A View from the Bridge (1955, revised 1956). Content and Description

Miller originally conceived A View from the Bridge as a one-act “curtain raiser” for A Memory of Two Mondays (1955). Upon completing the first draft, he decided Bridge should headline the bill. After trial runs in New Haven and Boston, both plays premiered on September 29, 1955, at New York’s Coronet Theatre. Reviews were largely negative; the play ran for only 149 performances. Critics complained that Bridge’s structure, language, and characterization failed to engage audiences.

Miller rewrote the play the following year, dividing it into two acts, transcribing the chorus’s verse lines into prose, prescribing a more realistic set design, and enlarging the central characters’ emotional range. Unwilling to allow the New York critical community to run it “through the mill again,” Miller chose London for the expanded version’s October 1956 premiere. The changes to the script, not to mention the locale, paid off. Warm reviews from the London press and a successful run in Paris the following year led Miller to publish the second version, which has since become the standard edition.

A View from the Bridge dramatizes the last few weeks in the life of Eddie Carbone, an Italian longshoreman in the impoverished bayside Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook. The action begins when Eddie’s wife, Beatrice, opens their home to two Sicilian relatives, Marco and Rodolfo. Though he is initially happy to help Beatrice’s family, Eddie’s support withers when Rodolfo courts his live-in niece, Catherine, whom Eddie has raised as his own child.

At first, his objections seem to be normal fatherly behavior, but as the play progresses, Eddie reveals a long-suppressed sexual passion for Catherine, a passion that drives Eddie to break Red Hook’s strict loyalty code. When Eddie reports Rodolfo and Marco to the Immigration Bureau, the community ostracizes him and Marco vows revenge. While awaiting deportment, Marco confronts Eddie about the betrayal. Hoping to earn back the community’s respect, Eddie lodges counteraccusations and a fight ensues, which ends when Marco turns Eddie’s knife on him. The final curtain drops as Eddie dies in Beatrice’s arms.

A View from the Bridge grew out of an anecdote Miller heard while researching corruption and Mafia influence in Brooklyn’s waterfront labor unions. In 1947, seeking a project to follow All My Sons, Miller became fascinated with Red Hook, which despite its proximity—Miller lived only blocks away—was foreign and enigmatic. A lifelong New Yorker, Miller nonetheless felt disconnected from the disparate cultures that made New York the world’s most cosmopolitan city.

The play’s title captures the feeling of detachment: As did Miller, most of the city’s residents only glimpsed Red Hook from the Brooklyn Bridge. Hoping to forge a deeper connection, Miller spent a year hobnobbing in Red Hook bars and attending morning dockside roll calls when longshoremen jockeyed for a day’s work. He also traveled to Sicily, witnessing the crippling poverty that drove thousands of local residents, seeking work and a better life, to the United States. On the basis of these experiences, he collaborated with the prospective director, Elia Kazan, on a screenplay, The Hook.

Studio executives quashed the film, refusing to provide financial backing for a movie with an “un-American” attitude. Miller declined to revise the screenplay, and The Hook eventually morphed into two separate projects. Kazan commissioned Bud Schulberg to write On the Waterfront (1954), a critically acclaimed film starring Marlon Brando in an Oscar-winning performance as the longshoreman Terry Malloy. The following year A View from the Bridge appeared on Broadway. Although they both portray life in Red Hook, Waterfront and Bridge draw differing conclusions about the virtue of loyalty. In Kazan’s film, Malloy heroically defies Red

Hook’s code of silence to bring down a tyrannical Mafia union leader. In contrast, Eddie Carbone dies a traitor after selling out his wife’s cousins. Both stories allegorize the U.S. government’s crusade against communist infiltration. In 1952, while testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), Kazan disclosed the names of several American communist supporters. On the Waterfront was Kazan’s answer to Miller and other critics who considered Kazan’s testimony an unforgivable betrayal. Two years later, Miller received a contempt citation for refusing to “name names” during his own HUAC deposition. Miller intended Bridge to capture the tragedy of contravening social taboos.

