Presentations, Lectures, and Events

Event: Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention
Panel: Breaking the Fourth Wall: Experimental Theatre from Six Characters to Today (Pirandello Society of America)
Date/Location: January 2021 (Virtual)

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 will trace 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.  

This paper was revised for publication in PSA: The Journal of the Pirandello Society of America.

Available PDFS:

• Paper/Notes

• Slides

• Large-print access copy

Event: Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention,
Panel: The Persistent Past in Italian Literature, 1200 – 1600
Date/Location: January 2021 (Virtual)

Abstract: From 1544 to his death in 1587, Giovan Maria Cecchi received and fulfilled at least one commission each year for plays that were intended for “immediate performance” (Eisenbichler 91).  Incorporating broad ranges of genres and dramatic traditions as well as Florentine vernacular, Cecchi’s dramas were crafted uniquely to reflect contemporary Florentine social, political, artistic, and cultural conditions. One such drama, L’esaltazione della croce, which, with its intermedi, was performed during the 1589 wedding festivities of Ferdinand de’ Medici and Christine de Lorraine. The revitalization of Medici power in Florence and throughout Tuscany was reflected in Cecchi’s work, and as his dramatic output grew it was more closely directed towards consumption by the Florentine upper-class, and even more particularly by the ruling family itself. Drawing from Cecchi’s drama, accounts of the staging of the intermedi, and confraternity production traditions, this presentation considers how Cecchi derives and elaborates upon “The Exaltation of the Holy Cross” from the popular medieval history The Golden Legend to create contemporary, that is renaissance, Medici parallels in both function and imagery, and how the 1589 production specifically involves the application of reinterpreted classical norms in conjunction with current developments in staging to realize these parallels with the Florentine ruling family. In doing so, it also considers  how art and artistic patronage while functioning as tools of pedagogy and propaganda can also act as enduring expressions of corporate solidarity (Black 242; Ventrone 8).

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• Texts of co-authored items are available upon request

Event: Midwest Modern Language Association (MMLA) Annual Convention
Panel: Comparative Literature
Date/Location: November 2019, Chicago, IL

Abstract: “Every reference-body […] has its own particular time; unless we are told the reference-body to which the statement of time refers, there is no meaning in the statement of the time of an event”. - Albert Einstein, Relativity (1916, 27) 

With this statement, Einstein dispenses with classical mechanics’ long-held assumption of the absolute significance of time, instead presenting a treatment of simultaneity which suggests that the validity of the observer’s perceptions and subsequently time itself are relative to the observer and their position in relation to the observed. There is no cosmic frame of rest against which all motion can be evaluated—rather “only motion relative to some other object is measurable and has meaning” (Lightman 63).

Responding directly to the MMLA’s citation of Luigi Pirandello in its description of this year’s convention theme, this paper will develop ideas surrounding Pirandello’s management of time and temporality in his dramatic adaptations of his short fiction. Proceeding from the initial research for this project presented at the 2019 MLA convention, which laid some of the theoretical foundations for this research, this paper will be directed towards clarifying the practical aspects of this transition from page to stage. In reshaping his literary works to both conform to and confound the limits and conventions of the theatre, Pirandello further illuminates how a variety of stories might transpire in a single, shared space, span of time, or series of events, and how a range of perspectives on a given set of circumstances are not reconciled into a collective understanding, but instead lay claim to competing assertions of validity. And so, a story is never just a story—it is told in relation to its characters, its timeliness evaluated in the moment of its telling, and its efficacy extended in a multiplicity of tellings across fiction and drama; we need only look to examples like Six Characters, in which the Father desires redemption and the Stepdaughter revenge, to Henry IV and its protagonist’s traumatic experience of time’s passage, or to the array of interpretations offered not only by individual characters, but also through Pirandello’s tendency to adapt his own work and his characters to the stage.  

