Unacknowledged Desire Becomes A Tragic Fate

Published in New Ceylon Writing No. 6

The production is stripped down and the set is minimalist because the emotions take up all the space on stage. This was a charged and intensely mesmerising performance by the whole ensemble. 

The director had invited me to a rehearsal two weeks before the performance, and I had come in time to see the principal players who play the lovers, Catherine and Rudolfo, working out the positioning and movement and alignments in a pivotal scene in which he is asking her why she finds it so hard to leave the home of her aunt and uncle and be with him, and live their life together. 

The story takes place in an Italian immigrant family in mid-20thC Brooklyn, and the claustrophobia and voyeurism of the setting is evoked by the simplest of sets: steel benches in a square, with see-through plastic sheeting in the foreground, and a set of steps leading up to a central doorway/archway which leads to the streets outside. 

The man of the family, Eddie Carbone, has aspirations for a better life for his niece, Catherine, who has grown up in his home. He wants her to live in a nice neighbourhood, amongst a better class of people than those she has so far moved among. He is extremely protective of her. 

What is clear to us, viewing through the sheeting and the frames, and the mediating guidance and commentary of Eddie's lawyer, is that Eddie is in love with Catherine. And this is romantic love, not fatherly or avuncular. And it is unacknowledged by Eddie, who is unconscious that, when he looks at his niece and comments that she is walking in 'too wavy' a manner, that he looks at her as a lover looks, territorially wishing to shield her from the gaze of other men. 

The extended family situations in which many of us live in Sri Lanka are spoken to very powerfully by this production, as unacknowledged wishes, longings and desires flourish in repression and denial. 

Blurred relational lines are fuelled by physical proximity and patriarchal values, in which the man of the house, the hard-working provider, 

feels unconsciously entitled to more than daughterly devotion, when a girl becomes an adult still living at home. 

Individuation is a central theme of the play, and in an ideal world Catherine would get a job, become independent financially, and settle down in the neighbourhood with a nice young man who is worthy of her intelligence, her sweetness and her beauty. And her uncle's unacknowledged feelings would gradually subside, like flood waters that have exceeded their limit, and return back into the normal lines of acceptability. 

It is usual to castigate and scapegoat child molesters and paedophiles for unnatural behaviour. This play, and this production in particular, shows us three adults equally caught in an explosive triangle which is tragically detonated by the arrival of a young man who Catherine likes enough to marry. 

I say three, because Catherine loves her uncle dearly, and Eddie's wife, Beatrice, sees her husband's situation with agape and compassion, not blaming her niece in any way, and encourages her to grow up and actively seek and insist on her emotional independence. 

We see Eddie's dislike of Catherine's suitor as comic initially: Rudolfo is a vibrant, attractive and outgoing personality, with brazen blonde hair and an exuberance which acts like a magnet on Catherine. Eddie openly suspects him of being 'not right' (translation: homosexual), because he likes to sing and is creative in ways outside Eddie's ken. And this disapproval, fed by jealousy of him as a rival, escalates into the accusation that Rudolfo is only interested in Catherine so that he can become an American citizen. 

This unjust suspicion, which he communicates as fact to Catherine, catalyses her through outrage and confusion into clarity, where she is forced to choose, and her choice causes Eddie to confront Marco and Rudolfo, because he has not been able to confront his own unfulfillable longing to be with Catherine. 

This is romantic, because it is a dream that can never come true, in real life. And it is tragic, because Eddie allows his feelings to interfere with his niece's pursuit of her happiness independently of him. The lawyer, his devoted wife, and all of us viewing the unfolding of the story, can see that Eddie is becoming more and more isolated and obsessed, and we are powerless to stop the tragic outcome.