STAGE WEST: "A View from the Bridge" at North Coast Repertory Theatre

Left to right: Coby Rogers, Richard Baird and Marie Zolezzi in "A View from the Bridge" at North Coast Repertory Theatre.                                                                                                      Photo by Aaron Rumley

            The view from this bridge is of a man being wrenchingly and utterly consumed by his inner demons.
            That would be the tormented Eddie Carbone in Arthur Miller’s searing drama “A View from the Bridge,” now onstage at North Coast Repertory Theatre. It’s a tense, explosive production expertly directed by David Ellenstein and starring Richard Baird in an all-stops-out performance.
            This was my first time seeing “A View from the Bridge,” and I won’t soon forget it. Theater has the uncanny ability to make one thoughtful but also uncomfortable. That this is accomplished so completely in North Coast Rep is the result of Miller’s trenchant script and his story redolent of a Greek tragedy, and also a superior cast immersed in the play’s sharp edges and detonations.
            The chorus of this Greek tragedy is narrator Alfieri, an Italian-American lawyer played with the sublime eloquence befitting a seasoned barrister by Frank Corrado. It is Alfieri who sets the scene (and throughout tries to steer Eddie’s wayward thinking and conscience in the proper direction).
            The scene Alfieri sets: Residing in the hardscrabble Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, longshoreman Eddie is most comfortable in his favorite chair with a beer in hand. It’s push/pull with his struggling wife Beatrice (Margot White) and co-dependency – and suggestively more than that simmering deep inside Eddie – with 17-year-old niece Catherine (Marie Zolezzi). The anxiety from the outset is ramped up soon when two of Bea’s cousins, family man Marco (Lowell Byers) and young Rodolpho (Coby Rogers), illegal immigrants from Italy, arrive to be indefinite house guests at the Carbones’.  
            Catherine, who has been sheltered her entire life by the doting but over-protective Eddie, immediately sparks to the blonde-haired, uninhibited Rodolpho – and the attraction is mutual. This preoccupies and infuriates the scrutinizing and discomfited Eddie. Bea wants to know why. Catherine wants to know why. Alfieri, Eddie’s counsel, wants to know why.
            All Eddie will say is that the flamboyant Rodolpho “isn’t right.” Code for: He likes to sing, likes to dance, likes to cook, likes to sew.
            As Catherine and Rodolpho grow closer, with physical intimacy between them looming, Eddie’s objections to anyone who will listen become more virulent.
            Hold on for Act Two.
             Eddie Carbone is a complicated character, to put it mildly. Baird told me in an interview I did with him for the San Diego Union-Tribune that Eddie would have benefited from psychotherapy. That’s about the last thing Eddie would have acceded to. From beginning to end – and what an end – he believes he’s right, believes that Rodolpho isn’t right, believes that he knows himself. That he doesn’t, or won’t acknowledge what he does know, is the starkest tragedy of the man.
            This is of course a meaty role for Baird, and his commitment to and passion for the portrayal is deep in the heart of this exceptional production. His Eddie is a man who possesses foundational decency even as he himself is possessed by so many hard realities and contradictions.
            Not to be underestimated is White’s support as the stalwart but desperate Beatrice. Her appeal to Eddie to face himself is the emotional counterpoint to the stern, dignified Alfieri’s sincere but measured appeals.
            Zolezzi’s Catherine is sympathetic without seeming a victim. After Eddie she may be the drama’s most complex character – growing up yet unable, until she can’t wait any longer, to get out of her tender trap.
            The shocks of the play’s second act make sense in retrospect, but Miller’s ingenuity is in scarcely, if at all, telegraphing them ahead of time. Or maybe it’s just that as Eddie starts to spiral we brace ourselves for just about anything.
            Concurrent with the inter-relationship flares of this play is its McCarthy-era ugliness.
            Though written and set in the ‘50s, “A View from the Bridge” is all too contemporary in its undercurrent of paranoiac anti-immigration. That my friends is another tragedy.
            “A View from the Bridge” runs through Oct. 13 at North Coast Repertory Theatre in Solana Beach.