Monologues to choose from for A View From the Bridge 

Eddie Carbone:

What can I do? I’m a patsy, what can a patsy do? I worked like a dog twenty years so a punk could have her, so that’s what I done. I mean, in the worst times, in the worst, when there wasn’t a ship comin’ in the harbor, I didn’t stand around lookin’ for relief—I hustled. When there was empty piers in Brooklyn, I went to Hoboken, Staten Island, the West Side, Jersey all over—because I made a promise. I took out of my own mouth to give to her. I took out of my wife’s mouth. I walked hungry plenty days in this city! (It begins to break through.) And now I gotta sit in my own house and look at a son-of-a-bitch punk like that—which he came out of nowhere! I give him my house to sleep! I take the blankets off my bed for him, and he takes and puts his dirty filthy hands on her like a goddam thief!

Beatrice:

Please. She’s crazy to start work. It’s not a little shop, it’s a big company. Some day she could be a secretary. They picked her out of the whole class. What are you worried about? She could take care of herself. She’ll get out of the subway and be in the office in two minutes. Listen, if nothin’ happened to her in this neighborhood it ain’t gonna happen no place else. Look, you gotta get used to it, she’s no baby no more. Tell her to take it. You hear me? I don’t understand you; she’s seventeen years old, you gonna keep her in the house all her life? Well, I don’t understand when it ends. First it was gonna be when she graduated high school, so she graduated high school. Then it was gonna be when she learned stenographer, so she learned, stenographer. So what’re we gonna wait for now? I mean it Eddie, sometimes I don’t understand you; they picked her out of the whole class, it’s an honor for her.

Beatrice Carbone, A View from the Bridge

CATHERINE: Don’t, don’t laugh at me! I’ve been here all my life. Every day I saw him when he left in the morning and when he came home at night. You think it’s so easy to turn around and say to a man he’s nothing to you no more? You don’t know – nobody knows! I’m not a baby, I know a lot more than people think I know.

Beatrice says to be a woman but – then, why don’t she be a woman! If I was a wife I would make a man happy instead of going at him all the time! I can tell from a block away when he’s blue in the mind and just needs to talk to somebody quiet and nice. I can tell when he’s hungry or wants a beer before he even says anything. I know when his feet hurt him – I mean, I know him, and now I’m supposed to turn around and make a stranger out of him? I don’t know why I have to do that, I mean.

Prologue – Alfieri

You wouldn’t have known it, but something amusing just happened. You see how uneasily they nod to me? That’s because I am a lawyer. In this neighbourhood to meet a lawyer or a priest on the street is unlucky. We’re only thought of in connection with disasters, and they’d rather not get too close.

I often think that behind that suspicious little nod of theirs lie three thousand years of distrust. A lawyer means the law, and in Sicily, from where their fathers came, the law has not been a friendly idea since the Greeks were beaten.

I am inclined to notice the ruins in things, perhaps because I was born in Italy . . . I only came here when I was twenty-five. In those days, Al Capone, the greatest Carthaginian of all, was learning his trade on these pavements, and Frankie Yale himself was cut precisely in half by a machine gun on the corner of Union Street, two blocks away. Oh, there were many here who were justly shot by unjust men.

Justice is very important here.

But this is 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. And now we are quite civilized, quite American. Now we settle for half, and I like it better. I no longer keep a pistol in my filing cabinet.

And my practice is entirely unromantic.

My wife has warned me, so have my friends; they tell me the people in this neighbourhood lack elegance, glamour. After all, who have I dealt with in my life? Longshoremen and their wives, and fathers and grandfathers, compensation cases, evictions, family squabbles – the petty troubles of the poor – and yet . . . every few years there is still a case, and as the parties tell me what the trouble is, the flat air in my office suddenly washes in with the green scent of the sea, the dust in this air is blown away and the thought comes that in some Caesar’s year, in Calabria perhaps or on the cliff at Syracuse, another lawyer, quite differently dressed, heard the same complaint and sat there as powerless as I, and watched it run its bloody course.

This one’s name was Eddie Carbone, a longshoreman working the docks from Brooklyn Bridge to the breakwater where the open sea begins.