With its searing production of Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge,” Shattered Globe Theatre delivers the kind of rich ensemble drama that has helped define the venerable company since the early 1990s.
In its fourth decade, Shattered Globe remains at the apex of its powers in terms of can’t-look-away storytelling in the service of productions that feel acutely, unnervingly timely, even when they’re period pieces.
Director Louis Contey clearly establishes “A View From the Bridge” as a period piece in the fiery staging running through Oct. 21 in a Shattered Globe production at Theater Wit. The visual cues are immediate in in costume designer Jessica Gowens’ 1950s house dresses and workwear.
But the show also has a universal feel thanks in part to Shayna Patel’s set design, which indicates the neighborhood and docks of the then working-class Red Hook Brooklyn, partially through massive drapes of roping.
As the dialogue makes immediately clear, Red Hook is a neighborhood of recent immigrants, some legal, some not. Shattered Globe’s Red Hook captures a blistering, gut-punching tragedy of new Italian arrivals desperate for work and in constant peril of being discovered and deported.
Contey’s “A View From the Bridge” also carries an ominous mantle of Greek tragedy about it. This is a story that’s at once highly specific to 1950s New York City and as ancient and archetypal as the fall of the house of Atreus. In John Judd’s world-weary, philosophical narration as the Red Hook lawyer Alfiere, “Bridge” has a Greek one-man chorus of immediate accessibility.
The Carbone family is at the heart of “View From the Bridge”: Eddie Carbone (Scott Aiello) works the docks to support his wife Beatrice (Eileen Niccolai) and their niece Catherine (Isabelle Muthiah, heart-breaking as she morphs from childish joy to devastated defiance), who the Carbones have raised as their own daughter. Initially, the three seem like a solid, healthy family.
But before the first few scenes are out, Eddie’s doting relationship with teenage Catherine starts to feel off. Eddie’s hyper-protective scrutiny of her “wavey” walk veers into creepy, possessive obsession. His eyes follow her too long as she leaves the room. He’s furious when she gets a terrific job opportunity, apoplectic at the notion of her dating. Aiello keeps Eddie’s confused, seething emotions barely contained, but he’s a coal-eyed powderkeg from the start.
Watching with dawning horror and equal parts rage and despair, is Beatrice. Niccolai’s terse, end-of-her-rope performance is masterclass in filling even the smallest gesture with a firestorm of anguished subtext.
It’s a tense atmosphere that only grows more tense when the Carbones take in a pair of “submarines,” aka illegal immigrants. Marco (Mike Cherry, who closes out the first act with a towering moment that will send chills down your spine) is a stoic family man, dutifully sending his wages home. His brother Rodolpho (a joyously charismatic Harrison Weger) sings at the dockyards and knows how to sew — both traits that have Eddie ominously growling “he ain’t right.” When Rudolpho starts romancing Catherine, Eddie’s fury turns rancid, irrational and dangerous.
It falls to Judd’s compassionate, philosophical attorney to draw out any larger meetings from the tragedy that ultimately destroys some of the denizens of “A View From the Bridge.”
And in the end, there is no neat moral to be drawn from Miller’s splintering, messy tragedy. Moral or no, Shattered Globe gives it the immediacy of immigration issues that are playing out right here, right now.
