‘That one!’: Theater proves no respite from lingering campaign season

Blowing off “Almanac” last Friday and going to the Guthrie Theater instead seemed like a good way to put an end to an exhausting Election Day/Week/Month/Year and exorcise the ghosts of a long campaign season. We got rush tickets to the penultimate performance of Arthur Miller’s “A View from the Bridge,” ready to be transported to working-class Brooklyn, purely for the escapism, with no exit poll demographics in mind.

At first, it seemed to be working. I let pass without mention a trivial thought: that 1956, the year Miller wrote the play, was the same year that voter turnout in Minnesota voters last topped 80 percent, a hoped-for but not-quite-achieved figure on Tuesday. When the play started, I didn’t notice that Eddie, the boorish central character who used to be likable, sometimes wandered the stage like a second-debate John McCain.

But then came the climactic moment at the end (spoiler alert!) when Eddie phones the authorities from a pay phone to report that Marco and Rodolfo, his wife’s cousins from Italy, are working in the United States illegally. As immigration officers drag away Marco, the older cousin who has been sending his longshoreman’s wages back home to feed his family, he spits in Eddie’s face, pointing and shouting for all the neighbors to hear: “That one! I accuse that one! That one!”

Suddenly, rushing back unbidden and unwelcome, came visions of McCain applying the same apparent epithet to Barack Obama in that second presidential debate. Arthur Miller’s artifice dropped away, and it was as if McCain’s about-face on immigration policy and his subsequent loss of the Latino vote had just played out before us, amid a revival of McCarthyesque furor. It was time to go home and check the the gap in the Franken-Coleman U.S. Senate race, which had shrunk by another 17 votes, to 221, in the short time we’d spent with Eddie and Marco, a half century ago in Brooklyn.