A View from the Bridge Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  ACT ONE

  ACT TWO

  PENGUIN PLAYS A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE

  Arthur Miller was born in New York City in 1915 and studied at the University of Michigan. His plays include All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Cnicible (1953), A View from the Bridge and A Memory of Two Mondays (1955), After the Fall (1964), Incident at Vichy (1965), The Price (1968), The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972), and The American Clock (1980). He has also written two novels, Focus (1945) and The Misfits, which was filmed in 1960, and the text for In Russia (1969), In the Country (1977), and Chinese Encounters (1979), three books of photographs by Inge Morath. His most recent works include a memoir, Timebends, (1987), and the plays The Ride Doum Mt. Morgan (1991), The Last Yankee (1993), Broken Glass (1994), and Mr. Peters’ Connections (1999), Echoes Down the Corridor: Collected Essays, 1944-2000, and On Politics and the Art of Acting (2001). He has twice won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and in 1949 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

  BY ARTHUR MILLER

  DRAMA

  The Golden Years

  The Man Who Had All the Luck

  All My Sons

  Death of a Salesman

  An Enemy of the People (adaptation of the play by Ibsen)

  The Crucible

  A View from the Bridge

  After the Fall

  Incident at Vichy

  The Price

  The American Clock

  The Creation of the World and Other Business

  The Archbishop’s Ceiling

  The Ride Down Mt. Morgan

  Broken Glass

  Mr. Peters’ Connections

  ONE-ACT PLAYS

  A View from the Bridge, one-act version, with A Memory of Two Mondays

  Elegy for a Lady (in Two-Way Mirror)

  Some Kind of Love Story (in Two-Way Mirror)

  I Can’t Remember Anything (in Danger: Memory!)

  Clara (in Danger: Memory!)

  The Last Yankee

  OTHER WORKS

  Situation Normal

  The Misfits (a cinema novel)

  Focus (a novel)

  I Don’t Need You Anymore (short stories)

  Theatre Essays

  Chinese Encounters (reportage with Inge Morath photographs)

  In Russia (reportage with Inge Morath photographs)

  Salesman in Beijing (a memoir)

  Timebends (autobiography)

  Echoes Down the Corridor (essays)

  On Politics and the Art of Acting (essays)

  COLLECTIONS

  Arthur Miller’s Collected Plays (Volumes I and II)

  The Portable Arthur Miller

  The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller (Robert Martin, editor)

  VIKING CRITICAL LIBRARY EDITIONS

  Death of a Salesman (edited by Gerald Weales)

  The Crucible (edited by Gerald Weales)

  TELEVISION

  Playing for Time

  SCREENPLAYS

  The Misfits

  Everybody Wins

  The Crucible

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  First published in the United States of America

  by Viking Penguin Inc. 1955

  Viking Compass Edition (with a new introduction

  by the author) published 1960

  Published in Penguin Books 1977

  Copyright © Arthur Miller, 1955, 1957, 1960

  Copyright renewed Arthur Miller, 1983, 1985, 1988

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Miller, Arthur, 1915—

  A view from the bridge.

  (Penguin plays)

  Reprint of the 1960 ed. published by The Viking Press, New York,

  which was issued as no. C73 of Compass books.

  I. Title.

  [ps3525.15056v5 1977] 811’.5’2 77-5007

  eISBN : 978-1-101-04254-0

  This play in its printed form is designed for

  the reading public only. All dramatic rights in it

  are fully protected by copyrights and no public or

  private performance—professional or amateur—

  and no public readings for profit may be given

  without the written permission of the author and

  the payment of royalty. Anyone disregarding

  the author’s rights renders himself liable to

  prosecution. Communication should be

  addressed to the author’s representatives,

  International Creative Management,

  40 West 57th Street, New York, N.Y. 10019.

  Lyrics from “Paper Doll” by Johnny Black

  copyright by Edward B. Marks Music Corporation.

  Used by permission.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  INTRODUCTION

  A play is rarely given a second chance. Unlike a novel, which may be received initially with less than enthusiasm, and then as time goes by hailed by a large public, a play usually makes its mark right off or it vanishes into oblivion. Two of mine, The Crucible and A View from the Bridge, failed to find large audiences with their original Broadway productions. Both were regarded as rather cold plays at first. However, after a couple of years The Crucible was produced again off Broadway and ran two years, without a line being changed from the original. With McCarthy dead it was once again possible to feel warmly toward the play, whereas during his time of power it was suspected of being a special plea, a concoction and unaesthetic. On its second time around its humanity emerged and it could be enjoyed as drama.

