Word: pirandello
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...WITH THE FLOWER IN HIS MOUTH. An evening of three one-acters by Italian Playwright Luigi Pirandello. The title play deals with death, The License with the evil eye, and The Jar with innate human idiocy. The actor who animates each is Jay Novello, a wily performer with a tasty slice of prosciutto...
...situation is the same: actors pretend to be Air Force bombardiers who flirt with the mimicry of death only to find that, one by one, they are really being killed on their outlandish make-believe bombing missions over Constantinople and Minnesota. The plot might well have been retrieved from Pirandello's wastebasket. Broadway these days is full of preachers who thunder that war is evil and that racial prejudice is hateful, but who seem not to have the slightest compunction about discrimination against good drama...
...Chamberlain in 1737, when Prime Minister Robert Walpole grew so outraged by the political lampoons of Henry Fielding that he forced through a new censorship law. Since then, the Lords Chamberlain have had unchallengeable authority to ban plays by Ibsen (Ghosts), Shaw (Mrs. Warren's Profession), Pirandello (Six Characters in Search of an Author), Arthur Miller (A View From the Bridge) and Tennessee Williams (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof). The most notable modern playwright to run afoul of the Lord Chamberlain is John Osborne. One of his plays dealing with homosexuality, A Patriot For Me, was banned entirely...
Claudio Buchwald plays the Author at Quincy House, a self-pitying sort who is trying to piece together a melodrama of murder, poverty, and lust from a collection of uncooperative protagonists. At the outset Anouilh has the courtesy to apologize, though the Author, to Pirandello. After that, Buchwald is left to intervene periodically as the play drifts out of his control. He does so with reasonable skill, although his expression of unrelieved anguish and his habit of passing off fidgeting as unease begin to wear after a while...
...play is immensely theatrical, sensuous and intellectual. Apart from being Pirandello's greatest work, Henry IV is a fascinating precursor of the entire theater of the absurd-the anguish over existence in Sartre and Camus, the guerrilla warfare against ossified language and the mass mind in lonesco, the bleak, alienated vision of Beckett, the sense of man eternally acting a role in Genet, and the use of the stage as a self-contained universe in Pinter. In a towering display of the actor's craft, Kenneth Haigh confers unbrooked, unhinged regality on the title character while coiling...