ABSTRACT
One chilly fall night during the rehearsals of my 1981 revival of A View from the Bridge I went to dinner in Brooklyn with Tony Lo Bianco, the Eddie Carbone of that production. Tony's uncle lived two blocks from where Arthur Miller had set his play, and Tony wanted me to ingest the atmosphere, along with a meal that went on for hours and featured every dish his aunt had ever learned to cook. I will never forget that apartment, nor will Arthur Miller ever let me, for it was exactly the apartment he describes as the home of the Carbones. When Tony's aunt filled in her husband's stories with all the neighborhood detail, I heard Beatrice and Eddie at the table. And after dinner, as Tony and I explored the streets around the tenement, people appeared in doorways and on stoops to smile at the local boy who had become a 120star, but who respected the code by which he had been raised as if he had never left home. Grey-suited elders, dining in a restaurant, were not to be greeted unless they indicated they wanted acknowledgement; otherwise Tony's celebrity might detract from their status and face would be lost. A certain dignity was everything in that world of the docks, and it wasn't hard to imagine that the penalty for betrayal in the 80s would be the same as it had been thirty years earlier: humiliation and death.
