Article for PSA: The Journal of the Pirandello Society of America, vol. XXXIII, Spring 2021. 

Page Scan PDF (OCR) Text Version

Abstract: Numerous characters created by Luigi Pirandello and Edward Albee are defined by trauma: the story of Pirandello’s titular Six Characters is one of abandonment and sexual violence; the otherwise unnamed protagonist of Henry IV (re)constructs his identity following a major injury and subsequent memory loss; George and Martha of Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? cope with (and ultimately reanimate) the anguish of their childlessness by way of the shared fiction that is there “son.” Each play examines the isolation that arises from the individual’s experience of their world and interrogates the stories we tell to give structure and meaning to existence. 

While these plays don’t all break the fourth wall—only one adopts a purely theatre-in-the-theatre framework, though this in itself is not necessarily a sufficient enough deviation from convention to illustrate the idea—they are nonetheless emblematic of the destabilizing influences that prefigure this closing of the conceptual distance between performer and spectator. Each play features characters which first establish parameters for their “performance,” and then see those parameters violated, either by naïve design or utter negligence: The Six Characters know their story until they try to see it performed; Henry IV is both sane and mad until he reveals his reality to his visitors; George kills his “son” when Martha mentions him to Honey, breaking the only rule they had about their family. Other figures, serving as audience proxies, find themselves absorbed by the chaos of these characters’ worlds as the stories they tell breach the confines of formerly contained and well-defined narratives.

This paper traces the dramaturgical lineage between Pirandello and Albee, examining how while we as audience members are not ourselves invited to partake of each character’s trauma, the so-called fourth wall is nonetheless broken in the collision between people and perceptions.  

Article for PSA: The Journal of the Pirandello Society of America, vol. XXX, 2017 (printed 2018)

Page Scan PDF (OCR) Text Version

Abstract: On January 22, 2017, the concept of “alternative facts” entered our collective consciousness.  It’s a term that seems particularly suited to the sesquicentennial of Luigi Pirandello’s birth, calling to mind the failure of mutual understanding that permeates Pirandellian dramaturgy.  This failure often makes itself known in the tension between society and one’s own self-understanding; the resulting multiplicity of interpretation often presents comically in Pirandello’s work, such as in the debate around the identity of Mrs. Ponza in It Is So (If You Think So).  Still, these debates and misunderstandings are not without consequences, highlighting the instability of identity and reality.  

While Pirandello often confines this chaos to the realm of interpersonal interactions, offering an amusing insight into relationships and the human condition, the laughter which these situations elicit quickly gives way to pity and unease—the essential duality at the heart of Pirandellian humor.  Likewise, the post-truth tenor of public discourse—with its tendency to confer validity on all positions and points of view—represents the extreme possibility of this failure to communicate, privileging conjecture and presupposition.

This paper considers the relevance of Pirandello’s work in a post-truth world.  It asks what his concept of humor, with its capacity for sympathy and intellectual investment (in opposition to the detachment characteristic of the Bergsonian comic), might bring to bear on the current state of affairs, when mutual understanding not only fails, but is actively deterred, and when resistance requires sensitivity, intelligence, and yes, laughter.  

Article for PSA: The Journal of the Pirandello Society of America, vol. XXVII, 2014, pp. 83-99. 

Page Scan PDF (OCR)  Text Version

Abstract: This paper demonstrates – through the lens of Pirandellian humor – the ways in which issues of dramaturgy and translation converge upon one another and suggests that the translator and/or dramaturge are inevitably visible through their work.  

Pirandello defined l’umorismo as “the feeling of the opposite.”  By penetrating the superficial and challenging the individual to deconstruct the illusion of an objective and coherent reality, Pirandello’s humor is both a commentary on a literary tradition and an implication of the individual in the construction of their own understanding of the quotidian.  Demanding a renegotiation of one’s point of view, the individual is marked as the site of identification and transformation at which reality is both dissembled and reconstituted.  

This inquiry into the nature of identification and transformation addresses the fundamental questions that arise at the intersection of literature and the performing arts– as the artist traverses the distance between modes of expression, what is lost, gained, challenged or altered in the process?  In broad strokes, these questions are the foundations of dramaturgy – a process which endeavors to strike the appropriate balance between the content and form of a performance.  

While perhaps not immediately apparent, the translator faces similar questions when navigating the cultural and linguistic divides between source and target cultures, considering the ways their own intervention into a text may strip or superimpose meaning upon a work.  But what of the drama translator?  How might their work be situated in relation to both the dramatic text and its instantiation in performance?  

Page Scan PDF (OCR) Text Version

Citation: “Eduardo e Pirandello: Una questione “familiare” nella drammaturgia italiana, by Dario Tomasello. Carocci Editore, 2014.” PSA: The Journal of the Pirandello Society of America, vol. 29, 2016, pp. 109-115.

Book review (text available above in PDF and RTF formats)

Link to Article Article Text PDF of Webpage (June 2021)

For the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, June 2014

Link to Article Text of Article PDF of Webpage (June 2021)

For the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, May 2014

Link to Article Text of Article PDF of Webpage (June 2021)

For the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, April 2014.

Link to Article Text of Article PDF of Webpage (June 2021)

For the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, March 2014.

Essay Text

Posted to Nightswimming Theatre's website, June 2011, following research completed in the company's archives for coursework, March 2011