A 'View' of obsession, emotion and Johansson

Is there a better role for method actors than the working-class Italian-American patriarch? Doubt it.
If you're looking to embody a character, it helps a lot if that character is trapped in his body already — consumed by its aches, its motions, its decidedly irrational wants. Liev Schreiber doesn't tear into the role of Eddie Carbone in "A View from the Bridge" so much as he slouches into it, reclining in a La-Z-Boy with his modest gut all but spilling out. That gut says, "I worked all day, I need a beer and I'd like some respect." It is a commanding stomach — and yet, not very commanding at all.

In a way, Arthur Miller's classic is neo-classical. "Bridge" is a by-the-book Greek tragedy whose objects of examination are some of the basic building blocks of human civilization: law and family. The narrator, a world-weary lawyer, seems aware of this transhistorical material in his opening monologue, in which he describes the 1950s Red Hook, Brooklyn setting as uniquely ghetto — "the gullet of New York swallowing the tonnage of the world" — but still imagines an ancient Calabria where the very same domestic dispute must have happened in the past.

Longshoreman Eddie lives with his wife, Beatrice (Jessica Hecht), and his 17-year-old niece, Catherine (Scarlett Johansson, making her Broadway debut), whom he took into custody after her mother died. Their bottom-floor tenement is plain and brown; their outfits are plain and blue. When Eddie comes home, Catherine runs to him like a joyful terrier. Almost as quickly, he tells her that her skirt is too short.

Eddie is obsessively overprotective of his adoptive daughter, so when Beatrice's cousins from Italy arrive, illegally looking for work, he's automatically suspicious of Rodolpho (Morgan Spector) — the one with the blond hair, effervescent demeanor and a love for singing in public. Sure enough, Rodolpho and Catherine fall for each other, which makes Eddie jealous in all the harmful, twisted, grotesque and ultimately tragic ways an Italian-American man can be jealous.

One critic has called Johansson "enchanting," but that's the last word I'd use. Not necessarily because it's a bad performance, but because her character is purposefully grating. Johansson brings an abrasive and barely convincing guido accent to a role that's already loud and childlike. It works insofar as you're supposed to regard her as a case of arrested development, but doesn't give her too much compelling — or "enchanting" — individuality. Hecht, meanwhile, is a lot worse. While her character is supposed to be the Venus to Schreiber's Mars, preaching love and independent womanhood, her accent and mannerisms are impenetrably cartoonish. Schreiber, embedded in the role, seems just as put-off by her as we are.

Directed by Gregory Mosher, the production features impressive mood lighting and a set that rotates elegantly among the street, Eddie's home and the lawyer's office. In these swapped but similar interiors, we can almost visualize the play's rich thematic stomping ground: that ambiguous gap (the bridge, if you will) between the law and all those rules of human conduct that are produced elsewhere and better left unsaid. The play is sort of like one of Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Decalogues" in that Miller takes "Thou shalt honor thy father" and runs the rule through its paces. It's brilliant, powerful stuff — simultaneously local and universal, physical and conceptual; an idea in a body, balding and covered in sweat.

"A View from the Bridge" is playing at the Cort Theater (138 W. 48th St.) through April 4. Tickets ($26.50-131.50) are available at telecharge.com.

Matt Margini is deputy managing editor.