Though known for directing Russian and Near and Far Eastern European drama, Andrei Malaev-Babel has never to my mind been more successful in capturing a dramatic essence than in directing Arthur Miller’s American tragic drama, A View from the Bridge. He has wrung maturity out of comparatively young FSU/Asolo Conservatory actors in a take on ancient myths informing the location and action of the modern play. Wes Tolman fully merits the attention paid to Eddie Carbone, a Longshoreman in the 1950s slummy Red Hook District of Brooklyn. Amber Lagerman as his wife Beatrice cogently reveals their marriage is troubled. Eddie focuses more attention and affection on Catherine, the orphaned niece they’ve raised like a daughter. She (Amy Helms, surprisingly robust) acts as his admiring barefoot kid but is eager to take a job offering independence. Beatrice gets Eddie, wary of outsiders, to house her cousins, illegal migrants though of the same Italian blood and heritage. Marco (a strong but mostly silent Aleksandr Krapivkin) needs work — now or never — to sustain his wife and three hungry kids back home. Ambitious younger Rodolpho (handsome, sincere Dustin Babin) craves a new, better life as an American. Andrew Bosworth’s straightforward Alfieri, a lawyer wise about the neighborhood and its people, acts mainly as a narrator. He also comments on their characters, values, and the roles all in the community are expected to play. Clearly, the drama isn’t merely a domestic one about a man undone by a jealous passion for his niece who shuns his wife and betrays her relatives to prevent the niece from leaving him for one of them. When Catherine tells she’ll marry Rodolpho, Tolman wildly unleashes Eddie’s jealousy against him. He claims the boy’s motive for marriage is to gain citizenship. He next says Rodolpho is gay, even forcing on him a (Judas?) kiss. But whose sexuality gets questioned? Personally, Beatrice is hurt but still more by Eddie’s betrayal of their blood and its obligations. When he tries to get Catherine to hurry the guys out of his house after informing on them, he’s not believed. As they are caught, it’s up to Krapivkin’s tradition-honoring Marco to extract from Eddie the price of perfidy. Designer Chris McVicker properly and metaphorically sets most of the action against a broken brick wall between the outside world and the Carbone domain. Rew Tippin’s sound design could be louder for Alfieri’s side stage remarks, but it makes the most of the song “Paper Doll” in Carbone’s house. Coins dropped into a wall phone curiously had no sound, though. Becki Leigh’s costumes are of the time. All of the actors and their director make Arthur Miller’s “View” unobstructed and creditable. The play comes over as both a historical piece and, in its treatment of illegal immigrants, a timely one.
