Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge” at Divar Art Home

TEHRAN-Divar Art Home in Tehran is hosting the play “A View From the Bridge” by American playwright Arthur Miller.

Rahman Khubzadeh has directed the play and also performs in it along with Alireza Eslampanah, Mira Amirnasab, Peyman Paypouran, Abolfazl Aliyari, and Sahar Mesbah.

Arthur Miller’s play is a tragic masterpiece of the inexorable unraveling of a man, set in a close-knit Italian-American community in 1950s New York. 

The action is narrated by Alfieri, who was raised in 1900s Italy but is now working as an American lawyer, thereby representing the “Bridge” between the two cultures.

Set in a neighborhood near the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, the play employs a chorus and narrator in the character of Alfieri. Eddie, the tragic protagonist, has an improper love for, and almost an obsession with, Catherine, his wife Beatrice’s orphaned niece, so he does not approve of her courtship of Beatrice’s cousin Rodolpho.

Eddie Carbone is a longshoreman and a straightforward man, with a strong sense of decency and honor. For Eddie, it’s a privilege to take in his wife’s cousins, Marco and Rodolpho, straight off the boat from Italy. But, as his niece Catherine begins to fall for one of them, it’s clear that it’s not just, as Eddie claims, that he’s too strange, too sissy, too careless for her, but that something bigger, deeper is wrong – and wrong inside Eddie, in a way he can’t face. Something that threatens the happiness of their whole family.

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 (titled “The Hook”) that addressed corruption on the Brooklyn docks. Kazan later directed “On the Waterfront,” which dealt with the same subject.

Arthur Miller (1915-2005) was an American playwright, essayist, and screenwriter in 20th-century American theater. Among his most popular plays are “Death of a Salesman” (1949), “The Crucible” (1953), and “A View from the Bridge” (1955). He wrote several screenplays, including “The Misfits” (1961). 

The drama “Death of a Salesman,” for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, is considered one of the best American plays of the 20th century.

In 1980, Miller received the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates. He received the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize in 1999, the Praemium Imperiale Prize in 2001, the Prince of Asturias Award in 2002, and the Jerusalem Prize in 2003.

“A View From the Bridge” will remain on stage until December 20 at Divar Art Home, located at No. 72, Sepand St., Nejatollahi St.

SS/SAB