A man under pressure erupts in 'A View From the Bridge'

By Mike Fischer, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

August 22, 2017

Arthur Miller’s “A View from the Bridge” has been adapted for opera not once, but twice.  No surprise there: Even when gauged by the standards of a playwright addicted to melodrama, “Bridge” plays big – despite being inhabited by characters who live small and don’t always have words for what they feel.

In another triumph for one of American Players Theatre’s best directors, Tim Ocel teams with a cast led by a great Jim DeVita to exploit that disconnect between cramped circumstance and operatic passion. The result is a devastating “Bridge,” in which titanic onstage emotion continually engulfs the audience within APT’s intimate Touchstone Theatre. 

We first meet Eddie in the place where he’s most himself: on the docks abutting Brooklyn’s Red Hook slum, re-created here by scenic designer Takeshi Kata as towering pallets that fill the stage until they’re laboriously moved upstage by two dockworkers (Kipp Moorman and Tim Gittings).  Those pallets remain there throughout the play, marking the perimeter of Eddie’s narrow world.

His home within that world has been shrinking by the year, as the 17-year-old niece he and wife Beatrice (Colleen Madden) have raised – and whom Eddie loves much more than he should – comes of age.

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