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Eddie Carbone, the emotionally myopic longshoreman in A View From the Bridge which opened Jan. 24 at the Cort for a fourth Broadway viewing, is a master of the bad call, whether it's how late the grocery stays open or who should marry the 17-year-old niece he and his wife have raised as their own daughter. Fifty-five years after Arthur Miller created him in a one-act play that was subsequently enlarged, Eddie is an easy read — except, of course, to himself — and it is this short-sightedness, his inability to recognize or even own up to the triangle that has formed in front of his own eyes, that propels his life inevitably off the docks.

Smoldering star-power appears to have been the motivation for this new revival — the commercial coupling of Liev Schreiber and Scarlett Johansson — and, through the sheer strength of her performance, Jessica Hecht joins them above the title, aligning the stars perfectly for the grinding tragedy ahead.

On opening night, there was none of the welcoming applause that generally is generated by stars on Broadway. A tone had already been set by the time they set foot on stage. Although Miller aspired for Greek-steeped tragedy, director Gregory Mosher goes about it in a sotto voce fashion, bringing it down a notch or two to resemble real life. This puts the production on a whole different plane than the all-stops-out, Tony-winning revival Michael Mayer directed in 1996.

"Then, the next thing you do is to say to the actors all day long, 'Please talk to each other. Please listen to each other. Please don't try to do too much. Do what comes from the other actor. Don't invent line readings. Don't think of funny faces to make. Just put your attention on the other actor, and what energy is coming from them and the imaginary circumstances of the play (we're in Brooklyn in a tenement). Whatever will come out will be truthful. That's how you spend rehearsal, but whether you're having a fight or whether you're trying to make up after a fight, the basic rule is: Listen. Listen. Listen. And that's how the accents come together, that's how the rhythms come together, that's how Jessica and Liev can be in the middle of the tensest scene and can take a ten-second pause in the middle of the scene. Those ten seconds crackle because you know they're paying attention to each other."

The unexpectedly stage-assured performance he drew from Johansson was the talk of the after-party held at Espace on (very) West 42nd Street. "Well, Scarlett's a champ — a pro," Mosher tossed off before dribbling off into a sports allusion: "Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player in the world, went to play baseball and had to go back to basketball because he could not hit the curve ball. This happens a lot with theatre and film people — going in both directions, by the way — but I thought she'd be very good or I wouldn't have cast her. She has that beautiful voice, and she's so gorgeous, so temperamentally perfect for the part. Then it turns out she could hit the curved ball. She can be — and is — a stage actress as well as being one of the world's great film actresses, and that blew my mind. I have to tell you, because Liev really is kinda Michael Jordan, to be there with him and to give up nothing to him — I mean, to be absolutely on the court with him — is an astonishingly achievement, and, to her great credit, she makes it look easy."

Incredibly, almost criminally, Mosher has been away from Broadway for 18 years. "My last Broadway show was 1992 — A Streetcar Named Desire with Jessica Lange and Alec Baldwin — and James Gandolfini playing the upstairs neighbor — but the 18 years, in a way, seems like 18 weeks."

He kept his hand in, directing regionally — most memorably, The Glass Menagerie with Sally Field and Jason Butler Harner that almost transferred to Broadway from the Kennedy Center. "It was the same situation as this play, really," Mosher admitted. "Sally was a great leader as well as a great actress. She set a tone for the show. Liev set a tone and an example of really hard work."

View the Entire Photo Gallery Liev Schreiber and Scarlett Johansson Photo by Aubrey Reuben

I asked Schreiber to tell me that his subtle, shaded portrayal was as easy as he made it look, and he said, "It's as easy as I made it look." A wry customer, but it was his only unconvincing line-reading all night. More than act the role, he seems to inhabit it, breathing it in and breathing it out, with finely tuned nuances throughout.

"It's a trying role, but it's a lovely play. It's so lean. There's no fat on this play at all. And the trajectory of the character is just remarkable. I don't think it's any coincidence that the actors who have played this role had great experiences doing it — Anthony LaPaglia, Tony Lo Bianco and Van Heflin."

He saw Raf Vallone do Eddie Carbone in the 1959 movie and "thought it was odd that they picked an Italian to play the lead because it seemed you lost that cultural conflict element, but I think [director Sidney] Lumet was after something about Italian men and that sort of patriarchal dominance." Continued...