Dream? What Dream?

It’s a grim opening. Sooty towers rise beyond Redhook’s brickclad tenements where dockworkers, largely immigrant and some illegal, get by, raise families, follow rules. Mostly. One of them, Eddie Carbone (Arthur Miller’s next Everyman after “Death of a Salesman”), is a big, sullen, lumbering fellow, a longshoreman, described by the lawyer/narrator in “A View From The Bridge” as a tragic hero, a common man headed for disaster. Inevitably. And from the very start he is played by John Ozerhoski as an isolated, remote figure. So, we are warned of trouble ahead, and almost as soon as the Carbone kitchen rolls onto the stage we catch its drift. “With your hair like that you look like a madonna,” Eddie tells Catherine, his 17-year-old niece. “You’re a madonna type,” he adds, fluffing her dark curls. O.K. We can let that slide. But there’s more. Eddie has not slept with Beatrice, his wife, for three months. When she asks why (she knows), he rails at her for raising the matter. Meanwhile, Catherine sits on Eddie’s lap or perches on the tub to watch him shave. Beatrice takes a dim view of all this. So, Eddie is hard for an audience to like. They even applaud when he’s knocked down in a fist fight. He’s even hard to care about, which is a problem for any production. And we get the feeling all are doomed. Not just Eddie, but Beatrice, Catherine, Rodolpho — a blond and distant relative who enters the country illegally with his brother Marco and stays with the Carbones for a time — and even the audience. Yes, we feel it: Nothing but bad can come of all this. Now Miller is drawn to immigrants, men who leave Italy, where mothers feed their infants water to stop their hungry wailing, and, secreted aboard cargo ships, drift into New York for a piece of the American Dream. They want to make a living. They want their children to survive. They want attention paid, as Miller says. They want to count. But Eddie, pincered and angry and alone, is way beyond any of these dreams. And we are way beyond wanting them for him. Director Les Ober clearly likes Miller and is beguiled by the idea of unswerving disaster. But though it works in “Death of a Salesman,” it is tired out here. The acting is fine with Ozerhoski as Carbone; Victoria Mancini as Catherine; Cathy Quirk as Beatrice; Reid Sinclair as Rodolpho; John Ponzini as Alfieri, the lawyer/narrator, and Robert Rovezzi, who with no theatrical experience listed, is especially good as Marco. “A View From the Bridge” runs at the Marine Studio Theatre in Torrington through April 13. For tickets, call 860-489-7180 or go to www.warnertheatre.org.