Luigi Pirandello makes us stand in front of a mirror which shows a painful yet necessary picture. But who is really standing in front of the mirror? Could it be our "personality"? The same character who lives with us day after day and in whom we want to recognise ourselves, only so that we could be accepted by the others? Or is it our "essence"? That unique being, the originary white page that everybody has been writing on quite frantically throughout our lives, writing whatever they wanted us to become.
This is the secret drama that we all carry and on which we get to reflect in The Black Mirror. Each of the two stories has good dramatic potential: due to the dynamic and deeply dramatic rhythm of the text; due to the physical space which Pirandello manages to create, from time to time, around his protagonists, while also guiding the spectators and, in our case, the actors; due to the surprising plot twists which enrich the stories, making them truly suspenseful.
The Wheelbarrow: by confessing an "unconscionable" passion, the famed and esteemed lawyer reveals the misery of the human condition, in a tragicomic crescendo.
A Breath: in Pirandello's most magical and metaphysical short story, the protagonist touches the thumb and the index finger on his right hand and, blowing air through the gap, obtains the power to kill. The epidemic which is unleashed by this destructive power, in which man ends up annihilating himself, is our one true moral dilemma.
So, in the darkness of our mirror, we are searching for a hidden reflection, which might tell us more about what and who we are. So that we might at least remember. - Roberto Bacci
Opening date: Sunday, February 26 2023
Next performance
Monday, October 7 2024, at 19:00 , Luceafărul Iași
Working on his fifth production at the National Theater of Cluj, Roberto Bacci came up with the hybrid The Black Mirror, a dramatization of two short stories by Luigi Pirandello, The Wheelbarrow and The Breath of Death (translated by Maria Rotar), which appears to be a continuation of the short play The Man with a Flower in His Mouth. The same oppressive atmosphere, the same difficult investigation into the psychology of the introvert, who is wandering through life, the same unforgiving analysis of the world within, under the auspices of nocturnal knowledge. The wondrous Ionuț Caras is a spokesperson for this descent into the abyss of self-reflection; he is disguised as the prototype of the problematic man, always tough and unforgiving with his own person, looking for lucidity until he reaches the point of Dostoyevskyan duality (...) it is a dramatic pursuit, worded dramatically, which Ionuț Caras conducts thoroughly, looking at every facet, in a well-rhythmed and well-dosed one-man show. It is, after all, a powerful dramatic recital, an achievement in its own right.
For 55 minutes, the actor switches with overwhelming subtlety and ease between the bodies and souls of the two characters, through the rich nuances of the multiple contexts they inhabit, through various modes of artistic expression, proposed by the author (oscillating between psychological drama, comedy, farce, tragedy, the theater of the absurd, romantic drama). We have no idea when he changes costumes, hairstyles, expressions, tonalities, props. Fully in control of the text: Ionuț Caras is that rare kind of actor who captures the meanings of every line he utters, integrating each phrase in the larger meaning of the play. In constant control of the space, in constant dialogue with the lights and the shadows (light design: Jenel Moldovan), engaging in fleeting relationships with unseen characters or the spectators: it is one of the most dynamic one-man-shows produced in the last few years, but devoid of any struggle or gestural-vocal stridency. The 42-year-old actor from the National Theater turns The Black Mirror into a demonstration of his craft: of what theater can be, of the ways in which it can transform/enhance literature, of the power of well-crafted and carefully-made art, which can captivate/capture the audience in the "here and now" of the stage, in the "what was true 100 years ago is still true today" of the written character.
There are two dimensions to this show, which come together nicely: the voice and the body, which make up what we conventionally call "the self", as well as everything residing outside of it. This proves that a single person can open up an entire world, by themselves and through themselves, a world where they can take us with them at whim, demiurgically, carefully and honestly. However, the gesture described in The Breath has become a beat type. Catchy enough, its effect is anti-hermetic and frees the spectators from any complex conventions, making its mark, reaching all of us on the same note. Playfully, jokingly, we also take it with us in the outside world. We have the breath, as well. And so does Ionuț Caras - the man, not just the actor - who uses it in an absolutely phenomenal manner (...) Pirandello might seem unfriendly at first, until we manage to resonate with his register, but then he becomes magical and we are all engulfed in his universe. The show was highly amusing to me. Pirandello has a playful dimension and knows how to calibrate his short stories, so that he introduces us to a whole range of emotions and, perhaps more importantly, dispels all confusion. Roberto Bacci does the same thing in The Black Mirror: he cultivates Pirandello's playfulness, with purpose and with a clear resolution. And skill.
Ionuț Caras's discourse is flawless: credible nuances, diverse expressions, controlled movements. He is always doing an impression of someone (the sister, the dog...) - in an involuntarily funny manner - then he smokes, he undresses, he dresses up, he moves the armchair; the focus is on the credible, challenging details. A virtual, fluid slalom, which proves the actor's refined talent.
