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87 Enoch Brater A Dominican View An Interview with Darryl V. Jones In November 1995, Darryl V . Jones directed Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge at the Source Theatre Company for a standard four-week run in Washington,DC.Enoch Brater spoke with him,on a telephone hookup arranged by WUOM-Radio on September 21, 2004, about the director’s decision to reset the play in a community of Dominican immigrants. Enoch Brater: How did you arrive at the idea of transforming Miller’s original Sicilian American Red Hook setting to a stage world inhabited by recent immigrants from the Dominican Republic? DarrylV . Jones: At the time I had just returned to theWashington, DC, area from working at the Globe Theatre in San Diego.And it was in California that, for the first time, I became aware of the reality of an immigrant population and the idea of borders, of people coming across borders illegally. Because in San Diego you’re right there on the border with Mexico, and you see the border patrol police all the time.That’s when I started to think that there’s another group of immigrants coming to the United States, as there always has been. I began to think not so much about Mexicans but about Latino immigration in general. Could I take this idea about the Latino community and work it into AView from the Bridge? I remembered that when I lived in NewYork in the last highrise building on Central ParkWest, aroundW. 106th Street, I was looking down into another world, because right there on the side street there was nothing but Dominicans and Puerto Ricans. I looked like them, and when I walked down the street they would speak to me. If they spoke in Spanish, I couldn’t respond. I started to reflect on that, and it made me think that perhaps my experience was similar to Arthur Miller’s: a Jewish American looking down from a bridge on a community of Italians. Maybe he, too, looked like them, but he was not really part of the code of 88 Arthur Miller’sGlobalTheater that environment. So I started to make those comparisons with my own experience, and this ultimately led to the production. EB: How did Arthur Miller react to this idea when you discussed it with him? DVJ: He thought it was a great idea, and he enthusiastically gave me his permission to proceed with the plan. He realized there would have to be some script changes. The major change was in Alfieri’s opening monologue, because that deals with Sicilian location and exposition. We needed to adapt this to account for an appropriate Dominican family. I settled on a Dominican situation after doing a lot of research about which Caribbean country would be most similar in experience to the Italian immigration. For a long time I wanted to use Cuba, but that wouldn’t work because the difference with Cuba is that you can’t go back.And that’s a big part of Miller’s story—Marco in particular is saving money so that he can return to his wife and children. Dominicans, on the other hand, can go back and forth. We didn’t want to use Puerto Rico, for example, because Puerto Rico is part of the United States—so the situation could not be the same. Eventually we settled on the Dominican perspective. Initially, when I first contacted Miller, we hadn’t made this finalization. I think he liked the idea of the Dominicans because he saw that the similarities between their world and the Italians were stronger. I made a few script changes to Alfieri’s opening monologue , Miller approved those changes, and we were off and running. EB: What was your experience with Miller’s work before you directed the Dominican View? Had you directed Miller before and, if so, how? DVJ: No. I hadn’t directed any Miller plays before. I had, of course, seen many of his plays. EB: In your experience as an audience member, have you seen any productions of his plays which were as ambitious as yours in transforming the setting? DVJ: No. EB: Were you aware of any when you directed AView from the Bridge? DVJ: Not at the time I was working on the production. Subsequently I found out a great deal more about this. Miller’s agent told me about the famous production of Death of a Salesman in Beijing. They...

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