Word: squatriglia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Then Chee Chee turns the debt to a credit by asking an elaborate favor in return. Squatriglia is to extort from Chee Chee's lady friend, Nada, three I.O.U.s that Chee Chee had carelessly given her. Gradually, we see that Chee Chee's tormented introspection is but another role played before Squatriglia--and played for a calculated...
Larry Hanawalt plays Squatriglia's awkwardness to a painful extreme, alienating us completely from any empathy we might have felt for his situation at least, so that we are left with the impression of an insect squirming on the shaft of a pin. Thus we lose the small saving irony of a Squatriglia being carried for a time into a certain belief in his own rhetoric, before Nada calls his bluff...
...Squatriglia might be an object of compassion. But he is significantly marred by the loss of his right eye, which is covered over with a bizarre skin graft. His blindness to the fact of role-playing is similarly a source of grotesque pity, certainly nothing with which we can identify. Chee-Chee calls him "indulgence personified," and deftly calculates Squatriglia's ineptitude at deception into his own plans to take in Nada...
...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...
Only an inspired production could fire this play with enthusiasm of even the most abstract sort. Unfortunately, Philip Haas and his cast are not equal to the task; we remain uncertain from the staging that they have thought much about it. The most interesting issues, such as Squatriglia's position as an unwilling initiate to the world of role-playing, or Nada's succumbing to indulgence toward Squatriglia, get lost in the difficulties of moving forward with the dialogue...