By popular demand, Brave New World Repertory Theatre, the Brooklyn-based theatre company that first won acclaim with To Kill A Mockingbird staged on the front porches of Victorian Flatbush in 2005, is bringing back its SRO production of Arthur Miller's A View From The Bridge onboard the Waterfront Museum Barge in Red Hook, where the play's action is set, September 12-29 for 12 performances.
Rave reviews greeted Brave New World Rep's original run last Spring (June 2018), which was sold out and extended. The immersive production, onboard the covered century-old barge docked in Red Hook, mesmerized audiences with its compelling family tragedy about Italian longshoreman Eddie Carbone - the demons he battles within himself, and with those different and threatening to him.
A View From the Bridge is Miller's classic domestic drama about Eddie, his wife Beatrice and their orphaned niece Catherine. When Beatrice's undocumented relatives arrive from Italy to work the docks, conflict grows between Eddie and cousin Rodolpho. The intimacy of the Waterfront Museum space - with its ambient smell of the sea and the audience merely feet away from the action - serves to drive home the tragic events of the story.
The play is more relevant than ever, says BNW co-founder/producing artistic director Claire Beckman, who is also playing Beatrice. "Eddie Carbone is a tragic American character who we may have assumed was a dinosaur before the 2016 election, but now know is alive and well and living among us," she says. "There is genuine danger in the play. It speaks to our time in a haunting way."
"Arguably the Bard of Brooklyn, Miller is a favorite of Brave New World Rep," she says. "We also produced The Crucible in 2010, The American Clock in 2011, the American premiere of The Hook, based on his screenplay this past June, and the 2018 production of View. Our director Alex Dmitriev takes a naturalistic, almost filmic approach to this classic."
Dmitriev, whom Beckman first met 30 years ago in another production of View, says the intimate setting aboard the Waterfront Museum lets in the tragedy of the story. "I am struck by the play's parallels to the struggle we see daily in the news about the promise of America, the never-ending struggle to build a better life, and the forces at work against achieving the American Dream. It's as relevant today as it was when Miller wrote it."
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