Splendid Cast Lifts ‘View From Bridge’

Through the years, Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge” has taken heat from critics for its heavy-handed dramatic structure--and rightfully so. Miller’s 1955 one-act, which was expanded into a full-length play a year later, revolves around Eddie Carbone, a Brooklyn longshoreman whose incestuous passion for his 17-year-old niece leads him down a dark path to disgrace and death.

The problem lies in Miller’s efforts to ennoble Eddie. Miller’s determination to transform Eddie from a garden-variety stalker into a full-blown tragic hero is at best wrong-headed. Yet given just the right combination of circumstances, Miller’s flawed drama can take on tragic heft, not as an ersatz Greek updating, but as a devastatingly modern examination of sexual obsession and twisted patriarchy.

Shashin Desai’s staging at the International City Theatre is just that combination, a near-perfect production that unfolds with propulsive inevitability. This “Bridge” collapse is a slow-motion catastrophe apparent from the play’s opening moments. Because of the flashback structure and the omniscient narration of Alfieri (Ric Mancini), the Greek chorus-styled lawyer who comments on the action in retrospect, the plot holds few surprises.

In a lesser staging, that intrinsic lack of suspense could be a shortfall. But despite our awareness of impending calamity, Desai and his superlative cast bring such emotional authenticity to every scene that the denouement still wrenches.

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Set in the 1950s, the action unfolds in Brooklyn’s Red Hook slum, an Italian American neighborhood near the docks where Eddie (Ramy Zada) sweats out a hard-won living. Childless Eddie and wife Beatrice (Laura Julian) have raised Beatrice’s orphaned niece Catherine (Tina Gasbarra) as their own. But Eddie’s paternal interest in Catherine masks his increasing sexual fixation. When Catherine falls in love with Rodolpho (Blake Shields), an illegal immigrant cousin who is staying with the Carbones, Eddie’s pathology becomes evident to all--except, sadly, himself.

Don Llewellyn’s extraordinary set, Rand Ryan’s lighting and Kim DeShazo’s costumes evoke the period and locale with time-capsule exactitude. Desai wisely downplays the obvious foreshadowing of the earlier scenes, emphasizing Eddie’s earthy humor over his kinks. Zada’s lacerating Eddie is the obvious spearhead of this acute cast, but all the actors, from the leads to the lesser roles, deliver performances of subtlety and magnitude. Especially fine is Mark Piatelli as Marco, Rodolpho’s older brother, a gentle man driven to drastic action by Eddie’s betrayal.

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* “A View From the Bridge,” International City Theatre at Center Theater, the Long Beach Performing Arts Center, 300 East Ocean Blvd., Long Beach. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends May 20. $27-$35. (562) 436-4610. Running time: 2 hours.