Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Saw the Young Vic production of "A View from the Bridge" at the Lyceum Theatre this afternoon, with Mark Strong as Eddie, Nicola Walker as Beatrice, Phoebe Fox as Catherine, Michael Zegen as Marco, and Russell Tovey as Rodolpho. Gripping but finally unsatisfying.

After a hummus dinner, JF and I watched this Arthur Miller revival, directed by Gregory Mosher, at the Cort. Liev Schreiber was a terrific Eddie Carbone, dense, powerful, inarticulate, very human. You see the Italian American longshoreman unable to admit his attraction for his niece Catherine, and unable to let her go to the Italian illegal immigrant Rodolpho, whom Eddie thinks is "not right," meaning homosexual. Scarlett Johansson was adequate as Catherine, but hardly revelatory. Her independence from her guardian was not achieved but merely happened in the second act. Morgan Spector as Rodolpho was charming but not winning. All my sympathy was directed towards Eddie and little towards Rodolpho. Jessica Hecht was a very convincing Beatrice, a scolding pinched wife, torn between jealousy of Catherine and protectiveness of the girl, and ultimately a helpless spectator of her husband's dive into self-destruction. The pacing of Act One felt slow. When Eddie kissed Rodolpho...

The New Yorker, October 2008 from Claudia Roth Pierpont's essay "Method Man" on Marlon Brando: [Of "A Streetcar Named Desire"] Without changing a word, the actor seemed to have expanded the role and turned Williams's original meaning upside down. Jessica Tandy, the British actress who played Blanche, was furious that the audience laughed along with Stanley's jokes at her expense--as though he were a regular guy putting an uppity woman in her place--and stunned that it openly extended its sympathies more to the executioner than his victim. The reason was not just Brando's youth: it was the comic innocence that fuelled the gibes, the baffled tenderness beneath the toughness. The face above the heavily muscled body was angelic; the pain he showed when he broke down and wailed for his wife was searing, elemental. And his intensity was almost unbearable. One critic wrote that "Brando seems always on the verge of tearing down the proscenium with his b...

Watched the film on my laptop on Sunday night, the 1993 re-release with the cuts restored. It felt melodramatic, rather than dramatic. I would like to watch the play, and compare it with the film. Film robs the drama of its physicality, I think, the menacing swagger of Stanley Kowalski, the sexual tension between Stanley and his wife, Stella, and the shocking rape of Blanche DuBois. On film, the smashing of windows and crockery blended into the soundtrack.  I still remember the visceral shock of watching Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge in the theater. The actor who played Eddie Carbone was a powerful physical presence. He dominated the stage in all three dimensions, and then some. Film not only converts flesh into celluloid, it also demystifies the body by making a picture of it.