'A View From the Bridge' at Cain Park is a Play with Big Ideas, Huge Emotions

If you like your drama served up rich, complex and piping-hot, look no further than Arthur Miller's A View From the Bridge, now at Cain Park's Alma Theatre.

Set in the 1950s, this finely crafted work explores the many emotional crevices and outcroppings that exist in most families while shining a light on such current explosive issues such as immigration and identity.

Longshoreman Eddie Carbone and his wife Beatrice have been raising their niece Catherine in this conservative Italian American community since her mother died years before. Now, Catherine is out of high school, learning to be a stenographer, and trying to balance her girlish habits and impulses with mature desires, especially with regard to her uncle Eddie.

It all seems like a workable sitcom-style situation until two of Carbone's cousins from the old country—Marco and Rudolpho— show up, undocumented and looking for work. They take up residence in the Carbone home and almost immediately Rudolpho and Catherine strike up a relationship.

Their story is intermittently framed on stage by Alfieri (Abraham McNeil Adams), a local lawyer and family friend. While this "Greek chorus" playwriting device feels a bit clunky, Adams gives it a light touch so it never intrudes as it might.

In the central role of Eddie, Dan Zalevsky provides the play a strong backbone by showing how his affection and love for his niece turns slightly wrong as she has grown up. Although he relies a bit too much on meaningful stares into the middle distance, he nicely modulates his energy, allowing it to simmer and then explode at the critical moments.

Ursula Cataan's Beatrice knows how to play Eddie's thoughts and moods while slowly revealing to us her own needs. This leads her to make decisions that may be surprising until you realize the world she inhabits.

The timelapse-brisk budding relationship between Catherine and Rudolpho could easily slide into cliché. But Ariana Starkman and Keenan Carosielli—under the guidance of director Celeste Cosentino and Assistant Director Laura Perrotta—make this pairing feel genuine and unforced.

Starkman is every inch a young woman on the precipice of adulthood. She is matched by Carosielli, who reveals his less-than-macho interests (he sings, he cooks, he dabbles in dressmaking) which make Eddie steam with disgust. Or is there another emotion at work in there?

Eventually Eddie initiates two confrontations, one between his cousins and the immigration authorities and another between himself and Marco (an excellent Santino Montanez). The latter mano-a-mano seems inevitable given each man's stranglehold on pride.

The success of the Miller script and this production rests in the fact that there aren't neat and tidy answers to the questions posed. Nor should there be.

A View From the Bridge is a play with big ideas, huge emotions and hair-trigger volatility—not the incessant mewling of dysfunctional families that populates much of current theatrical offerings.

Once you relax and allow this production to carry you back to this neighborhood and that time, you'll be glad you took the trip.

A View From the Bridge
Through September 15 at Cain Park. 14591 Superior Road between Taylor Road and Lee Road in Cleveland Heights, 216-371-3000, cainpark.com


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