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Pirandello and the Restructuring of the Modern Stage
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17073 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1990 |
6,356 Words |
| Author
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Anne Paolucci
Anne Paolucci is chairperson of the English Department and
director of the Doctor of Arts degree program ay St. John’s
University in New York. She serves on the National Council of
Humanities. She is an award-winning playwright, a prolific
writer on the Theatre of the Absurd, and president of the
Pirandello Society. |
Coming to the stage after years of successful fiction and prose writing, Luigi Pirandello found himself, at the age of fifty, an overnight sensation as a dramatist. He started with plays written in his native tongue, the dialect of Agrigento in Sicily (later he would translate those early plays into Italian proper), but he soon became the symbol and source and creative versatility in theater everywhere. As Robert Brustein reminds us, Pirandello influenced nearly every playwright of our time.
His own life reads like a Pirandellian script. His wife began showing symptoms of pathological depression early in their marriage and in the years that followed grew insanely jealous of him (without cause), and finally violent, threatening the life of her own children and husband. After many years of caring for her at home, Pirandello was forced to institutionalize her. By that time, his success in theater was assured, and he began to travel. Often, he was accompanied by the great actress Marta Abba, who soon became his constant traveling companion. (Their relationship was destined to become a source of controversy over the future rights to certain plays Pirandello dedicated to Abba and gave her as a token of his admiration and affection.) Eventually, Pirandello visited most of the major centers of the world.
Later in life, Pirandello, a professor at the Magistero (the Teacher's College of the University of Rome), became a member of his own theater companies, living out of hotel rooms where he often revised scripts between rehearsals and performances. Two years before his death in 1936, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature - proof of the extraordinary international recognition he had achieved.
Introduction
Pirandello must have recognized soon enough that his true poetic voice was dramatic. The early plays - written for a friend, the great Sicilian dialect actor Angelo Musco - were a huge success; but with revolutionary open-ended plays like Six Characters in Search of an Author, Pirandello broke new ground and gained an audience outside of Italy. What he brought to theater at that moment was something so unexpected, so completely new and utterly beguiling, that at first no one really believed it was important or that it could last. He and Six Characters were booed in Italian theaters; after the popularity of the dialect plays, Italian audiences were disconcerted, unprepared for the strange new kind of play where nothing is resolved and everything seems out of focus. In these dramas, action is fragmented, language is
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