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July 11, 2:11 AMSF Community Theater ExaminerJim Strope

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Arthur Miller’s 1955 script details Eddie Carbone’s steady and logical decline from all the virtues of generosity, through doubt and silence, to violence and then to betrayal and to sin and consummate tragic violence.

In Off Broadway West’s production, Richard Harder commands the stage.  He insists that we love him by opening his house to his wife’s poor relatives, a long way from home, food from his mouth, blankets from his bed.

But he has issues, having adopted his wife’s orphaned niece, a young woman the middle-aged man has become too attached to.   And one of the newcoming guests distracts the object of his attachment.  You can see Harder’s Eddie Carbone fall silent, begin to brood and in his brooding to think and to know and decide.

The rest of the cast in unison can hardly stand up to Harder, not with all their charming and shrieking and pleading, offering and seducing, threatening and yielding and marrying.  But Glen Caspillo’s Marco, crucified in ethical dilemma, trying to save his brother’s romance, having a code of his own above all, finds the strength to return and challenge Eddie Carbone.  It’s a wonderful story and I thank Off Broadway West for bringing it to San Francisco so elegantly at the Phoenix Theatre.

The center of the play is very close the heart of Eddie Carbone, the jealous father whose jealousy goes a little too close to sexual desire and whose strength of character, whose mark made upon the world is not to be ignored.

Classical Greek tragedy recognized the organizing power of a central character.  People honored the king, placated him, flattered him, ceremonialized him.  Existence was ancillary to the social order, which was created by will and fate or man and god.

Richard Harder’s Eddie Carbone is volcanic patriarchy in the finest sense.  His being sits upon a great eruptive, self-destructive event.  He and all the morality that we have attempted to slow him down with, have tried to load him down to the ground with, is essentially nothing more than a force trying to contain its own explosion: it is nothing less than the situation that the mental being finds at each moment of the day: Ethics is in the teeth of the beast that will feed.

Harder’s character is the strength to refuse to see what is obviously true to every other character on the stage.  I predict that the resourceful cast in this production, those huddled masses yearning to be free, will step forth and confront the angst of Richard Harder’s Eddie Carbone.  I have seen Sandy Rouge take over the stage against some pretty tough characters.  And she has an ally in Glen Caspillo. 

Go see this wonderful play.  Off Broadway West’s ensemble performs a great reading of Miller’s play and invents its own set of characters to do so. 

What makes Miller's script classically Greek?  Eddie Carbone is a king who rules his family and provides order and who should be supported, even in error, because they'd be lost without him.  Eddie is a modern Oedipus, powerful, placated, and perverse.  He claims an ancient right, going back to the time when men owned women.  Eddie, powerful in his pride, violates the law, goes crazy and destroys himself and damages all who depend on him, bringing chaos to the society that he supports.