Arthur Miller's A View From the Bridge is a study of an Italian family living in the Red Hook section of New York in the 1950s and the effects of jealousies and betrayal spurred on by inappropriate sexual desires. A View From the Bridge tickets first sold in 1955, but the play earned little notice in its original one act form at the Coronet Theatre. It was not until the play grew to two acts in 1956.
Miller conveys the story of the Carbone family in a distinctly Sicilian enclave underneath the Brooklyn Bridge. The neighborhood is a neighborhood almost void of the police. Many of the residents are illegal immigrants and fear the police and the return to the impoverished Italy more than the protection the police provide. The neighborhood is close knit. Families are impoverished and cannot leave even for vacation, so the entire world takes place on Red Hook's streets. As a result, everyone knows everyone, there are few family secrets, and the rules of Sicilian justice dominate the neighborhood in A View From the Bridge.
Eddie Carbone is a longshoreman, much like every other adult male in the neighborhood. He and his wife Beatrice have raised Beatrice's orphaned niece Catherine, who has just finished high school. However, the development that drives the conflict in A View From the Bridge is the growing sexual feelings that begin to emerge in Eddie for Catherine. The arrival of Beatrice's two cousins from Italy, brothers Rodolpho and Marco, complicates domestic life further.
Rodolpho is a young man around Catherine's age who has blond hair and is attractive. Catherine falls for Rodolpho, which vexes Eddie. He ignores his jealousies the best he can throughout A View From the Bridge until one day he discovers the two having sex. This prompts him to betray the code of the neighborhood and call the Immigration Bureau to take the cousins away. The final scene is a showdown between a lost Eddie who has betrayed his family and the neighborhood way and the bigger, stronger Marco. Marco uses Eddie's own knife to kill Eddie after he first attacks Marco.
The play explores the many external influences in the Italian neighborhood. These include the idea of the American Dream, the affect of xenophobia especially prompted by McCarthyism (which had an effect beyond the hunting down of supposed communists). The play also explores the anti-homosexual sentiment in Eddie's critical opinion of Rodolpho's more effeminate hobbies. A View From the Bridge tickets are an excellent chance to re-explore American history and its underlying conflicts beneath the overly sheen post-war skin.
