Audience Study Guide
Table of Contents
About the Play….……………..………...…………………………….…………………………..Page 3
List of Characters………………………………………….....………………………..Page 3
Setting……………………………………………………….………………………….Page 3
Synopsis ……………………………………………………………………………….Page 3
Interview with the Director…………………………………………….………………………….Page 4
Designer Spotlight………………………….…………………………………………………….Page 5
Lighting Design Terminology…………………………….…………………………...Page 6
Light Plot – Section……………………………………….……………………………Page 7
Light Plot – Section……………………………………….……………………………Page 8
Elements of a Greek Tragedy……………..……………………….……………………………Page 9
Tragedy of the Common Man……………….………………………………………………….Page 10
More to Think About...………………………………………………..…………………………Page 11
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ABOUT THE PLAY
List of Characters
Eddie Carbone - A Longshoreman. The husband of Beatrice and uncle of Catherine.
Catherine - The orphaned niece of Eddie and Beatrice.
Beatrice Carbone - The wife of Eddie and aunt of Catherine.
Marco - Beatrice’s cousin from Italy. Rodolpho’s brother.
Rodolpho - Beatrice's young, blonde cousin from Italy. Marco’s brother.
Alfieri - An Italian-American lawyer.
Mike - A Longshoreman and friend of Eddie's.
Louis - A Longshoreman and friend of Eddie's.
First Immigration Office
Second Immigration Officer
Setting
Red Hook, Brooklyn. 1956.
Synopsis
Eddie, his wife Beatrice, and their orphaned niece Catherine, live together in the shadows of
the Brooklyn Bridge. The family welcomes into their home Beatrice’s cousins, Marco and
Rodolpho, who have snuck into the United States from Italy in the hopes of making a better life
for themselves and their families. But when Rodolpho and Catherine start to get romantically
involved, Eddie’s fatherly overbearance turns into incestuous jealousy. The story is narrated by
Alfieri, a lawyer consulted by Eddie, who watches helplessly as the tragic events unfold.
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Interview with the Director Jeff Paul
By Christina Ramos
Christina Ramos: What is your concept for this
production of A View from the Bridge?
Jeff Paul: I’ll start by saying it’s a complicated piece, in
that there are a lot of aspects to it, some of them with
echoes and roots in classical Greek theatre and a lot of
things that are pertinent today. So just in a grand scale,
it’s a more realistic piece that tells us a little bit about
who we are as humans. And that’s timeless. Not just
who we are now, but where we come from.
CR: So with the design and staging of this production,
are you looking at it being realism - Red Hook,
Brooklyn, in the 1950s?
JP: The play itself is written in pretty realistic jargon –
like, the characters speak like people would in Brooklyn
in the 1950s, for the most part. Even within the play that
Arthur Miller wrote, he’s not looking for realistic
expression of where they live or what their room looks
like or anything like that. Which in a way makes it a little
more timeless. It doesn’t firmly plant it in a certain time
and place. Also the idea that it’s kind of like a Greek tragedy. Very much like a Greek tragedy,
in fact. In the scenic design, Lindsay, the scenic designer – what she has done… I told her I
didn’t want to heavily invoke “Greek tragedy”, but I didn’t mind if there was a feel that kind of
crept in. And she has kind of made a blank playing space downstage that can be defined
however we define it – by light or just by how we use it. But upstage is kind of an edifice that
has what looks like columns, and characters can climb on top of it. It doesn’t say “this is a
Greek edifice” but it does sort of evoke that feeling. We’re not saying “oh, this takes place here
or there” other than what the characters talk about, but that we do have this feel of something
that’s a little more timeless or rooted a little more in the history of humanity.
CR: What do you hope the audience will take away from the production?
JP: How man’s true nature will [come] out. How people, sooner or later, will show you who
they are. And sometimes the thing that drives somebody, even if they intellectually understand
that it’s not right or that it’s not accepted, I think the thing that drives people will still push them
towards that. And in that way, it’s almost like fate does enter into our lives. That the things we
hold suppressed, they’re going to come out in some way.
I think this is going to be (I hope it to be) a very actor driven piece. Meaning that there’s a lot to
explore and a lot that individuals can bring to these characters, because they’re not all just
black and white. They’re presented with a lot of contradictions, and so there are a lot of
choices that actors and the director can make in the process and kind of illuminate different
things about them.