 Looking towards Pirandello’s engagement with relativity theory, his emerging “quantum dramaturgy,” and emphasizing time and temporality, this paper will examine Pirandello’s engagement with and methodological parallels to modern scientific thought, as his characters—doubled across fiction and drama—confront a world in which processes of meaning-making have been reconfigured and the only truth to be found is generated from within.  

Available PDFs:

• Paper/Notes

Event: MMLA Annual Convention,
Panel: Drama Panel
Date/Location: November 2019, Chicago, IL

Abstract: The 1589 wedding of Ferdinand de’ Medici and Christine of Lorraine “mobilized the combined intellectual, artistic, and administrative forces of Tuscany at the zenith of its wealth, power, and cultural prestige” (Saslow 1). Among the many festive offerings was a spectacular production of Giovanmaria Cecchi’s 1583 sacra rappresantazione, L’esaltazione della croce. The dramatic text is doubled by a detailed description of the theatre and the intermedi of the 1589 production.  

This pair of texts offer a unique insight into the interplay of faith and spectacle, yet the relationship between the acts and intermedi requires further attention. We will examine how the assemblage of stories and mythologies, which are derived from The Golden Legend, reinforces a cosmological vision in which all places, times, and things are united under a divine plan, and how this production, with its spectacular staging and expansive time frame, contextualizes the union between two major Renaissance powers within such a plan. This presentation will analyze some of the ways in which these two texts constitute a cohesive whole, balancing the text of a religious drama which draws upon popular legends of the early church with intermedi based on subjects interpreted from the Old Testament. 

Available PDFs:

• Texts of co-authored items are available upon request

Event: MLA Annual Convention,
Panel: Negotiating Identities: From Pirandello to Today, Pirandello Society of America
Date/Location: January 2018, New York, NY

Abstract: In physics, the uncertainty principle defines the limits by which it is possible to observe a particle’s position and velocity, with one becoming less distinct as the other becomes better defined.  A similar problem exists in Pirandello’s drama, as his characters negotiate the divide between self-understanding and socially constructed identities.  Figures like Signora Ponza or Henry IV, with their indeterminate and occasionally volatile identities, dominate Pirandellian narratives, highlighting the complex question of who a person is, what they can be, and how circumstances influence the understanding of one’s own person and others.  Even Pirandello’s defining aesthetic, l’umorismo, is not so easily defined, at once denoting a temporal extension from laughter to sympathy as well as the moment of intersection between these two states. 

Pirandello’s dramatic output not only tests the limits theatrical convention and practice, but offers an inquiry into the nature of identity, social structures, and human interaction.  In short, the locus Pirandello’s theatre was not simply the nature representation, but an investigation into its limits and possibilities.  Using the theatre as a kind of lab space, Pirandello scrutinizes the human condition within the confines of the theatrical space, mitigating the distance between theatrical representation and self-understanding. 

This paper will examine what contemporary scientific inquiry might bring to bear on understanding Pirandellian drama and the interrogations of identity and being contained therein.  

Available PDFs:

• Paper/Notes

Event: Global Legacies: Pirandello Across Centuries and Media , Pirandello Society of America
Panel: N/A
Date/Location: September 2017, New York, NY

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 will consider the relevance of Pirandello’s work in a post-truth world.  It will ask 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.  

This paper was later published in PSA: The Journal of the Pirandello Society of America

Available PDFs:

• Paper/Notes

Event: MMLA  Annual Convention,
Panel: Drama:  “Crashing the Borders—Drama/Performance/Criticism”
Date/Location: November 2016, St. Louis, MO

