Pirandello's Work
Pirandello wrote for a new audience. His plays were reactions to the plays of naturalism and realism that came before him. He got his beginnings in writing short stories and upon arrival back to Sicily after his schooling at Bonn he began to take an interest in theater. This began with the dialectal theater of Sicily and an exploration of commedia dell’arte (Gainor et al. 530). After his life began to unravel at the very beginning of the 20th century Pirandello began to expand his writing to what he is now known for, his philosophical comedies and metatheatrical works (Gainor et al. 529).
His unique sense of humor and his delivery of that humor through the raisonneur character helped him to create a world in which realism and naturalism were thrown out the window and metatheatricality was employed to fully explore Pirandello’s philosophies (Gainor et al. 530). His most famous play, Six Characters in Search of an Author, follows a set of characters in conflict over how to tell their story (Gainor et al. 531). This play then explores what it means to stage a play and who is in charge of telling the story. The audience is only allowed to put the pieces together in the final moments because everything they had heard up until then was subjective because the actors were in the world of the play too much to see the whole picture (Gainor et al. 532). It also explores what it means to distill a story down for the stage from the plot of a novel, or multiple short stories in this case, so that they are able to be followed by the audience and have discreet scenes (Gainor et al. 531).
Toward the end of his career Pirandello began to write plays with strong female protagonists (Norton 532). This may have been in support of Marta Abba, the young actress that he was in love with, or the many years of teaching at a women’s school, but either way it allowed him to explore another demographic that had not had as much exposure on the stage.
Short Stories on the Stage
Many of his plays were inspired by short stories that he expanded and adapted for the stage. This is an interesting contrast to Emile Zola's attempts at putting novels on the stage which resulted in Naturalism. Zola noted that there was a distinction between the content and purposes of novels and plays. He attempted to dissolve this difference by creating plays that staged a whole character with an apparent psychology. Man is suddenly represented as a higher form of animal that eats and sleeps. Pirandello draws much of his inspiration from his short stories and it is interesting to see how his adaptations of short stories manifest very differently than Zola's adaptations of novels. Pirandello creates a self-aware world that is less concerned with psychology and more concerned with philosophy.
This is best exemplified in Six Characters in Search of an Author because this play explores directly what it means to distill one's life down into a plot that can be understood by an audience. The characters must translate their own complete lives and interwoven stories into one cohesive narrative that has clear scene divisions and plot. The short story as a form be concise and to the point with clear characters and action while a novel can be more rambling and examine moments more microscopically. Pirandello's distillation of the plot and lack of facade between the audience and the fact that they are watching theater creates an inherently different adapted from the short story than Zola made when adapting the novel.
Aesthetic
In his work, Pirandello explores the naturalism that came before him and then continues on to explore some of the elements of symbolism, futurist theater, and dada theater as he creates his own place in the modern cannon with metatheater. The book The Drama of Luigi Pirandello divides his theatrical career into five parts: In the Wake of Naturalism; The Drama of Being and Seeming; Social Plays; The Drama of Womanhood; Art and life.
Many of his first plays reflect the growing popularity of naturalism in the late nineteenth century. Vittorini writes, “Pirandello has taken from naturalism… the concept of a suffering and pitiful humanity” (Vittorini 44). He also set many of these early plays on his home island of Sicily, like Liola and L'Altro Figlio (Vittorini 45). Pirandello used the tenets of naturalism to create complete characters in an everyday setting and many echoes of his beginnings in naturalism resonate throughout the rest of his works (Vittorini 45-46).
In his next phase of work, “The Drama of Being and Seeming,” Pirandello begins to explore the grotesque and humorous elements of life. He makes a hard distinction between irony and humor saying that humor always contains in it a bit of grief (Vittorini 89). He was a scholar of humor and his specific take on the concept is documented in the book L'Umerismo published in 1908 (Vittorini 89). Much of his humor comes from quick reversals or sudden changes of appearance (Gainor et al. 530). At times he takes the absurdity of life and pushes it to its extreme to show his audience how at times it can be so much that we become mad (Vittorini 91). These plays were also written during a time in Pirandello’s life when things were beginning to fall apart and this deep pain is reflected in the calculated humor he employs in his plays. They include Ciascuno a suo modo and Enrico IV.
Pirandello’s social plays center on his moral philosophies as their themes. One of the most common is the immorality of men and the subsequent superiority of women (Vittorini 184). Pirandello’s deep sense of empathy comes through in the morals he presents in these social plays (Vittorini 186). He also gets a chance to express some of his political views in The New Colony a play in which he explores his growing ambivalence toward fascism, which he was a very vocal supporter of until his later life (Brey).
The drama of womanhood is an interesting part of Pirandello’s career because it comes after he has explored many different forms and frameworks for his writing but explores a theme that has been present throughout, that of fertility and motherhood (Gainor et al. 530). Pirandello worked as a professor at a women’s teaching college beginning in the early 1900s and continued to work there well into his career. Being surrounded by young women would have led him to want to explore their lives and how his philosophies applied to them. Around the same time he met Marta Abba, a young actress, whom he fell in love with (Gainor et al. 533). His fascination with the difficulties life presents as well as the moral superiority of women come together to help him create this interesting grouping of plays toward the end of his career.
Life and art is one of the most interesting divisions of his work because it is where Pirandello was able to explore metatheatricality and immerse his audiences in work that did not allow them to be a passive observer of the plot but forced them to question which characters they could trust and even what theater itself was. These included his three "theatre in theatre" plays, one of which is Six Characters....
His Work and Influence
Pirandello was most well known for his plays and short stories. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934 "for his bold and ingenious revival of dramatic and scenic art" (Nobel). He wrote a book in 1908 titled L’Umorismo in which he explores the nature of the art he produces. In this book he writes about how his fascination with psychology influences his writing of characters. He began to write plays in 1898 and gained fame in 1923 with a production of Six Characters… in Paris. Traces of his work can be seen in the existentialist plays of Jean-Paul Sartre, and the absurdist works of Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett. Below is a selected list of Pirandello’s most notable plays:
1916: Liola, One of his first prominent plays, takes place in Sicily, the story of a single father (reflecting his own life at the time)
1917: Cosi e (se vi pare) (So It Is (If You Think So)), Based on a novel of Pirandello’s, explores who you can trust on stage (both characters claim the other is insane)
1921: Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (Six Characters in Search of an Author), His most famous work, first play that explores “theatre in the theatre” – the metatheatricality that Pirandello is well known for
1922: Enrico IV (Henry IV), A play that explores madness and human psychology
1923: L’Altro Figlio (The Other Son), Set in his home region of Sicily
1924: Ciascuno a suo modo (Each in His Own Way), Part of the “theatre in the theatre trilogy”
1928: La nuova colonia (The New Colony), This play explores Pirandello’s growing ambivalence toward Mussolini and Fascism
1930: Questa sera si recita a soggetto (Tonight We Improvise), Part of “theatre in the theatre trilogy”
1936: I giganti della montagna (The Mountain Giants), This play was unfinished at Pirandello’s death, reflects on his relationship with Fascism