The program informs us that playwright Arthur Miller first wrote this near-perfect drama as a one act verse play, and if that wasn’t tip enough that he’s reaching for the heights and depths of Greek tragedy here, the lawyer/narrator actually mentions Greece — in connection with Sicily, from which our immigrant characters, legal and otherwise, hail — in his opening monologue.

The monologue’s subject is the law: the American version, in which we settle for half and civilization muddles along, and the more ancient, less codified, and definitely more violent version that might have been enforced by the cliffs of Siracusa long ago. The play’s subject is Eddie Carbone, the sort of monster part into which actor Richard Baird has been ripening for some time now. Eddie is a longtime longshoreman, old enough to both savor his achievements — he’s kept his promise to his dead sister to raise her little girl Catherine — and reckon with his mistakes — he’s let his fatherly concern mushroom into something less…distanced. (“You’re walkin’ wavy. You gotta keep yourself more.”) He is, as the lawyer puts it, “as good has he had to be,” a man with a code and a worldview. And you know what tragedies do to good men, their codes, and their worlds. Baird is the sort of actor who can dominate a stage with his controlled ferocity, but he knows how to keep his presence in check, and even if he didn’t, he has a powerful cast to bang up against. (There are no disappointments, but Margot White as Eddie’s wife Beatrice and Coby Rogers as his unwitting rival Rodolpho stand out; she for her bravery in battling Eddie’s demons, he for his easy embodiment of everything that summons them.)

Just before the end of the first act, our narrator laments, in true Greek fashion, that he can see what’s coming, step by inevitable step, and that brings us back to the “near” in “near-perfect.” Because this isn’t a one-act verse drama, it’s a two-act prose play, and here and elsewhere, the narrator demonstrates his superfluity. He says what he needs to say about the uneasy relation of “the law” to “what’s right” in his capacity as a character in the story. As a narrator, he articulates profundities that are already on display — and in his closing remarks, his confusing comments work to blunt the action’s considerable force. Still, it’s a triumphant production of an American classic.