Ahhhhh che noia ;u; a parte il linguaggio che già mi ha messo a dura prova i nervi.. Il colpo di grazia me lo hanno dato i dialoghi del padre e della figliastra, con quel loro continuo dire e non dire e ridire e smentire. ( )

I am happy to report that I have found an Italian author that I very much like: Luigi Pirandello. I just read his play Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore, and while I am still not entirely comfortable reading books in Italian, and I struggled at times to fully understand the nuances of the language in his play, I still found more than enough in its pages to pique my interest and inspire me to seek out more of his texts. The introductory study to my edition of this play provided me with some background on both his life and the themes that he developed as a novelist and as a playwright. It was not short on laudatory statements, signaling him as one of the forefathers of modern theater and stating that he was responsible for introducing many questions concerning man's ability to communicate with and understand one another that have permeated twentieth century creative thought. Albert Einstein, after seeing one of his plays, introduced himself to the author and said that he felt they were "kindred spirits." In the play that I have just read, I can see why he might say this: human understanding of one another is relative to different individuals' vantage points, with each one of us seeing each other (and ourselves) in a different way. I imagine that Einstein would have been tickled to see ideas concerning an entirely different sort of relativity, psychological instead of scientific, expresed on stage.

In the play, a theater troupe is getting ready to start a rehearsal for their nightly performance when a group of six characters enter the theater and join them on stage. These characters (the father, the mother, the stepdaughter, the son, and two young children of the mother by her recently-deceased second husband, a boy and a girl) explain that they are looking for an author to write their story so that it may be performed on stage. The members of the troupe scoff at them, and ask them who the hell they think they are. As they begin to tell their story, the director and actors become more and more interested, and it is eventually decided that the family's story should be adapted for theater, with the actors playing the roles of the six characters. A script is hastily written, and the actors begin to act out a particularly shocking scene in the family's history in which the father meets the stepdaughter (fathered by the mother's second partner) in a prearranged sexual encounter at the shop where the stepdaughter works. The characters, however, find themselves unrecognizable in the actors. Even when they are saying the exact same things as the characters said in real life, the difference is so vast that the characters laugh in surprise, angering the actors and director who are trying to recreate real scenes from life on stage. Here, theater is unable to recreate real life, and actors are unable to "be" real people, no matter how much they strive for accuracy and authenticity.

The family's issues are to a large extent related to their inability to understand one another. The father sent the son away from the family and later instructed his wife to marry another man whom he believed she loved more. He wants the people on stage to understand his intentions, but he's not able to convey the reasons for his actions in a way that is satisfactory to him, and doesn't really seem to believe that comprehension between human beings is really possible. The son is obstinant in his refusal to take part in the drama that is unfolding, and repeatedly states that he really has nothing to do with it all. He seems embarrased to be associated with the other characters, and exhibits a rebel-without-a-cause sort of attitude. The stepdaughter works in the shop of Madame Pace, a seamstress-procuress, and exhibits disgust at the acts of the father, and a desire to fly away from the life she has been forced into. They argue about who holds responsibility for different aspects of their situation, and they want the actors to depict their story, perhaps so that they can see themselves objectively and see things how they really happened. This doesn't prove to be possible, because they cannot recognize their real selves in the actors, although these actors are professionally trained to portray real people on stage.

I look forward to reading many more works by Luigi Pirandello. This play was a good introduction to his investigations on human understanding and the limitations of art in representing human life. I've really been enjoying the Italian language and have found it quite accessible as a longtime student of Spanish. Reading a play was great, because there was a lot of dialogue and also a great deal of stage directions and descriptions of the characters and the set as imagined by the author. I learned a lot of new words, and got a better idea of how Italian is spoken in real life. ( )

Sei personnagi houdt nog altijd goed stand als toneel binnen het toneel; schijn en zijn als centraal thema
Enrico IV is veel moeilijker te volgen door de vele wendingen. ( )