OnStage: A view from the stage

A week or so before "A View From the Bridge" was due to open, director Ethan McSweeny was in a crisis, unsure how he would end the first-ever staging of this Arthur Miller tragedy at the Guthrie Theater.

He remained cool.

"I trust in the process and know that we will get there," he said calmly. "We'll see by opening."

Putting on a show is often like a magic act: Will there be a rabbit there when you reach into the hat? For the imaginative and visionary McSweeny, who does not shy away from taking big risks in his productions, pixie dust has surrounded some of his past productions at the Guthrie.

"Six Degrees of Separation" remains a landmark in the theater's history. He also staged fluid and beautiful productions of "A Body of Water," "Sideman" and "Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde."

If the disparate parts of his 2004 "Romeo and Juliet" did not cohere, they nonetheless showed the director's audacious reach.

"We needed a little more time with that one," he said.

Two Miller plays this year

While he has never directed "Bridge," McSweeny is working his way through the Miller canon. This summer I caught his potent and arresting production of "Death of a Salesman" at the Chautauqua Theater Company in upstate New York, where he serves as artistic director alongside his partner, Vivienne Benesch.

Co-starring in that production as Linda Loman was Amy van Nostrand. In "View," she plays Beatrice, the wife of a longshoreman.

"Ethan tries a vision, changes it, adjusts it, so that you come to own the vision as your own," said Van Nostrand, who also starred in "Six Degrees." "He makes the life of the play encompass the whole audience and all of the actors who are involved in it."

Miller, American tragedian

In his tragedies, Miller often finds a theme or subject matter against which he pins characters until they break. In "All My Sons," the struggle is between family and money, conscience and capitalism. In "The Crucible," it's between the individual and a witch-hunting society.

A modern-day "Oedipus," "A View From the Bridge" deals with immigration, codes of justice and destructive lust. Italian-American longshoreman Eddie Carbone, who lives in Brooklyn's Red Hook section, has an unseemly interest in Catherine, Beatrice's orphaned niece, whom they have reared.

Two male cousins of Beatrice enter the country illegally and move in with the Carbones. One of the men falls for Catherine, which puts him in conflict with Eddie.

Miller's characters live by an ethic that is ancient and that makes tragedy inevitable. "These people are trying to work these big problems they have in their lives without access to Shakespeare or Freud," McSweeny said.

"There's something in the play, when Eddie breaks the tribal code, the only thing that would actually bring justice is blood. It's an Old Testament type of justice and connects it to the great tragedies of the canon. Eddie is offered great opportunities to get off this highway to doom and, because of hubris, he never takes them."

Finding his calling

So when did McSweeny, son of a presidential speechwriter in the Johnson administration, get the theater bug? As a child, he and a close friend who became a visual artist used to have days-long games playing with cowboy figures. "We were basically playing with dolls," he said.

McSweeny also considered acting and architecture as a boy; he loved sketching buildings and interpreting literature.

But as he grew, he found he was neither "a very good actor nor a very good painter," McSweeny said, adding that he needed to do theater because it was the only outlet where he could combine his passions.

His chosen craft has met with impressive results, even when he is searching to find his way in a script.

"One of the things that I really appreciate about Ethan is that he doesn't pretend to know something he doesn't know," said screen star John Carroll Lynch ("Fargo," "The Drew Carey Show"), a Guthrie veteran who is returning to the theater after 13 years to play Eddie.

"He has a passion and a faith, and he's meticulous," Lynch said. "And he is a master of this thrust stage. He knows how to use it, to make the play grow to the size of an opera, even if it's claustrophobic, with five beings being pressed down in this tiny apartment in Brooklyn."

Rohan Preston • 612-673-4390