A View from the Bridge

This powerful and dramatic play is set 'in Red Hook, not Sicily.  This is the slum that faces the bay on the seaward side of Brooklyn Bridge.  This is the gullet of New York, swallowing the tonnage of the world'.  It is the 1950s when a day's work is the long-shoreman's most urgent need.  Not only the products of the world arrive but also illegal immigrants, relatives from the homelands of Italy and Sicily, escaping from a devastated, workless life to a land of promise and opportunity.

Here lives Eddie Carbone whose father arrived a generation earlier.  Here in his tenement flat, he lives with his wife, Beatrice, their long-standing marriage struggling through a difficult period.  With them, Catherine the 17 year old orphan child of Beatrice's sister.  Blood ties in this community are paramount and now demand that Beatrice's two cousins, arriving illegally, must be given shelter.  The strains and stresses they bring culminate in this very human and violent tragedy.