Word: chee
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Neumiller's burial of his father, Faulkner's style intrudes: "Clarence carrying o'clock twelve." The more experimental parts of the book are far from perfect. At times there are too many lists of food and too many clumsy attempts at representing noises in onomatopoeic form--for example, "creer chee, creaca chee, creesh shee" to convey the sound of shoes on a sidewalk. At other points in the novel, the symbols are too apparent. The silver dollars which Charles uses to cover his dead fathers eyes later roll around floors and are found in desks and awarded as prizes...
...lack of any feeling behind all of these deceptions reflects the hollowness of Chee-Chee. In the Pirandellian wilderness of mirrors and puppets, emotion at least must be real. Artistically, it is emotion which must charge Pirandello's otherwise intellectualized prose with dramatic truth, as he well knew: the playwright needs to find the word which will be the action itself spoken, the living word that moves, the immediate expression, having the same nature as the act itself...
...Chee-Chee, the word is bound, and denies the action. Only Nada feels what she says; and she is done in by a little knowledge. She sees Squatriglia's feeble but well-meant ploy, but not the larger deception that frames it. And Pirandello deprives us of the third and largest dramatic frame: the denouement that turns deception to the service of human compassion...
Pasquale Tato looks the part of Chee-Chee, but doesn't act it. His nervous semblance of bravado saps any conviction in his portrayal of Chee-Chee as a manipulator of deceptions; nor does he transform his uncertainty into the kind of brooding self-doubt that might have provided an alternate, though shaky, interpretation of a Chee-Chee torn in the existential dilemma...
...Chee-Chee may sound like part of a soundtrack of Irven DeVore's latest researches into primate behavior, but is actually someone's transliteration of the title of a play by the great Italian playwright Lujgi Pirandello. Pirandello is best known for his somewhat stagey plays Henry IV, Six Characters in Search of an Author, and Right You Are [If You Think You Are], which pretty much made reality vs. appearance the central obsession of modern theater. Chee-Chee is austere (it lasts only a half hour) but full of depth. This is the kind of play--rarely performed pieces...