Old ‘View’ in a New Century

It is a high yet double-edged honor for a playwright to have his or her work tampered with by a grateful but restless posterity.

It happens to the ancient Greeks and Shakespeare all the time--the updating and partial transformation of a timeless work to make it current for a contemporary audience. It means that the play is still speaking to directors, adaptors and theater-goers, although there is always the risk that the author, if still afoot, would be aghast.

Here’s predicting that “A View From the Bridge” will someday receive that treatment. It is easy to imagine the play migrating from 1950s Brooklyn, where Arthur Miller set it, to Long Beach or San Pedro, Miami or Houston--anywhere laborers are needed to haul stuff on and off cargo ships. It is the story of Eddie Carbone, who for deep, psychosexual reasons that he never can admit, is driven to sell out two illegal immigrants he has been harboring, and in the process destroy himself.

Miller’s milieu is the Italian community of Brooklyn, where established immigrants and their children struggle for a hard living on the docks. New arrivals from the impoverished old country are seen as deserving support--and protection from the immigration service. Eddie himself, before his inexorable descent into obsession and betrayal, declares that trust inviolable: “You’ll never see him no more, a guy do a thing like that,” he says of a neighborhood snitch who turned over his own uncle. “How’s he gonna show his face?”

It is a drama that easily could be transposed to more directly reflect the stakes today for new arrivals from Mexico, Haiti or the People’s Republic of China. But Penelope VanHorne, director of Vanguard Theatre Ensemble’s current production of “A View From the Bridge,” is not one to tinker with greatness.

“That thought never crossed my mind,” she said when asked whether she had considered putting the play in a Latino, Southern California milieu. Taking liberties with a play by Miller wouldn’t be her style, she said. “I grew up with the classics. I have such a high regard for what they have to say, how wonderfully written they are and what they have to give actors.”

But VanHorne and Wade Williamson, Vanguard’s artistic director, agree that such a transformation easily could be done and would speak to the play’s universality--assuming that Miller, who at 85 is still very much alive and active as a playwright, could be persuaded to allow changes.

“Most contracts are very clear that you can’t change any part of the script at all,” Williamson said. “Sometimes you can ask, but if it’s going to change the author’s intent, they’ll probably say no.”

As it turned out, Vanguard got an Eddie Carbone cut from original cloth. Joseph Anthony, who plays the part, is the son and grandson of Italian Americans who worked as longshoremen on the Brooklyn waterfront. His parents still live in the house where he grew up within walking distance of Red Hook, the hardscrabble neighborhood where Eddie lives in the play with his long-suffering wife, Beatrice, with his perhaps too-scrumptious apple-of-his-eye niece, Catherine, and with the two immigrant newcomers, Marco and Rodolpho. When Catherine and Rodolpho fall in love, it triggers Eddie’s darkest impulses.

VanHorne says she knew right away that Anthony, whose Eddie casts a pall over the household with his intense brooding, would be her antihero. “He came in [for the audition] and just nailed it for me. To me, he captures the essence of Eddie’s soul.”

Anthony says he had some special gut instincts about playing Eddie: “I’ve met guys like this growing up. I had a lot to draw on. When [Eddie] talks about hustling for work, my father used to do all that--go down to the [union] hall, stand there in the freezing cold all day and try to get hired. He took me on the ships a couple times when I was younger. I remember him telling me ‘I never want to see you come down here”’--meaning he didn’t want his son following in his laborer’s footsteps.

Anthony went into acting instead. As a student at Webster University in St. Louis, he played Louis, one of Eddie Carbone’s buddies, in a 1980 production of “A View From the Bridge” at the St. Louis Repertory. He recalls closely studying the Eddie of Bob Darnell, one of his most influential acting teachers. That has rubbed off on Anthony’s performance now.

“I don’t want to say I’m copying exactly what he did, but I just have been remembering how we worked in class and the techniques he taught us to prepare for these scenes that are very, very emotional.”

Anthony decided he could not pass up a chance to play Eddie Carbone, even though it has meant long commutes from his home in Sherman Oaks and a good deal of time and income sacrificed from his job as a limousine driver. The Vanguard pays its actors only a nominal fee.

“I knew [from that college production] that this was something I was destined to do,” he said. “There’s something about Miller where I just tap into the emotions. Hopefully I won’t have to wait another 20 years to play Willy Loman.”

VanHorne has not had to do the usual art-versus-day-job balancing act required of actors and directors doing grass-roots theater. She was laid off in June from her longtime job with a bill collection agency, giving her plenty of time to attend to the details of mounting “A View From the Bridge.”

“I literally spent days and nights here, fine-tuning things,” she said. That included leafing through old magazines and scrounging at flea markets to find just the right accouterments for the play’s period set--such as the vintage Westinghouse portable record player that figures in a key scene.

VanHorne focused on acting and directing at Point Park College in her hometown of Pittsburgh. But after moving to Southern California in 1985, the Long Beach resident set aside her theatrical interests for her business career. She joined the Vanguard ensemble four years ago and, besides acting and directing, has served as the company’s costume mistress.

“When I came here, one of my pet peeves was that I loved the shows, but they were wearing the wrong shoes for the period,” she said. VanHorne’s attention to detail has set that right. “Ask any ensemble member here. I’m a little controlling about anything that goes on the stage.”

In directing “A View From the Bridge,” she said, she has tried to loosen up a bit. An actress herself, she knows that too much control can be counterproductive. “I gave the actors free rein, and I got a couple of really nice surprises. I told them I wasn’t going to dictate who they were--within reason.”

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“A View From the Bridge,” Vanguard Theatre Ensemble, 699-A S. State College Blvd., in the College Business Park, Fullerton. Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays 5 p.m. Ends Sept. 15. $13 to $15. (714) 526-8007.