I'll admit it: I've taken my sweet time Googling for the perfect picture of Scarlett Johansson to accompany Gothamist stories on the starlet, and while I was curious find out whether she could hold her own in her Broadway debut, I figured it would at least be an opportunity to gawk for a couple of hours. But the real surprise in the current revival of A View From the Bridge isn't that Johansson's acting chops are legit, but that Liev Schreiber's performance is so riveting that you forget to ogle her.
Set in bustling post-war Red Hook, Arthur Miller's classically structured tragedy centers on Eddie Carbone, a longshoreman "working the docks from the Brooklyn Bridge to the breakwater where the open sea begins." The play (and this production) is rich in idiomatic authenticity; Miller spent time in the largely Italian-American neighborhood in 1947 doing research for an unproduced screenplay, The Hook, which was to have been directed by Elia Kazan and bears similarities to what became On the Waterfront. The simple but gripping narrative of "View" is based on a true story told to Miller about a longshoreman who was disgraced (or possibly murdered) after informing on two illegal immigrants—his relatives—to stop one of them from marrying his niece.
In Miller's play, Carbone is the reluctant, guilt-stricken informant, but you wouldn't take him for a rat in Act One—in fact, as his wife and niece are preparing for their immigrant cousins' arrival, he tells a cautionary tale of another guy from the neighborhood, Vinny Bolzano, who disappeared after "snitching" to immigration. (Incidentally, that surname is still phonetically known, though not infamously, in the neighborhood—Sunny Balzano is the proprietor of the beloved Conover Street bar Sunny's.) When first staged in 1955—on the heels of On the Waterfront's release—some saw Miller's play, with its unheroic portrayal of informants, as a riposte to Kazan's film, in which Marlon Brando's character identifies mob thugs to investigators.
But even without that layer of historical nuance, "View" is an accessible tragedy with universal themes, and with Schreiber as Carbone, this production is compelling on its own terms, despite an uneven cast. Johansson, an actor I never thought had much range, more than holds her own, and brings a stirring vulnerability and subtlety in the role of Carbone's neice. Her performance feels wholly authentic and earned, and during her anguished love scene I could see tears streaking her cheeks. You can fake that on film, but not on stage.
The rest of the ensemble has soft spots. Michael Cristofer is superb as the avuncular attorney and narrator who's helpless to stop Carbone's inexorable descent to doom, and Corey Stoll is endearing in the role of the brawny immigrant whom Carbone betrays. But Jessica Hecht, who plays Schreiber's neglected wife and whom you may remember as one of George Costanza's rare romantic triumphs on Seinfeld, is stuck on one grating "Brooklyn wife" note, at times lapsing into cliche. And Johansson's forbidden lover, the fair-haired Sicilian immigrant Rodolpho, is played by Morgan Spector, who up until a couple of weeks ago was the understudy to actor Santino Fontana. Fontana dropped out of the production after sustaining a concussion during a vague on-stage accident, and while Spector is adequate in the role, there's no heat between him and Johansson, and one wonders how the dramatic tension would have differed with Fontana.
Thankfully, Schreiber's portrayal of Carbone is so lived-in, so visceral, that he more than makes up for the cast's weaknesses. Carbone does something despicable, but you never see Schreiber judging his character, and his empathetic take on the role humanizes Carbone's monstrous deed. I'm a standing ovation purist, and think the gesture should be limited to only the most phenomenal performances, but I jumped to my feet along with the rest of the audience when Schreiber took his bow.
