A View from the Bridge Author:Miller, Arthur "A play, as Mr. Miller points out in the introduction to this new ed. of A View from the Bridge, rarely is given a second chance. A book, after a slow start, may reach a large audience, but a play usually must make its mark on opening night or vanish forever. This play is an outstanding exception. It did not find a large audience with its origin... more »al Broadway production, but later it had great success in London and also in Paris, where it ran for two years, in the revised version printed here. The nature of the revisions should be of the greatest interest to students and workers in the theater.
Initially, in America, the play was in one act, with a set shorn of adornment. The British version, in two acts, had a background of fire escapes, passageways, and suggested apartments, so that Eddie Carbone lived out his horror in the midst of a recognizably familiar milieu. And the British actors, used to playing Shakespeare, moved more easily than the Americans in the larger-than-life attitude demanded by the play. Altogether, the play became more human, warmer, and less remote, without in any way bowing to the sentimentality which Mr. Miller wanted to avoid.
Both for the pleasure of reading the play itself and for the behind-the-scenes story of its presentation, this is a book which anyone interested in today's theater will find immensely rewarding."« less