A View From the Bridge by Arthur Miller

A View From the Bridge by Arthur Miller

The final moments of Act One are some of the most tense and dramatic

in the entire play, and thus they need to be emphasized in such a way

that the audience understand their significance and start anticipating

the next act. A director must be careful in doing this, to avoid

overdoing the drama and therefore making the production seem

unrealistic.

In this scene, the whole Carbone family - Eddie, Beatrice, Catherine,

Marco and Rodolpho - are in the living room of the Red Hook apartment.

They have just finished dinner and I think it would be a good idea to

have the sun setting on the horizon out of a window. Some brilliant

lighting effects could be done here. It also tells the audience that

the end of this act is nigh, so something dramatic is going to happen.

All of the characters in this scene are Italian immigrants, and the

play would not be done justice if they didn't have the appropriate

accents. They speak in Brooklynese dialect, which is a vigorous

language with lots of y'knows, ain'ts, sump'ms, and double negatives

in it, e.g. "she didn't take nothin' yet''. This reflects the

characters' lack of education due to poverty rather than intelligence.

Generally, Italian conversation contains a lot of liveliness and

gestures, and I would expect the immigrants to have taken that with

them to America. The actors in a production of this must have the

correct body language and at least not pronounce their 'g's when at

the end of words, i.e. nothin'.

By this stage in the play, Catherine has fallen in love with Rodolpho,

one of Beatrice's illegal immigrant cousins. He and his brother Marco

are lodging with the Carbones. Unknown to himself, or maybe just not

admitted, Eddie wants Catherine in another way than as a niece; this

is obvious throughout the play with his attempts to stop her growing

up. He comments on her short skirt and high heels, resents her getting

a job and forms a very strong grudge against Rodolpho which is based