A view from the bridge

“During the 50s, America was a refuge for European immigrants that wanted a decent life for themselves and their families. Today, Europe is refuge for millions of Syrian civil war victims, which leave their country to save their lives. The similarities are blatant, and humanity is again powerless in the face of human tragedy caused by terror, and unfortunately, often answers with hatred and disdain.
During the last several years, many stories about the refugees have reached our ears, sometimes unfounded anecdotes, and other times even terribly terrifying but also completely true information, cruel and brutal images, like the photograph of little Eylan, found dead on a beach in Turkey, after a shipwreck at sea. In the last year, more such clandestine refugees, including many children, have also reached the Black Sea’s shore, asking for help and shelter, after hundreds had already drowned at sea, on their way to « freedom ».

Arthur Miller’s play is one such a random fact, apparently common, from 1950 New York: two brothers, Sicilian immigrants, Rodolpho and Marco, show up in from of Eddie Carbone’s house, porter on the banks of Brooklyn, which offers them a home for awhile. Katie, his niece, falls in love with one of the boys, and this event triggers a major unbalance both in his family, and in the community, the diaspora, causing a conflict of interests that finally falls into the hands of justice. Keeping Miller’s text in its integrity, the performance is the confession of a story about passion, betrayal, guilt, emancipation and the acute need for freedom.

The refuge from this performance is theatre itself, that also hosts the story of these antiheroes, because, fortunately, theatre still is a place where different people, from different social classes, different ethnicities, minorities, people with different mother tongues, can meet in the same place, at the same time and can share the same feeling of empathy if front of the drama born on stage.” Eugen Jebeleanu