  For a long time I had not permitted a second New York production of A View from the Bridge principally because I had no desire to see it through the mill a second time. However, a year or so after its first production it was done with great success in London and then in Paris, where it ran two years. It is done everywhere in this country without any apparent difficulty in reaching the emotions of the audience. This play, however, unlike The Crucible, I have revised, and it was the revision which London and Paris saw. The nature of the revisions bears directly upon the questions of form and style which interest students and theater workers.

  The original play produced on Broadway (Viking, 1955) was in one act. It was a hard, telegraphic, unadorned drama. Nothing was permitted which did not advance the progress of Eddie’s catastrophe in a most direct way. In a Note to the published play, I wrote: “What struck me first about this tale when I heard it one night in my neighborhood was how directly, with what breathtaking simplicity, it did evolve. It seemed to me, finally, that its very bareness, its absolutely unswerving path, its exposed skeleton, so to speak, was its wisdom and even its charm and must not be tampered with.... These qualities of the events themselves, their texture, seemed to me more psychologically telling than a conventional investigation
in width which would necessarily relax that clear, clean line of his catastrophe.”

  The explanation for this point of view lies in great part in the atmosphere of the time in which the play was written. It seemed to me then that the theater was retreating into an area of psycho-sexual romanticism, and this at the very moment when great events both at home and abroad cried out for recognition and analytic inspection. In a word, I was tired of mere sympathy in the theater. The spectacle of still another misunderstood victim left me impatient. The tender emotions, I felt, were being overworked. I wanted to write in a way that would call up the faculties of knowing as well as feeling. To bathe the audience in tears, to grip people by the age-old methods of suspense, to theatricalize life, in a word, seemed faintly absurd to me if not disgusting.

  In The Crucible I had taken a step, I felt, toward a more self-aware drama. The Puritan not only felt, but constantly referred his feelings to concepts, to codes and ideas of social and ethical importance. Feeling, it seemed to me, had to be made of importance; the dramatic victory had to be more than a triumph over the audience’s indifference. It must call up a concept, a new awareness.

  I had known the story of A View from the Bridge for a long time. A water-front worker who had known Eddie’s prototype told it to me. I had never thought to make a play of it because it was too complete, there was nothing I could add. And then a time came when its very completeness became appealing. It suddenly seemed to me that I ought to deliver it onto the stage as fact; that interpretation was inherent in the very existence of the tale in the first place. I saw that the reason I had not written it was that as a whole its meaning escaped me. I could not fit it into myself. It existed apart from me and seemed not to express anything within me. Yet it refused to disappear.

  I wrote it in a mood of experiment—to see what it might mean. I kept to the tale, trying not to change its original shape. I wanted the audience to feel toward it as I had on hearing it for the first time—not so much with heart-wringing sympathy as with wonder. For when it was told to me I knew its ending a few minutes after the teller had begun to speak. I wanted to create suspense but not by withholding information. It must be suspenseful because one knew too well how it would come out, so that the basic feeling would be the desire to stop this man and tell him what he was really doing to his life. Thus, by knowing more than the hero, the audience would rather automatically see his life through conceptualized feelings.

  As a consequence of this viewpoint, the characters were not permitted to talk about this and that before getting down to their functions in the tale; when a character entered he proceeded directly to serve the catastrophe. Thus, normal naturalistic acting techniques had to be modified. Excessive and arbitrary gestures were eliminated; the set itself was shorn of every adornment. An atmosphere was attempted in which nothing existed but the purpose of the tale.

  The trouble was that neither the director, the actors, nor I had had any experience with this kind of staging. It was difficult to know how far to go. We were all aware that a strange style was called for which we were unsure how to provide.

  About a year later in London new conditions created new solutions. Seemingly inconsequential details suggested these solutions at times. For one, the British actors could not reproduce the Brooklyn argot and had to create one that was never heard on heaven or earth. Already naturalism was evaporated by this much: the characters were slightly strange beings in a world of their own. Also, the pay scales of the London theater made it possible to do what I could not do in New York—hire a crowd.

