Word: pirandello
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Relativism brought the underground man into his own--in Europe, with Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Beckett, Aichinger, Sartre, Mann and Pirandello; in America with Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Ellison, Capote and Salinger. The antihero, too, searched for unified meaning, but the narrative that held him was all about divisions, schisms and self-inspection. He sought to be by himself, like a god. In Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities and Richard Wright's The Outsider, protagonists become serial killers out of the desire to be alone...
...Characters in Search of an Author is performed in Rome. Pirandello challenges the conventional distinction between illusion and reality as well as authorial omniscience--the whole business of tyrannically driving "his" creations along to some preordained point. This prefigures what may be postmodernism's most interesting idea: it is the reader, not the writer, who is the final arbiter of a work's meaning. Which, naturally, renders meaning itself indeterminate...
Best Play Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello...
...Pirandello's Henry IV tells of a modern-day nobleman (David Skeist '02) who has, for the last 20 years, believed himself to be Emperor Henry IV of Germany. As the play opens, his one-time paramour Matilda (Karin Alexander '02) comes to visit "Henry" in his grotesquely medieval living-space. She brings her friend Baron Belcredi (Tom Price '02), her daughter Frida (Marianne Cook '02) and a psychiatrist (Matthew Carlson) who intends to study "Henry" and attempt to cure him. Matilda and Belcredi explain the scenario to the doctor and to us before entering Henry's masquerade along with...
This one dissonance aside, however, Pirandello's Henry IV remains a wonderful evening of theater. I hope the gentleman behind me thought...