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Designer Spotlight
Kelsey McGill – Lighting Designer
Lighting Designer, Kelsey McGill, wanted to create a feeling
of film noir onstage. She plans to heavily utilize shadows
and silhouettes in her design. The goal is to have
characters identified by their shape or silhouette –
especially the character of Alfieri. McGill is excited to
incorporate a scrim into this design – revealing special
effects and images to enhance her design.
Kelsey McGill
Inspiration Images
Alfieri Inspiration Image
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A Selection of Lighting Design Terminology
Boom:
A vertically-mounted lighting position, usually mounted to a wall or
threaded into a base or flange on the floor. When booms are
mounted downstage of the proscenium, they are known as box
booms.
Cyclorama(or Cyc):
A backcloth colored pale blue, gray, or white, used as a sky
backing. This was originally a curved architectural plaster
background to the stage. Many cloth cycs are still curved, but flat
cycs are more common today.
Light Hang:
The physical process of hanging each lighting instrument in its
plotted position. Most lights are hung on a batten above the stage.
Light Plot:
A drawing or drawings showing the location of each fixture, its
fixture type, color, channel, dimmer, and focus.
Proscenium(or
Proscenium Arch):
The opening in the wall which separates the stage from the
seating area. Often framed on either side by pilasters.
Scrim:
An open weave fabric which appears opaque when lit from the
front, but turns transparent when objects behind it are lit. Scrims
are most often found in either black or white, but they are available
in many colors and can even be painted. The act of fading down
the frontlight on a scrim while raising the intensity of the light on
the objects behind it – therefore revealing those objects to the
audience – is called a "bleed-through," or a "scrim-through".
Special:
One or more fixtures focused on a limited area, usually not part of
a wash.
Wash:
Multiple fixtures which, when used together, cover the entire
performing area with a single color from the same direction.
The lighting design process for A View from the Bridge started in June of 2016, with alterations
to the light plot happening into the week of light hang! Check out a couple of the sections from
McGill’s light plot on the next two pages. Do you recognize any of the terms from above?
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Light Plot - section
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Light Plot - section
Elements of a Greek Tragedy*
A View from the Bridge is not a Greek tragedy, but it does evoke some of the elements of a Greek tragedy. Read
the following and see if you can identify the similar elements.
Tragedy
Greek Tragedy evolved to follow a number of specific criteria. The plays focused on stories based on the distant
past, be it myth or historical. Everyone in the audience would have known the basic story for the plays they were
seeing, although playwrights were given license to alter the story as they saw fit. It uses a heightened language
and includes incidents that arouse pity and fear in the audience. At the end, there must be an emotional purging,
a catharsis, caused by the pity and fear.
Other Elements
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Late point of attack – the audience enters the story during its final chapter.
Offstage action – violence and death takes place offstage.
The use of messengers.
The Structure
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Prologue: The introduction to the main character and background of the play.
Parodos: The entrance song of the chorus. Sets the tone of the play.
Episode: Dialogue between characters and chorus.
Stasima: At the end of each episode, the chorus reflects on what has been said and done.
(The play flips back and forth between Episode and Stasima three to six times.)
Exodos: The final resolution.
The Parts of Tragedy
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Plot - The story has a self-contained beginning, middle and end. There is always a discovery of self by
the main character (from ignorance to knowledge) accompanied by a drastic change of action (from good
fortune to bad).
Character - The main character must be good, moral, believable, and consistent.
Thought - The sense and meaning that goes into the lines.
Diction - The expression of the words.
Song - This refers to the chorus.
Spectacle - The staging of the play.
The Three Unities
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The Unity of Action: The story should only have one plot from beginning to end (no sub-stories).
The Unity of Place: The story should take place in one location.
The Unity of Time: The story should take place over one day.
The Tragic Hero
The tragic hero is the main character in a tragedy. They are a good person of noble birth but have a lot of pride
(or some other fatal flaw) and therefore makes mistakes. They are not perfect. They refuse to accept their
situation or don’t have a complete grasp on the situation, even though everyone else including the audience
knows the hero is wrong. Because of that, the tragic hero brings about their own downfall. When the hero finally
realizes they have erred, it's too late and their destruction is inevitable.
