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Another tragic dramatic masterpiece from Arthur Miller. I read Death of a Salesman and The Crucible in school; I am hoping to see this one produced onstage soon, so I picked up A View From the Bridge, and it was as great as the others.

Eddie lives in an Italian neighborhood of New York City with his wife Beatrice and Beatrice’s orphaned niece Catherine (Katie). Beatrice’s cousins are coming over illegally from an impoverished town in Italy, to work on the docks and raise money to send back home. The elder, Marco, has a wife and three children to support. The younger, Rodolpho, catches the eye of the teenaged Catherine, who Eddie loves perhaps more than is appropriate. There are oblique references to Eddie and Beatrice’s sex life having suffered lately, and also to Rodolpho being a bit effeminate for Eddie’s tastes. Financial and sexual tensions arise and the ending is not happy.

The building tension in this unassuming domestic setting reminds me of Tennessee Williams and The Glass Menagerie, a play I should read again someday. The working-class frustrations of Eddie, a longshoreman, feel familiar to me from other Miller plays. Themes include the concept of “rats”, or those who tell tales; loyalty and secret-keeping; and the machismo of the docks, not to mention obsessive love. The View From the Bridge is a powerful, emotionally moving classic tragedy, and I can’t wait to see it on the stage.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: drama, sense of place |