Abstract: Luigi Pirandello’s career as a dramatist positions him as an artist who tested the boundaries between writing drama and seeing it realized in performance.  But, Pirandello’s penchant for philosophizing places him between the theatre itself and the theoretical frameworks that attempt to account for the characteristics and methodologies that distinguish it from the literary arts.  An artist who intermingled theory and practice, Pirandello interrogated the impasse between homo fictus and homo sapiens, the best known example being the occasion when six characters invade the stage space and urge the troupe they find there to play their story.  The confrontation between characters and humans—particularly, between characters and authors—is not an unusual device for Pirandello, having been employed in several short stories that anticipated Six Characters in Search of an Author, and subsequently revisited in his trilogy of theatre plays throughout the 1920s.  This recurrent motif speaks to Pirandello’s long artistic evolution, as his suspicion of the theatre’s status as art and its efficacy in enacting a creative vision would resolve into an appreciation of the potency of the form—one he would ultimately characterize as a transformative and collaborative effort with its own mechanics and ways of being.  His dramas, celebrated for the spirit of experimentation in which they were written and their long influence since, bear the traces of his deep consideration of the origin and purpose of art.  These texts reveal themselves concurrently as plays to be performed and as significant theories of theatre (Santeramo 1).

This paper will consider Pirandello’s evolution from critic to dramatist and, finally, to capocomico.  It will demonstrate how the heavy philosophical content of Pirandello’s plays—often depicted as intimidating to audiences and readers—speaks to the playwright’s reimagination of the theatre’s potential, as he constantly crashed the borders between theory and practice, creating works that, in doubling as theoretical treatises, can only be fully appreciated in the moment of embodiment.

Available PDFs:

• Paper/Notes

Event: MMLA Annual Convention,
Panel:
Date/Location: November 2015, Columbus, OH

Abstract: In spite of the title, nothing is left to chance in Luigi Pirandello’s 1930 play, Tonight We Improvise.  The final play of his “theatre-in-the-theatre” trilogy is fully scripted, from the onstage noises and audience outbursts in the “involuntary prologue,” to moment the director, Dr. Hinkfuss, is driven out by his own company, to the leading actress’s fainting spell during the emotional death scene of her character.  The play, in exploring (and perhaps exacerbating) the tension between life and form that is the indelible mark of Pirandello’s drama, continues to complicate the chief pursuit of the playwright’s career, questioning how, as Hinkfuss proposes, we can “lift [the work of art] out of the rigidity of its own form […] let it loose inside ourselves [and] with our own life endow it with life” (471).

In calling attention to and staging the mechanics by which theatrical representation is achieved (more so than in the preceding "theatre-in-the-theatre" plays), Pirandello identifies the creative process, often, and in this case purposely messy and haphazard, as essentially a temporal extension, motivated within and transpiring across time.  In doing so, Pirandello elevates the creative process to the level of art itself, eschewing the "art object" that demonstrates technical skill for the "work of art" which actively breaks open the world and stands out against, but never separate from, the context from which such a work springs forth.  

The temporal extension that denotes the creative process is further complicated when confronting the deceptively finite quality of the dramatic text itself.  After a particularly difficult scene with an actor, Hinkfuss assures the audience that the experiment, an improvised play based on a scenario drawn from a Pirandello short story, will run more smoothly the following evening, saying of the actor, “tomorrow, he will acquit himself of the scene marvelously” (507).  This is of course not so—there is no tomorrow for the  “actor", who over the course of a run of this play will continue to face the same difficulty, performance after performance, just as the much later (but equally perplexing) Vladimir and Estragon will be continually assured that Godot will come tomorrow evening.  

This paper will explore how Pirandello is able to reconcile the final, static quality of the dramatic text with the recovery of the lively, "spoken action" that he identifies as the impetus for the artist's work.  Using the language of contemporary theories of time and temporality, I will interrogate how a creative process and its resulting artwork occupy, often paradoxically, the same stage space, as Pirandello makes art out of the artless.

Available PDFs:

• Paper/Notes

Event: MMLA Annual Convention,
Panel: Dramatic Disaster and Theatrical Catastrophe
Date/Location: November 2014, Detroit, MI

Abstract: This paper will demonstrate how Pirandello's dramaturgy of time is served by the language of disaster and catastrophe, using the playwright's adoption of the stage as a horizon of corporeality as its point of departure.  The metatheatrical frame of Six Characters in Search of an Author seems particularly suited as a point of access into the complex interpenetration of disaster and catastrophe in dramatic narrative.  Disaster, etymologically speaking, calls attention to the ways in which the driving forces of the universe no longer favor an individual or collective, while catastrophe considers how specific intentions and actions are undone through fundamental flaws in planning and execution.  In Pirandello’s work, the life/form dichotomy parallels the tension between the abstract, metaphysical origins of disaster and concrete failures that underpin catastrophe.  But, there is an oft-ignored temporal element to this interplay, as the lively creative force which drives the titular Characters is instantiated in and halted by dramatic structure and theatrical convention.    

