, job-centered lives...
...here it does the play injustice...
...The desperate Eddie draws his knife...
...Longshoreman Eddie Carbone and his wife have brought up her niece...
...In "Shakespeare As a Dramatist" (Talking of Shakespeare, edited by John Garret, Theater Arts Books, 1955), Nevill Cog-hill shows the intricate interweaving of preparation for later points in the apparently casual growth of a play...
...At the Coronet Theater...
...When the girl and the younger cousin fall in love, the extent of Eddie's incestuous passion is revealed...
...this they are now--is to scant the process, the becoming...
...The action moves on superbly apt sets by Boris Aronson, in the main well directed by Martin Ritt and vividly performed...
...In character portrayal, especially in the human nearness of the persons in the first play, here is some of Mr...
...We watch--on a summer's Monday, then a Monday in winter??a dozen employes of a large automobile-parts warehouse in Manhattan...
...The lawyer talks, then we see the ensuing events, in a story of passion so overpowering that it drives a man to an action he detests, then to his death...
...One sodden fellow, by a lift of will-power, frees himself of the habit...
...Miller says he wrote both plays spare, without trying to pad them out to full length...
...From Italy come two of the wife's cousins, smuggled in...
...Miller's best work...
...Its faults, as I see them, lie rather in his failure to impose self-discipline, to grind his materials into theatrical grist...
...The second play, which might appropriately be called A View of the Bridge, presents the story of a Brooklyn longshoreman, as told by his lawyer there...
...Similarly, while the device of the narrating lawyer has certain conveniences and is an easy method of transfer, prophecy and philosophizing, it is an interruption of, an intrusion on, the dramatic flow, an admission of story-writing technique into dramaturgic development...
...Some of the "laws" of dramaturgy are also rooted in the nature of the theater and the audience...
...Miller's warm sharing of his characters' feelings, and his ability to convey these in natural dialogue, come richly through the first play...
...Together, they provide a vivid and moving evening...
...Undoubtedly the most provocative of the season's new plays are the two by Arthur Miller, A Memory of Two Mondays and A View from the Bridge, presented together under the title of the second...
...The older cousin and two neighbors also caught will be sent back to Italy...
...Even now, A View from the Bridge is worth taking...
...always it is risky...
...To most, life has become a meaningless round: work, relaxation, work, work...
...the marriage of the boy to the girl, an American citizen, gives him a chance to stay...
...a youngster newly come from Ireland with poetry and hope in his heart turns bitter and drowns his frustration in liquor...
...When he pays greater heed to what the medium demands, his gift for natural dialogue, his sympathy for and understanding of struggling humans, may work to the great advantage of the theater...
...Miller should have pondered the words of his own lawyer, to the effect that laws are good when and because they are natural...
...Sometimes, by a tour de force, this may lend immediacy, power and sense of universality...
...Various roads toward happiness or forgetfulness are glimpsed--one man buys a car because its mechanism appeals to him --but most of the men turn from their labors to drink...
...To give us two glimpses of characters, six months apart--this they were then...
...The other is a good-looking, sex-hungry girl, eager for experience, whose end --one of the workers prophesies--will be among the naked women in the brothel across the way, revealed to the avid peering of the men when, after 22 years, the warehouse windows are washed...
Vol. 38 • October 1955 • No. 41
