A View From The Bridge

A View from the Bridge is a play by American playwright Arthur Miller that was first staged on September 29, 1955 as a one-act verse drama with A Memory of Two Mondays at the Coronet Theatre on Broadway. The play was unsuccessful and Miller subsequently revised the play to contain two acts; this version is the one with which audiences are most familiar today. The two-act version premièred in the New Watergate theatre club in London's West End under the direction of Peter Brook on October 11th, 1956.

The play is set in 1950s America, in an Italian American neighborhood near the Brooklyn Bridge in New York. It employs both a chorus and a narrator (Alfieri). Eddie, the tragic protagonist, has an improper love of, and almost obsession with, Catherine. Miller's interest in writing about the world of the New York docks originated with an unproduced screenplay that he developed with Elia Kazan in the early 1950s (entitled The Hook) that addressed corruption on the Brooklyn docks (Kazan would go on to direct On the Waterfront, which tackled the same subject). Miller said that he heard the basic account that developed into the plot of A View from the Bridge from a longshoreman, who related it to him as a true story.