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Pirandello and the Restructuring of the Modern Stage
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17073 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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Date : |
8 / 1990 |
6,356 Words |
| Author
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Anne Paolucci
Anne Paolucci is chairperson of the English Department and
director of the Doctor of Arts degree program ay St. John’s
University in New York. She serves on the National Council of
Humanities. She is an award-winning playwright, a prolific
writer on the Theatre of the Absurd, and president of the
Pirandello Society. |
Coming to the stage after years of successful fiction and prose writing, Luigi Pirandello found himself, at the age of fifty, an overnight sensation as a dramatist. He started with plays written in his native tongue, the dialect of Agrigento in Sicily (later he would translate those early plays into Italian proper), but he soon became the symbol and source and creative versatility in theater everywhere. As Robert Brustein reminds us, Pirandello influenced nearly every playwright of our time.
His own life reads like a Pirandellian script. His wife began showing symptoms of pathological depression early in their marriage and in the years that followed grew insanely jealous of him (without cause), and finally violent, threatening the life of her own children and husband. After many years of caring for her at home, Pirandello was forced to institutionalize her. By that time, his success in theater was assured, and he began to travel. Often, he was accompanied by the great actress Marta Abba, who soon became his constant traveling companion. (Their relationship was destined to become a source of controversy over the future rights to certain plays Pirandello dedicated to Abba and gave her as a token of his admiration and affection.) Eventually, Pirandello visited most of the major centers of the world.
Later in life, Pirandello, a professor at the Magistero (the Teacher's College of the University of Rome), became a member of his own theater companies, living out of hotel rooms where he often revised scripts between rehearsals and performances. Two years before his death in 1936, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature - proof of the extraordinary international recognition he had
... (1946 of 38190 Characters)
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