Prologue & Introduction of the Carbone Household The play opens with a prologue delivered by Alfieri, an Italian-American lawyer who serves as both narrator and the audience’s entry point into one of New York City’s immigrant communities. He introduces Red Hook, a working-class neighborhood at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, that is largely shaped by the labor culture of longshoremen and governed by Old World Italian codes of honor. Alfieri adopts a rhetorical distance and a fatalistic tone reminiscent of the Greek chorus as he foreshadows the tragic arc of the story to come. By invoking this classical structure, Miller establishes a sense of inevitability and fate, along with the anticipation of a tragic hero at the narrative’s center. Alfieri then introduces Eddie Carbone, a proud Red Hook longshoreman, his wife, Beatrice, and their 17-year-old orphaned niece, Catherine, whom they have raised. Eddie is initially portrayed as protective and somewhat controlling of Catherine as she approaches adulthood with excitement and eagerness, while an observant Beatrice becomes increasingly aware of this underlying tension within the household. This precarious dynamic is the stasis, or the state of equilibrium at the beginning of the narrative. As the family awaits the arrival of Beatrice’s cousins from Italy, they discuss the necessity for secrecy and discretion regarding the relatives, as the Carbones will be harboring the immigrants illegally. Eddie even mentions a neighborhood man, Vinny Bolzano, who gave up his own family members to Immigration and how the entire community turned against him. This exposition establishes a culture of protecting illegal immigrants in Red Hook but also foreshadows the eventual fall of Eddie to the same fate. This opening scene lays the foundation for the play’s classical tragic structure while also introducing the psychological and interpersonal conflicts that will ultimately rupture the domestic sphere.​