Back by popular demand after a sold-out run, Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge will be performed again in Red Hook through Brave New World Repertory Theatre. But unlike your conventional theatergoing experience, the play takes place on a floating barge.
Claire Beckman, Brave New World’s producing artistic director and co-founder, explained that View was a play that she had wanted to do for years and was only first able to obtain the rights back in 2018, a few years after the Broadway revival ended. In the meantime, while waiting to see if they would get those rights, Beckman heard about another play from the Waterfront Museum’s president David Sharps called The Hook and, with playwright Ron Hutchinson, adapted it for a U.S. premiere aboard the Lehigh Valley Barge #79 this June. Originally an unproduced 1947 screenplay by Miller, The Hook anticipated the classic film On the Waterfront, which the company also previously performed in a stage version.
“This summer, it was really about a deep dive into Miller’s relationship with Red Hook and, specifically, his fascination with longshoreman and their world,” Beckman explained. “He was drawn to the waterfront because of these graffiti and poster signs that he saw all over the Red Hook area about Pete Panto. This [story] is important to us because of the social justice issues.”
Panto was a longshoreman who contacted authorities about the poor working conditions on the docks run by unions with mafia ties. He disappeared in 1939 and was later found dead in a New Jersey lime pit. Beckman said by the time Miller wrote The Hook eight years later, corrupt unions had murdered many, which he felt was an important story to tell. After a Hollywood deal fell through, he used The Hook’s setting for a new stage drama, A View from the Bridge.
“Miller had took all this research he had been doing about Red Hook and made a more domestic, intimate story, which is part of, I think, what makes him such a masterful playwright,” she added. “He brings the macro and the micro together. Most of his protagonists have a struggle between themselves and the world.”
Beckman sees parallels between this play, set in the mid-1950s, and today’s political climate, which is why she thinks it did so well last year and stuck with many audience members.
“Everybody was shocked to listen to Miller’s words and feel how they resonated, including the cast and the director,” she said. “I [performed in] the play myself 30 years ago as Catherine, the niece; now I play her aunt. Even as well as I knew the play, I was still astounded by how it resonated.”
View is the 1950s story of Eddie Carbone, a longshoreman who lives and works in Red Hook with his wife Beatrice and her 18-year-old orphaned niece, Catherine. When Beatrice’s undocumented relatives arrive from Italy to work on the docks, problems arise between Eddie and cousin Rodolpho. Without giving away too much away for those who’ve never seen it, there’s drama and comedy that speak to relatable life situations and feelings.
“The tension and the momentum is the most unbearable because it just hurdles like a train towards this inevitable conclusion, inevitable crash … you know that it’s coming, there’s no stopping it. That’s the power of Miller’s writing, but it’s also very funny,” Beckman explained. “His ear is so in tune with the human comedy – it’s the drama of being a human being.”
Location, location, location
Brave New World is a nomadic company that scouts out ideal, natural locations that fit with productions’ storylines and settings. They bring theater to the doorsteps of Brooklyn, instead of asking Brooklyn to come to them. For example, their first site-specific production of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird took place on six Westminster Road porches in Ditmas Park in 2005, attracting over 2,000 people. Four years later, Shakespeare’s The Tempest was performed on Coney Island’s beach and boardwalk near the aquarium. Miller’s The Crucible had a 10-day run a year later at the Old Stone House, where only candle-lit lanterns were used as light sources.
“You hear Eddie and the other characters speak about Red Hook and talk about particular streets, places and piers and you’re there. And to be on a barge, a vessel that carried cargo from the ship to the shore where a man like Eddie Carbone worked every day, is magical. It’s about as close to getting in a time machine because of the world that we create [with] the costumes, props and feeling the boat rock,” Beckman said in reference to the View production.
“I think people right now crave opportunities that are more organic, more spontaneous and less happening within the little frame of their computer screen and the fourth wall [that’s felt most strongly in film and television].”
She also emphasized the fact that a night out to Manhattan to see a Broadway show adds up between the ticket purchase, transportation, dinner and other factors (like buying merchandise or hiring a babysitter). By having theatre available here in Brooklyn, people can see quality work for a fraction of the cost in their own backyards.
Social justice issues
The work of Brave New World always tries to take a hard look at social justice issues, while still being entertaining, because those are what attendees can relate to. Beckman attributes this social justice theme and focus to the social upheaval that’s occurred around the world over the last decade.
“It’s not often that an artist has an opportunity to really effect change in the world, but we try in our own little humble way to get people thinking, so that maybe we can build empathy,” Beckman added. “We tell stories that we hope have some significance, some intentionality in the world we’re living in.”
A View from the Bridge will be on the Waterfront Museum barge (290 Conover St.) for three weekends in September (beginning the 12th) with multiple evening performances – and the possibility for an extended weekend in October. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit bravenewworldrep.org.
Top photo credit to Doug Barron