Alexandru Jurcan, The Mirror and Social Masks, in the magazine Tribuna, no. 493, 16-31 March 2023
Throughout his performance, which kept the spectators on the edge of their seats, Ionuț Caras proved his unquestionable talent and his diverse and nuanced means of expression, which allow him to go seamlessly from one character to the next, from realism to fantasy, exploring the depths of the human condition, always paying attention to its manifestations, in a well-balanced, dynamic, classically elegant discourse.
In this adventure into the darkness of the subconscious, Ionuț Caras is the embodiment of resignation, despair, cynicism and evil, of grandeur and hopelessness. He juggles extreme emotions in a natural, playful manner, without exaggerating or being demonstrative. From the insecure character, who accepts his own dull life, to the almost demonic and exasperated antihero who brings chaos and (self-)destruction all around him, replicating the structure of Gogolian absurdity, Ionuț Caras is a hypnotizing presence: he juggles a myriad of costumes, expressions, gestures, dramatic genres, revitalizing a lesser-known Pirandello.
In this show made in Cluj, we have the chance to see ourselves in the gestures, tones and words of the characters. If the protagonist, who discovers his own power to kill with/through one breath, decides to test this ability, we find ourselves trapped, facing a dilemma. Can that small being, born to suffer as a matter of course, be subjected to this form of euthanasia? We find ourselves in agreement, we find ourselves conditioned by the "pro-life" movements - two mutually exclusive ideologies - and we get stuck. Just as the death of a terrifying brute can cause both satisfaction (as a vigilante would feel) and civic uproar. Ionuț Caras's tone and gaze are unsettling: "What is life! One breath can take it away. A giant in the night! It was me! I was death!"
A performance like one long gaze in the mirror - with self-criticism, sarcasm, humor and a lot of irony experienced by a man on the edge of his own personal abyss; a reflection in a misty train window, the train which ensures the journey of a spirit caught between evaporated desires coming at him ever since he was born or even before; or a reflection in the window of a shop selling realities, which cannot help but contain this man, swallow him whole [...] A psychological drama based on Luigi Pirandello's intelligent and extremely relevant texts dating back to the beginning of the last century (the short stories "The Wheelbarrow" and "A Breath"). In its masculine version, the play is full of absurd, comical and tragic elements. It is intriguing without drawing a conclusion, it incites without offending, it hits hard but also comforts, it kills without being punished for it. An experienced actor, tightly caught in an intelligent game involving the length of his lines (equal to the thoughts that accompany them), their artful modulations and inflections. He uses the racket of rhetoric most aptly, in order to hit each idea before sending it back across the court with perfect timing, without allowing it to ever hit the ground or stop the game even for one second; the referee has allowed a precise time for this game - one hour.
Luigi Pirandello is one of the most appreciated, read and discussed playwrights of the twentieth century. His work has changed the world of theater for good.
Robert Brustein, a renowned American theater critic, wrote that "Pirandello's influence on the theater of the 20th century is incommensurable. Through his intense meditations on the nature of existence, he anticipates Sartre and Camus; through his revelations regarding the disintegration of human personality and man's isolation, he anticipates Samuel Beckett; through his ceaseless war against language, theory, conceptual thinking and the collective mind, he anticipates Eugène Ionesco; through his manner of addressing the conflict between truth and illusion, he anticipates Eugene O'Neill (and, later on, Harold Pinter and Edward Albee); through his dramatic experiments, he anticipates an entire series of experimental playwrights, including Thornton Wilder and Jack Gelber; through the interactions between the actors and the characters, he anticipates Jean Anouilh; and through his conception of the human being as an animal-who-plays-a-part, he anticipates Jean Genet. The very length of this incomplete list proves that Pirandello is the most important playwright of our times...".
Luigi Pirandello was born in 1867 in Girgenti (today, Agrigento), in Sicily, in a rural district called "Chaos" ("Càvusu" in Sicilian). Pirandello would never forget his origins and the symbolic nature of his birthplace, taking pleasure in defining himself as "the son of Chaos". His family was wealthy enough, with his father being part of the brimstone industry.
To his father's displeasure, who hoped his son would walk in his footsteps in the industry, Pirandello had a passion for literature. He studied Philology in Palermo, then at the University of Rome. Later on, he transferred to Bonn, in Germany. It was an important moment, which facilitated his familiarization with the texts of the German writers and philosophers of his time, whom he read in German.
In 1891 he graduated with a dissertation on the dialect from Girgenti.
