Enrico IV

When Luigi Pirandello wrote his play Enrico IV (or Henry IV as it is generally translated into English) there must have been some confusion in the audience about which Henry IV the play was portraying.

In fact, there's confusion on stage in the play about which Henry IV is being discussed. English-speaking audiences might immediately think of England's King Henry IV, the subject of multiple plays by William Shakespeare. The character of Berthold in the play, however, at first thinks the monarch in question is Henry IV of France.

How could the characters in the play not know which king it is they're dealing with on stage? As the audience learns in the first scene, the Henry IV in the play is not the real Henry IV, a Holy Roman Emperor who famously feuded with the Pope, but rather a wealthy man who was thrown from his horse while enacting the role of Henry IV in a pageant. Waking up after severe head trauma, he thinks he really is the man he was portraying.

For years now, the man's family and friends have been keeping up the act that he really is Henry IV to appease his madness. He later reveals, however, that he recovered his memory and is well aware that he's not an emperor. In order to appease his family and friends, though, he continues to play the role. Everyone in the play is acting, and is even aware that they are acting, but none of them are able to give up the roles and just be themselves.

All of this is a metaphor for society as a whole, as Pirandello makes clear. Pirandello began his playwriting career as a part of an Italian movement known as the Theatre of the Grotesque in which characters resemble puppets with no control over their own destinies. That certainly sounds like Enrico IV! The movement was known for a number of other tropes as well, such as irresolvable love triangles and unfaithful women. Yup, the play has those, too.

Pirandello went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and today the Pirandello Society of America keeps his memory alive in this country. They also publish PSA, a journal that published my own Pirandello adaptation, Wedding Night, based on one of his short stories. That play, however, doesn't have people pretending to be dead emperors.

Wedding Night Published

My short play Wedding Night, which previously had a staged reading in D.C. at Anacostia Playhouse, is now published in PSA, the journal of the Pirandello Society of America.

The play is freely adapted from Luigi Pirandello’s short story “Prima notte,” which was first published in 1900. It follows a young woman saying goodbye to her mother on her wedding night. Both know the coming marriage will not be ideal, but as darkness descends, new possibilities emerge that no one ever anticipated.

My play is included alongside three other dramas also inspired by Pirandello short stories. These are If by Robert Brophy adapted from the story “Se…” (“If…”), Vilomah (a Sanskrit word meaning “against the order of things”) by Elisabetta Bracer adapted from “Quando si comprende” (“War”), and To the Moon and Back by Joshua Piper adapted from “Una Giornata” (“A Single Day”).

Early in his career, Pirandello began writing plays that were considered Theatre of the Grotesque. These plays used what he called “umorismo” which is a type of painful laughter that accompanies a sense of tragic bewilderment. Stefano Boselli, the Theatre and Performance Outreach Officer for PSA, mentioned Wedding Night’s connection to umorismo in a forward to the four plays.

Boselli, who also goes by the stage name Stebos, is a talented director in addition to being a scholar. He has directed original and classic works, including plays originally performed by the Theatre du Grand-Guignol.

Theatre of the Grotesque

The Italian movement known as the Theatre of the Grotesque was characterized by a quality described by its most famous practitioner, Luigi Pirandello, as "umorismo." This was a type of painful laughter that accompanies a sense of tragic bewilderment. Characters in Theatre of the Grotesque resembled puppets with little or no control over their own destinies. They frequently got involved in seemingly irresolvable love triangles involving female infidelity and lost a sense of what was real and what was illusion.

The playwright Luigi Chiarelli began the movement with his 1913 play The Mask and the Face, which he subtitled "a grotesque in three acts." In the play, a cuckolded husband pretends to murder his wife to preserve his honor, but in reality he sends her away and confesses to a crime he did not commit. The man is acquitted of murder and sent bouquets of flowers from women who want to marry him for his supposedly manly actions. His wife returns and the two are reconciled, but the man is then charged with lying to the police in confessing the murder. As a murderer, he was respected, but now it is clear he is innocent, he is hunted down as an outlaw.

Other playwrights followed in Chiarelli's footsteps. These including Luigi Antonelli, who wrote the time-traveling play A Man Confronts Himself, and Enrico Cavacchiolo, who explored the hopelessness of marital infidelity in his highly theatrical play The Bird of Paradise, as well as Rosso di San Secondo, whose play Puppets of Passion exemplifies the obsession Theatre of the Grotesque had with marionettes and other puppets. By far, however, the most influential playwright in the movement was Pirandello.

Pirandello's play Right You Are (If You Think You Are), which premiered in 1917 in Milan, is typical of his early work. It shows a group of civil servants who become obsessed with a new employee whose wife for some reason communicates with an old woman through letters lowered down from a window in a basket. The characters call in the old woman, the man, and ultimately the man's wife, continually trying to get to the bottom of the mystery. With each questioning, however, they uncover new contradictions and are unsure whether to believe the man or the old woman. Instead of resolving the mystery at the end, the wife proclaims that they are both right, and the audience is left with more questions at the end than at the beginning.

The Theatre of the Grotesque tended to repeat itself, however, and Pirandello ultimately outgrew the movement. His 1921 play Six Characters in Search of an Author goes beyond the tricks of his earlier work. It involves six mysterious individuals who show up in a theatre just as actors are getting ready to rehearse a play. The strange guests explain they are characters in an unfinished story and try to get the performers to act out their history. It ends in chaos, with no one able to distinguish art from reality.

The initial production of the play in Rome had mixed results. While some in the audience hailed it as brilliant, others cried out that Pirandello was a madman. A subsequent production in Milan was more successful, and the play spawned countless imitations. Pirandello followed that success with Henry IV, about a man who thinks he is a Holy Roman Emperor from the 11th century and is humored by his relatives who play along with his delusion. As it turns out, the man knows perfectly well who he is, but prefers living in the fantasy to reality.

Pirandello had personal experience with madness, as his own wife had been committed to an insane asylum since 1919. His explorations of madness, theatricality, and the idea that reality itself might be subjective continued to influence writers and thinkers for years to come. In 1934, Pirandello received the Nobel Prize for Literature, with the committee citing his "bold and brilliant renovation of the drama and the stage."