Word: worked
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Like much of Arthur Miller's other work, A View from the Bridge belongs to the Drama of Embarrassment--almost the dominant American genre--where the hero makes a spectacle of himself while his wife wishes he would behave, and all the people onstage (and not a few in the audience) are highly uncomfortable. This sort of thing can be gloriously transfigured, as in Long Day's Journey into Night and Death of a Salesman, but in the present case it becomes a slow buildup to a series of emphatic but unreverberant wallops...
Moreover, this sturdy little play aspires above its station. Obviously affected by delusions of tragedy, Mr. Miller has outfitted his work with a one-man chorus named Alfieri, who takes a small part in the action (he is a waterfront lawyer), but spends most of his time making superfluous references to the passionate nature of the Mediterranean peoples and the inevitable doom of Eddie Carbone. This device imparts to the play an air of pretentiousness, which Joseph Plummer does not dissipate by playing Alfieri like the dear old professor of a very recondite subject...
...Plummer also directed, and his work is decent and creditable, if, as I suppose, his many miscastings were forced upon him. As the starcrossed longshoreman Eddie Carbone, Nick Smith is, among other disabilities, twenty years too young. Ruth Bolton Brand, Francesca Solano, Johnny Bell, and Stanley Young are also estimable but over parted in various ways. They get across a good deal of what is in the script, but View from the Bridge is not so stuffed with dramatic riches that any company can afford to let so much of it get away...
...also mutually exclusive. As students, we are taught to rid ourselves of biases in studying history, and to consider art as above and removed from morality. What is not so often stressed is the necessity, and desirability, of moral judgements in history, or the fact that criticism of a work of art is itself a moral action. The whole academic world is involved with morality, but the distinction between "objective" investigation and "subjective" judgment can at times serve as a pretext to ignore this involvement. If moral philosophy cannot be taught, it can at least be discussed...
...Researchers will also try to ascertain the effect of volunteers upon the hospital as a whole. Some students will work with entire wards, trying to cheer patients and help them regain self-esteem. A sociologist has started to study selected wards, and his investigation will be repeated after the volunteers complete their duties...