În 1892 he went back to Italy and moved to Rome, where he met Luigi Capuano, an outstanding representative of verism, the Italian variant of European realism or naturalism. It was an important encounter, which would impact the style of Pirandello's first works, characterized by verism. Capuano introduced him to the literary circles in Rome and encouraged him to write prose. Pirandello wrote short stories, essays, as well as poetry, collaborating with various periodicals. In 1893, he wrote his first novel, L'esclusa [The Excluded Woman], also characterized by verism.
In 1894, his family arranged his marriage to Maria Antonietta Portulano, the daughter of one of his father's business partners. They would have three children together: Stefano, Lietta, and Fausto.
In 1897 he got a job as a professor at Instituto Superiore di Magistero in Rome, to supplement the allowance he received from his father.
The year 1903 was a decisive one in Pirandello's life: the brimstone mine in which the family had invested all of its resources, as well as his wife's dowry, collapsed; the psychological shock suffered by Antonietta triggered the decline of her mental health. His wife's illness, her descent into madness, the alienation, her fits of obsessive jealousy would all impact Pirandello's life and writing, causing the famous "Pirandellian pessimism" and the metaphor of society as a prison/trap.
To ensure his family's survival, Pirandello started writing more. The following year, in 1904, he published what is thought to be his first masterpiece, the novel Il fu Mattia Pascal [The Regretted Mattia Pascal]. He also began collaborating with the cinematographic industry, writing film scripts.
In 1908, based on a collection of critical texts including L'umorismo [Humorism], an essay which was emblematic for his poetics, he got a permanent position at Instituto Superiore di Magistero.
Although his short stories and novels were appreciated in Italy, international success and recognition came later, as a playwright, especially after his play Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) was produced in Europe. Pirandello gave up his position as a professor and devoted himself to the world of theater. In 1925, he became the director of the theater company "Teatro d'Arte" in Rome. The company produced his plays and Pirandello went on tour around the world.
In 1934, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature: "for his bold and ingenious revival of dramatic and scenic art" (the motivation of the Nobel Jury).
He continued writing for the screen, but in 1936, during the filming of Il fu Mattia Pascal, at the famous Cinecittà studios, he got sick and died from pneumonia.
In 1949, his childhood home in Chaos was declared a national monument.
It is a rare and precious moment in literary history when a writer leaves such a strong mark that his name generates a concept, becoming a noun or an adjective - Pirandello is one of those writers. One of the first and most relevant definitions of Pirandellianism was proposed by the Italian critic Adriano Tilgher: "the Dualism of Life and Form or Construction; Life needing to flow into Form and the impossibility of exhausting this Form".
A century later, fostered by a passion for paradoxes, meant to dispel the "veil of illusion" and full of compassion for the human condition marred by contradictions, Pirandellianism remains relevant and impressive, still making us ask the essential questions.
Bibliography
Cengage Learning Gale: A Study Guide to Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, Gale Research, 1998.
Farrell, Joseph: "Commentaries and Notes" in Luigi Pirandello. Six Characters in Search of an Author, Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury, Griswold Detroit, Mi, 2009.
Georgescu, Alice: "Chronology" and "Notes" in Luigi Pirandello: Șase personaje în căutarea unui autor și alte piese, ART, Bucharest, 2012.
Illiano, Antonio: Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author: A Comedy in the Making, in Italica, Vol. 44, No. 1 (March, 1967), pp. 1-12, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/477418. Accessed on May 15th 2021.
Lorch, Jenniffer: "Introduction" in Luigi Pirandello: Six Characters in Search of an Author, Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Potra, Florian: "Introductive Study" in Luigi Pirandello: Teatru, Editura pentru Literatură Universală, Bucharest, 1967.
Whitfield, John Humphreys. "Luigi Pirandello", in Encyclopedia Britannica, December 6th 2020,
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Luigi-Pirandello. Accessed on May 20th 2021.
The photograph is in the public domain. It is no longer protected by copyright. It dates back to 1934 and the author remains unknown.
By Ramona Tripa
The Black Mirror is a dramatization of two of Pirandello's short stories, The Wheelbarrow and The Breath (The Breath of Death), published in the volume Short Stories for a Whole Year (1922). The volume is seen by the critics as a true "human comedy", due to the "significant human typologies drawn by the author (...) to the diverse angles from which the author approaches his subjects" (Mihai Banciu). The title of the book came from the (unfulfilled) ambition to provide a short story for every day of the year.
According to Roberto Bacci, Luigi Pirandello makes us stand in front of a mirror which shows a painful yet necessary picture. But who is really standing in front of the mirror? Could it be our "personality"? The same character who lives with us day after day and in whom we want to recognize ourselves, only so that we could be accepted by the others? Or is it our "essence"? That unique being, the originary white page that everybody has been writing on quite frantically throughout our lives, writing whatever they wanted us to become.
