However, rooting its intervention in live performance, this panel opens new directions that are important not just to supplement but also to challenge and deepen the traditional academic presentations in our other panel. First, recognizing theater studies perspectives on performance as research, this panel invites a wide audience to experience key scenes from Pirandello’s work and to participate in the destabilization of truth and appearance that the presenters will thematize in their remarks. Second, the panel’s format itself offers an argument about the question of what constitutes visibility or invisibility when we discuss works that were designed for live performance; in this way, the panel addresses the Presidential Theme from a unique perspective that merits inclusion in the Convention program. Third, by inviting performers into the Convention space, the panel also helps us rethink questions of how academics relate to the works we study, rendering visible the human actors who give the ideas we study concrete form. The panel thus highlights how Pirandello’s theater realizes (makes real) a dialectic relationship between truth and appearance: by structuring a metatheatrical experience where the audience witnesses the process of theatrical creation “from within,” so to speak, Pirandello’s plays seek to make visible the creative imagination itself in the embodied form of live performance.
With this set of thematic issues at its core, the panel is structured around two live performances of approximately 10-15 minutes each. Each performance is in turn accompanied by a 10-minute presentation by the adaptation’s director, who will contextualize the scene and frame it in terms of conceptual questions rooted in these themes. We will then engage the directors and actors in discussion – a short, structured Q&A discussion after each performance (approximately 5 minutes), and then a longer unstructured discussion after both performances and their associated presentations have concluded (15 minutes), which will engage the public at large.
The first performance features a scene from the new adaptation of Pirandello’s most famous work, Six Characters in Search of an Author (originally 1921/1925). Director Nick Gabriel has created a new adaptation of the play, which is making its American premiere at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura of Los Angeles in September 2024 after being produced at the Scuola di Teatro Paolo Grassi in Milan earlier this year. The panel performance will feature an ensemble of actors from local institutions including Tulane University, coupled with a framing presentation by Gabriel. His talk, “Unlimited Reality in Six Characters in Search of an Author: The Visibility of Truth Onstage,” explores the relationship between truth and reality based upon how the Characters argue with the Director and Actors about the representation of their stories in the scene that will be performed. This debate centers on questions of mimesis, representation, and the reality of lived performance. It also questions the nature of dramatic narrative and what an audience experiences as “real” or “true.” Ultimately, the visibility of the imagination is at stake in this scene and play, and Gabriel aims to challenge his audience to rethink both.
The second performance is a scene from an innovative reworking of Pirandello’s famous play Henry IV (originally 1922) as an extended dramatic monologue in a one-man show produced by the Kairos Italy Theater (New York City). Director Laura Caparrotti adapted the play in collaboration with actor Rocco Sisto, using a new translation by Gloria Pastorino. The panel performance will feature Sisto, an award-winning New York actor, coupled with a framing presentation by Caparrotti. This presentation, “Staging Henry IV as a Solo Show: Playing Visible and Invisible with an Audience,” examines the method behind Caparrotti’s 2017 adaptation and the way it was built to reframe the drama around an interaction between the protagonist and the audience itself. Considering dynamics including the set, music, blocking, and monologue, Caparrotti highlights the way the adaptation seeks to create an initial confusion for the audience regarding what they are witnessing and who the lone actor is speaking to, gradually giving way to the character addressing the audience directly, looking them in the eyes, and involving them in the examination of what theater shows (and hides) in its performance.