Arthur Miller play about a 1939 Brooklyn mob hit finally staged — 70 years later
nypost.comhistorian and author Nathan Ward, who penned “Dark Harbor: The War for the New York Waterfront,” in 2010.“[Cohn] said he wouldn’t make it unless they’ve turned the mobsters into communists,” Ward, a native Brooklynite, told The Post. “If it was an anti-communist movie about the waterfront, then he could make it.
He said his union wouldn’t let him buy it the way it was written.”Almost 75 years later, the unearthed project from Miller — who also wrote the play “A View From The Bridge” on Brooklyn waterfront corruption in 1955 — is finally being staged by the Brave New World theater company at Brooklyn’s Waterfront Museum, housed on a barge in Red Hook, through June 25.
Performances are already sold out. “It’s our attempt to give Pete Panto his due — and to bring the play into the public eye,” director Claire Beckman told The Post.Panto had spoken out against the overwhelming amount of corruption and mistreatment workers faced along the Brooklyn docks controlled by the International Longshoremen’s Association.Bosses would throw worker checks up into the air, watching as the primarily desperate, immigrant crowd fought over their due pay.That was just one of the humiliating rituals considered to be all in a day’s work at the time. “They’d have to buy wine from a certain place, they had to get their hair cut in a certain place.
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