Martίn Hernández – Stage Raw
In the early 1950s, playwright Arthur Miller and his friend Elia Kazan pitched Miller’s dockworker-based screenplay The Hook, with Kazan as the proposed director, to Columbia Pictures’ boss Harry Cohn. When Cohn – and the FBI – wanted to change the corrupt union villains from Mafia thugs to Communist ones, Miller pulled out and the movie was scrapped. Later, during the anti-communist witch hunts conducted by the U.S. Congress, Kazan “named names” of suspected communists and fellow travelers, many of whom were blacklisted for years. Miller refused to do the same and was charged with contempt of Congress, but the charge was dismissed on appeal. Their friendship was shattered, and while they eventually reconciled, Miller and Kazan were never as close again. Read more…
Don Shirley – Angeles Stage
An omniscient narrator is just about the only exception to the realism in Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge.” This stormy drama, first produced in two acts in 1956, focuses on the unhappily married Brooklyn dockworker Eddie Carbone. While he and his wife are hosting two young illegal Italian immigrants on his tenement floor, he begins to resent — for apparently unsavory reasons — the budding attraction between one of the immigrants and his teenaged niece. Read more…