The Workshop Players present ‘A View from the Bridge’

The Workshop Players are presenting Arthur Miller’s ‘A View from the Bridge’ on 7, 8 and 9 October, directed by Jerome L. de Silva at the Lionel Wendt Theatre.

The Workshop Players, one of Sri Lanka’s foremost English theatre groups, is famed for bringing some of the best of Broadway musicals and plays such as ‘Cats’, ‘The Lion King’, ‘Oliver!’, ‘Evita’, ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’, ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ and most recently ‘Les Miserables’ and ‘Shakespeare in the Park’ to the local stage.

The play is set in 1950s America, in an Italian American neighborhood near the Brooklyn Bridge in New York. It employs a chorus and narrator in the character of Alfieri. Eddie, the tragic protagonist, has an improper love of, and almost obsession with, Catherine, his wife Beatrice›s orphaned niece, so he does not approve of her courtship of Beatrice›s cousin Rodolfo. 

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 later directed On the Waterfront, which dealt with the same subject. Miller said that he heard the basic account that developed into the plot of A View from the Bridge from a lawyer who worked with longshoremen, who related it to him as a true story.

“Justice is very important here” – Alfieri.

The box plan is now open! Tickets available at the Lionel Wendt Theatre. Tickets are priced at Rs. 2,000, Rs. 1,000, Rs.750 and Rs.500 (Balcony).

Pix by Andre Perera