  These seemingly mundane facts had important consequences. The mind of Eddie Carbone is not comprehensible apart from its relation to his neighborhood, his fellow workers, his social situation. His self-esteem depends upon their estimate of him, and his value is created largely by his fidelity to the code of his culture. In New York we could have only four strategically placed actors to represent the community. In London there were at least twenty men and women surrounding the main action. Peter Brook, the British director, could then proceed to design a set which soared to the roof with fire escapes, passageways, suggested apartments, so that one sensed that Eddie was living out his horror in the midst of a certain normality, and that, invisibly and without having to speak of it, he was getting ready to invoke upon himself the wrath of his tribe. A certain size accrued to him as a result. The importance of his interior psychological dilemma was magnified to the size it would have in life. What had seemed like a mere aberration had now risen to a fatal violation of an ancient law. By the presence of his neighbors alone the play and Eddie were made more humanly understandable and moving. There was also the fact that the British cast, accustomed to playing Shakespeare, could incorporate into a seemingly realistic style the conception of the play—they moved easily into the larger-than-life attitude which the play demanded, and without the self-conscious awkwardness, the uncertain stylishness which hounds many actors without classic training.

  As a consequence of not having to work at making the play seem as factual, as bare as I had conceived it, I felt now that it could afford to include elements of simple human motivation which I had rigorously excluded before—specincally, the viewpoint of Eddie’s wife, and her dilemma in relation to him. This, in fact, accounts for almost all the added material which made it necessary to break the play in the middle for an intermission. In other words, once Eddie had been placed squarely in his social context, among his people, the mythlike feeling of the story emerged of itself, and he could be made more human and less a figure, a force. It thus seemed quite in keeping that certain details of realism should be allowed; a Christmas tree and decorations in the living room, for one, and a realistic make-up, which had been avoided in New York, where the actor was always much cleaner than a longshoreman ever is. In a word, the nature of the British actor and of the production there made it possible to concentrate more upon realistic characterization while the universality of Eddie’s type was strengthened at the same time.

  But it was not only external additions, such as a new kind of actor, sets, and so forth, which led to the expansion of the play. As I have said, the original was written in the hope that I would understand what it meant to me. It was only during the latter part of its run in New York that, while watching a performance one afternoon, I saw my own involvement in this story. Quite suddenly the play seemed to be “mine” and not merely a story I had heard. The revisions subsequently made were in part the result of that new awareness.

  In general, then, I think it can be said that by the addition of significant psychological and behavioral detail the play became not only more human, warmer and less remote, but also a clearer statement. Eddie is still not a man to weep over; the play does not attempt to swamp an audience in tears. But it is more possible now to relate his actions to our own and thus to understand ourselves a little better not only as isolated psychological entities, but as we connect to our fellows and our long past together.

  ARTHUR MILLER

  CHARACTERS

  Louis

  Mike

  Alfieri

  Eddie

  Catherine

  Beatrice

  Marco

  Tony

  Rodolpho

  First Immigration Officer

  Second Immigration Officer

  Mr. Lipari

  Mrs. Lipari

  Two “Submarines”

  Neighbors

  ACT ONE

  The street and house front of a tenement building. The front is skeletal entirely. The main acting area is the living room-dining room of Eddie’s apartment. It is a worker’s flat, clean, sparse, homely. There is a rocker down front; a round dining table at center, with chairs; and a portable phonograph.

  At back are a bedroom door and an opening to the kitchen; none of these interiors are seen.

  At the right, forestage, a desk. This is Mr. Alfieri’s law office.

  There is also a telephone booth. This is not used until the last sce
nes, so it may be covered or left in view.

  A stairway leads up to the apartment, and then farther up to the next story, which is not seen.

  Ramps, representing the street, run upstage and off to right and left.

  As the curtain rises, Louis and Mike, longshoremen, are pitching coins against the building at left.

  A distant foghorn blows.

  Enter Alfieri, a lawyer in his fifties turning gray; he is portly, good-humored, and thoughtful. The two pitchers nod to him as he passes. He crosses the stage to his desk, removes his hat, runs his fingers through his hair, and grinning, speaks to the audience.

  ALFIERI: You wouldn’t have known it, but something amusing has just happened. You see how uneasily they nod to me? That’s because I am a lawyer. In this neighborhood to meet a lawyer or a priest on the street is unlucky. We’re only thought of in connection with disasters, and they’d rather not get too close.

  I often think that behind that suspicious little nod of theirs lie three thousand years of distrust. A lawyer means the law, and in Sicily, from where their fathers came, the law has not been a friendly idea since the Greeks were beaten.

  I am inclined to notice the ruins in things, perhaps because I was born in Italy.... I only came here when I was twenty-five. In those days, Al Capone, the greatest Carthaginian of all, was learning his trade on these pavements, and Frankie Yale himself was cut precisely in half by a machine gun on the corner of Union Street, two blocks away. Oh, there were many here who were justly shot by unjust men. Justice is very important here.