A View from the Bridge is more than a sociopolitical statement. It is also an attempt at contemporary Greek tragedy. In a 1983 interview, Miller told Mathew Roudane:

When I heard this story the first time . . . it struck me even then how Greek it was. You knew from the first minute that it would be a disaster. Everybody around him with any intelligence would have told Eddie that it would be a disaster if he didn’t give up his obsession. But it’s the nature of the obsession that it can’t be given up. The obsession becomes more powerful than the individual it inhabits, like a force from another world. (Theater Essays 426)

With Bridge, Miller replicates several features of Greek tragedy. Although antiquity’s tragic heroes are never of common stock, they share Eddie’s inability to control external forces. Eddie’s unacceptable desire brings him down, just as fate destroys Oedipus and hubris ruins Agamemnon. The lawyer Alfieri functions as a Greek chorus, an intermediary between the audience and the characters.

His communal role as an attorney mirrors this in-between space. As an Italian, he operates within the Red Hook community, but unlike the longshoremen, he is educated and relatively wealthy. His status as both/neither insider and/ nor outsider allows him not only to counsel Eddie against betraying Marco and Rodolfo and to resist his desire for Catherine but also to narrate, explain, and judge Eddie’s behavior. The original one-act structure reproduces the steady crescendo common in Greek drama. It also captures Miller’s intent to subsume characterization and social commentary under the umbrella of thematic content and narrative development. Miller explains:

Everything that is said in the Greek classic play is going to advance the order, the theme, in manifest ways. There is no time for the character to reveal himself apart from the thematic concerns. . . . [The Greeks] thought art is form; a conscious but at the same time an inspired act. . . . I began A View from the Bridge in its first version with the feeling that I would make one single constantly rising trajectory, until its fall, rather like an arrow shot from a bow; and this form would declare rather than conceal itself. (Theater Essays 426)

The first version, a “hard, telegraphic, unadorned drama,” was designed to “advance the progress of Eddie’s catastrophe in a most direct way” (Theater Essays 219). Unfortunately for Miller, critics assailed this lack of “adornment,” calling the play an “unaesthetic” concoction, lambasting the lack of psychological development that made Death of a Salesman an instant classic.

After the London premier, Miller admitted that the revisions improved the play, a concession he later repeated in several interviews and essays. Whenever he spoke or wrote about Bridge, however, his tone betrayed a subtle resentment, as if he wished audiences and critics had appreciated his homage to Greek tragedy. Despite the compromises—or perhaps because of them—the play has remained in the American repertoire for five decades.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. In an unpublished third version of A View from the Bridge, Eddie Carbone commits suicide. This ending was staged in Paris just after the play’s successful 1956 London run. How, if at all, does the play change if Eddie dies by his own hand rather than Marco’s? Which ending is more appropriate to the story and/or truer to Eddie’s character?

2. Read both published versions of A View from the Bridge. Is the two-act revision an improvement on the one-act original? When answering this question, discuss the difference in language. Why would Miller choose to tell this story in verse? Was rewriting the play in prose a good idea? It was not until the 20th century that “serious” playwrights abandoned verse. Discuss the expressive limitations of both verse and prose. Does one style better capture contemporary life?

3. After reading Miller’s The Crucible—or alternatively watching the 1996 film version—compare Eddie Carbone with John Proctor. Discuss each man’s desire to preserve his “name.” Does one succeed more than the other? Is either right to sacrifice everything to maintain and/or regain respect?

4. Do you agree with Alfieri’s judgment that Eddie’s actions, though perverse, are “pure,” that Eddie “allowed himself to be wholly known”? Does Alfieri’s assessment add to or detract from the play—that is, does it interfere with or enhance the audience’s ability to assess Eddie’s character and behavior?

5. For centuries, incest has fascinated playwrights and their audiences; for instance, Sophocles’ Oedipus cycle and Shakespeare’s Hamlet contain incestuous undercurrents. Does incest make for good theater? If so, why?

6. Miller wanted audiences to react to A View from the Bridge in the same way Greek audiences reacted to the great Athenian tragedies. Compare Miller’s play with Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Antigone, Aeschylus’s Agamemnon and The Eumenides, and Euripides’ Medea.