*Pulled from Theatrefolk.com
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Tragedy and the Common Man - Abridged
By ARTHUR MILLER
In this age few tragedies are written. For one reason or another, we are often held to be below tragedy-or tragedy
above us. The inevitable conclusion is, of course, that the tragic mode is archaic, fit only for the very highly
placed, the kings or the kingly, and where this admission is not made in so many words it is most often implied. I
believe that the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were.
As a general rule, to which there may be exceptions unknown to me, I think the tragic feeling is evoked in us
when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing-his
sense of personal dignity.
Sometimes he is one who has been displaced from it, sometimes one who seeks to attain it for the first time, but
the fateful wound from which the inevitable events spiral is the wound of indignity and its dominant force is
indignation. Tragedy, then, is the consequence of a man's total compulsion to evaluate himself justly.
In the sense of having been initiated by the hero himself, the tale always reveals what has been called his "tragic
flaw," a failing that is not peculiar to grand or elevated characters. Nor is it necessarily a weakness. The flaw, or
crack in the characters, is really nothing-and need be nothing, but his inherent unwillingness to remain passive in
the face of what he conceives to be a challenge to his dignity, his image of his rightful status. Only the passive,
only those who accept their lot without active retaliation, are "flawless." Most of us are in that category. But there
are among us today, as there always have been, those who act against the scheme of things that degrades them.
Insistence upon the rank of the tragic hero, or the so-called nobility of his character, is really but a clinging to the
outward forms of tragedy. If rank or nobility of character was indispensable, then it would follow that the problems
of those with rank were the particular problems of tragedy. But surely the right of one monarch to capture the
domain from another no longer raises our passions.
The quality in such plays that does shake us, however, derives from the underlying fear of being displaced, the
disaster inherent in being torn away from our chosen image of what and who we are. Among us today this fear is
strong, and perhaps stronger, than it ever was. In fact, it is the common man who knows this fear best.
Now, if it is true that tragedy is the consequence of a man's total compulsion to evaluate himself justly, his
destruction in the attempt posits a wrong or an evil in his environment. And this is precisely the morality of tragedy
and its lesson. The discovery of the moral law, which is what the enlightenment of tragedy consists of, is not the
discovery of some abstract or metaphysical quantity.
Seen in this light, our lack of tragedy may be partially accounted for by the turn which modern literature has taken
toward the purely psychiatric view of life, or the purely sociological. If all our miseries, our indignities, are born and
bred within our minds, then all action, let alone the heroic action, is obviously impossible.
There is a misconception of tragedy with which I have been struck. It is the idea that tragedy is of necessity allied
to pessimism. Even the dictionary says nothing more about the word than that it means a story with a sad or
unhappy ending. This impression is so firmly fixed that I almost hesitate to claim that in truth tragedy implies more
optimism in its author than does comedy, and that its final result ought to be the reinforcement of the onlooker's
brightest opinions of the human animal.
The possibility of victory must be there in tragedy. Where pathos rules and is finally derived, a character has
fought a battle he could not possibly have won. The pathetic is achieved when the protagonist is, by virtue of his
witlessness, his insensitivity, or the very air he gives off, incapable of grappling with a much superior force.
Pathos truly is the mode for the pessimist. But tragedy requires a nicer balance between what is possible and
what is impossible. And it is curious, although edifying, that the plays we revere, century after century, are the
tragedies. In them, and in them alone, lies the belief-optimistic, if you will, in the perfectibility of man.
It is time, I think, that we who are without kings, took up this bright thread of our history and followed it to the only
place it can possibly lead in our time-the heart and spirit of the average man.
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More to Think About
1. After seeing the production, how effective do you think the lighting design was? Give
an example of how it would change the telling of the story if it had been different.
2. What elements of a Greek tragedy do you see in A View from the Bridge? What
elements don’t you see?
3. What other “common man” tragedies can you name in popular culture?
4. Give an example of what Arthur Miller means when he states that “tragedy implies
more optimism in its author than does comedy.”
5. Director Jeff Paul believes that the tragedy of this story comes from someone’s
suppressed “true self” eventually being exposed while Miller believes a tragedy is
someone refusing to be passive with their lot in life. Compare and contrast these
opinions as they pertain to Eddie Carbone.
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