Bergson's characterization of the body as “an ever advancing boundary between the future and the past,” and Heidegger's understanding of being as a "being-there,"  will lend support to this analysis of Pirandello’s dramaturgy of time, as the disastrous beginnings and catastrophic ends of Pirandello's sextet are played out at the epistemological and ontological impasse between character and actor. 

Available PDFs:

• Paper/Note

Event: Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) Annual Convention
Panel: Pirandello’s Six Characters:  Theatrical Influence and Legacy, Pirandello Society of America Roundtable
Date/Location: April 2014, Harrisburg, PA

Abstract: In this paper I discuss the dramaturgy of time in  Six Characters in Search of an Author and Krapp's Last Tape, focusing on the  moments in which characters are made to watch and listen to themselves as narrativized or historicized records.  I will offer an outline of the key features of the Pirandellian dramaturgical legacy for Beckett.

While the title borrows from Pirandello’s Henry IV, it might as well refer to the incredulity of the Six Characters as the acting company tries to perform their story, fixing it in the moment of embodiment and mitigating the depth of their struggle in the process.  The Characters exist outside of the flow of time and in possession of an invariable reality – a position which, in some ways, makes them appear ontologically superior to the members of the company, who cannot understand a life devoid of unceasing and fluid change.  Responding with laughter, derision, and some uneasiness towards the company’s efforts, the Characters resist the historicization imposed by a narrative framework, and their past and future become bound up in the present.  

Seeing a version of oneself played back is not only a problem which a Pirandellian character faces.  Krapp’s Last Tape also features a protagonist who encounters historicized versions of himself.  There is a decided otherness to Krapp’s recorded self.  But, unlike the Characters railing against the framework the capocomico attempts to impose upon them, Krapp’s difficulty is in recognizing himself as the man in the record from his youth.  

Available PDFs:

• Paper/Notes

Event: MMLA Annual Convention,
Panel: The Artifice of Time in Literature
Date/Location: November 2013, Milwaukee, WI

Abstract: What is time with respect to madness? Luigi Pirandello offers one possible treatment of the question in his 1921 drama, **Henry IV**. Featuring one of Pirandello’s most celebrated protagonists, the play exhibits some of the playwright’s most thought-provoking commentary on the nature of being and the relativity of personal experience. However, underlying Henry’s sane-madness and his thirst for revenge is a narrative explicitly concerned with the nature of time, memory, and identity. Dismantling the notion of a coherent self and demonstrating the ways in which insanity may rewrite the individual’s experience of the flow of time, the play offers a narrative in which time’s passage is not marked by a clock or calendar, but by its ravages on the mind, body, and heart. Taking as a point of departure Pirandello’s characterization of identity as fragmented and shifting and using, among other theoretical sources, Heidegger’s analysis of temporality as the ontological structure of Being, this paper will consider Henry’s relationship to time, his attempts to arrest it, and the degree to which he finds authentic freedom in the self-imposed exile of feigned madness.

Available PDFs:

• Paper/Notes

Event: New York College English Association (NYCEA) ConferencePanel: Date/Location: October 2012, Buffalo, NY

Abstract: This paper examines how matters of translation intersection with matters of dramaturgy, positioning the translator as a vital interpreter of drama. 

This paper won one of two awards for the Best Graduate Student Paper at the 2012 conference (in spite of its typos!). A revised version of this paper was later published in PSA: The Journal of the Pirandello Society of America.

Available PDFs:

• Paper/Notes