Word: pirandello
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Right You Are (If You Think You Are). Playwright Luigi Pirandello, like the Devil, seduces the idle. After years of temptation, the Theatre Guild succumbed last week to spending some unengaged time and talent on special matinees of a cerebral shadow dance wherein "the Italian Shakespeare" divides a flighty family against itself and lets in village gossips to decide who is crazy. There is no one crazy but someone's else thinking makes him so. The truth? What is truth? etc. etc. Two-thirds of it are lively entertainment, unless you think otherwise. Helen Westley does another...
...Roman high school, turned to drama late in life after writing many novels and short stories. "Pirandellian" is now Italy's equivalent for "Shavian." He came to wide fame only in 1921, with his play Six Characters in Search of an Author. Critics who deny that Professor Pirandello is a philosopher at least agree that his genius for sardonic humor is considerable. If he only toys with mankind's moral and spiritual absurdities, and makes the stage a debating platform for fruitless metaphysics, he at least does it with terse wit and few didactics. Not a few clowns...
...Significance. Foe of machinery, Professor Pirandello never tires of manipulating the intricate machinery of the human mind. Attacking cinema with the full venom of a legitimate playwright, he manipulates his customary close-ups and fadeouts of existence, real and unreal, seeming and serious. A mystic, a believer in man's supernatural endowment, he finds nothing too lowly, dull or grotesque to serve his purpose-a beggars' shelter, a dusty country road, a flyblown tavern. One who speculates on the borders of insanity, he never long departs from concrete dramatization. Shoot is as full of action as a wild...
...complexities of Pirandello's thought are rendered more intricate by the translation. In a probable effort to reproduce the style of his original Mr. Moncrieff has produced an English titled, awkward and difficult, without much excuse for being so. The following is an example, picked absolutely at random; worse could be found...
...that may be his lack, for in what he could understand he was struck by elements of really great drama and penetrating insight. The difficulties of language are as smoke surrounding a flame. Pirandello's thought, tinged with a profound yet tender pessimism, is in the truly grand manner. If he fails, it is only because he has attempted too much. And again his failure may be those of the translator and reviewer...