Word: pirandello
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Departing from the experimentalism of Pirandello and the social satire of Wilde, Repertory Boston has added a competent adaptation of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory to its collection. The addition is a fine one: this stage version of one of the better recent novels stimulates thought, and receives, under Stephen Aaron's direction, a careful and well-paced performance...
Although plans for the course are still uncertain, Alfred and Cedric H. Whitman '38, associate professor of Latin and Greek and co-lecturer in Humanities 8, disclosed some of their tentative ideas for reading material ranging through the plays of the Greek dramatists, Shakespeare, Moliere, Ibsen, and Pirandello. "I would like to also consider some medieval plays, especially Everyman, and also Beckett's Waiting for Godot, which is essentially medieval...
...tragedy" that the Characters demand be made out of their gnarled interrelationships would not be a good one, because tragedy is something more than an orchestration of the steady drip, drip of human misery. Even Pirandello, while giving their story more attention than it deserves, is more interested in their status as Characters and in their relation to the troupe of Actors upon whom they descend...
...Stepfather, who is the play's raisonneur, draws a few morals from his position inside his story, which only serve to indicate that Pirandello is in doubt about the difference between a profundity and a platitude. But the Stepfather's long speech, to the effect that the Characters are more real than the "real" actors, is subtle and intriguing, and so is the dramatic embodiment of this theme in a great entanglement of paradoxes: the Characters are really actors who pretend to be characters demanding to be acted, the Actors are really pretending to be other actors pretending...
...contriving all sorts of ironies and subtleties and stage effects out of the relation between Characters and Actors. He is an expert in gimmickry--indeed, the whole play is really a gimmick, a shell game with reality as the pea. Since he is only a clever intellectual prestidigitator, Pirandello may not deserve his exalted reputation as a dramatic master. But he is a strikingly individual play-wright, and in his way a brilliant one. Repertory Boston does right by him and us; it is up to us to do right by Repertory Boston. So go and see their production...