This is the secret drama that we all carry and on which we get to reflect in The Black Mirror. Each of the two stories has good dramatic potential: due to the dynamic and deeply dramatic rhythm of the text; due to the physical space which Pirandello manages to create, from time to time, around his protagonists, while also guiding the spectators and, in our case, the actors; due to the surprising plot twists which enrich the stories, making them truly suspenseful.
The Wheelbarrow
Taking the train home, a successful lawyer goes through an identity crisis, which grows more acute as the journey draws to an end. The crisis reaches its climax when he reads his name on the door: "All of a sudden, standing before this dark, bronze-colored door, bearing the oval brass plaque with my name on it (...) I saw myself, as if from far away; I saw my life, which I didn't recognize as my own". Suddenly, he realizes that society has forced him to become a form without substance, and "any form means death". Few people are aware of this, "most of them fight, struggle to obtain a certain status, to reach a certain form; when they get there, they think they have won their lives, but instead they start dying. Because they can no longer break free from that morbid form which they embody; they don't realize they are dead and believe they are alive". However, in that moment of lucidity, the protagonist doesn't see "what is dead within me" but the fact that "I have never been alive, I see the form that the others - not me - have given me, and I feel that, because of this form, my life, my real life, has never actually existed". And then comes the rebellion, which manifests itself in an unexpected way. "I have had at home - he says - for the last 11 years an old dog, white and black, fat, short and hairy, her eyes clouded by old age". This dog will become the object of the protagonist's revenge against his situation: "slowly, carefully, I grab her hindlegs and make her do the wheelbarrow". "The pleasure of doing this" frees the "formidable law professor" - "for just one moment" - from "the prison of the dead form". And the dog, who knows that he is unable to make a joke - "she cannot accept that I'm joking" - looks at him in amazement and horror. For a second, the mask was no more, and the "formidable professor" allowed himself a moment of madness. He managed to unleash something else in himself, in order to bear (and to perpetuate) his reification.
The Breath of Death
The story begins with a conversation about a sudden death, accepted with great difficulty by the person who receives the news. His amazement is expressed as a banal line: "Alas, but what is life? One breath can take it away!" accompanied by an even more banal gesture: bringing together his thumb and index finger and "blowing over them as if I wanted to blow away an imaginary snowflake caught between the two fingers". Meanwhile, he is breathing in the face of his interlocutor, who becomes pale all of a sudden, feels sick and dies half an hour later. This is how he discovers that his common, insignificant gesture is deadly. Unintentionally, he kills his own friend. The young doctor who confirms Bernabò's death speaks about death quite casually and arrogantly, "perhaps because he was always dealing with it"; "no case could make him doubt himself, so that I grinned disgustedly before I could stop myself". The doctor's emphatic speech attracts the death-bearer's "twisted and cold gaze", which "crawls like a snake" and which the protagonist notices while looking in the wardrobe mirror. On the street, in the crowd surrounding him, he blows through his thumb and index, on all the faces he comes across. And sudden death occurs every time. The next day, all the newspapers write about "those unexpected and mysterious deaths". The protagonist, the cause of this "epidemic", wants to convince himself that death doesn't actually depend on him, and, at the same time, to escape the "diabolic temptation" to use his power, so he stays indoors for a few days. The deaths also stop: "I waited for three days, five days, a week, two weeks, the newspapers mentioned no more deaths". To prove to himself that his gesture is an "innocent, childish" one, he tries it one more time, blowing over a sick child, whom he "frees" from his suffering. This is when he realizes that "I was death!". The great and troubling question "Could I destroy humanity in its entirety?" makes him subject himself to the breath. The result? "As if I were swallowed by emptiness, as if a tornado engulfed me, I was no longer visible (...) I could feel my body when I touched it but I could no longer see it..." He comes to understand that he is the "epidemic", while the others are "mere maggots (...) all these lives that could be destroyed by one breath". The image of a young woman sitting on a bench, "an image which had been there for a lifetime, perhaps the last of its kind on earth" stirs his heart, making him stay invisible, "with his hands tied and holding his breath". The mask is gone and purity is possible again. The chain of death has been broken.
In her study Let us (re)discover Luigi Pirandello's short stories, 150 years after his birth, published in Italo-Romanian Cultural Perspectives, Miruna Bulumete writes that:
"Pirandello has an extraordinary propensity for death and everything related to it, experimenting with it in as many registers as possible, in as many configurations as possible and shedding light on its many consequences for the living. Without hesitation and quite bluntly, the writer exposes the numerous vulnerabilities of the human being, who is always subject to all sorts of dangers and the threat of death, regardless of its possible causes: from insects and natural disasters to murder and illness. One's physical frailty is also doubled by psychological frailty: in a hostile universe, being subject to life's constant blows, the protagonists sometimes experience the darkest feeling of unfamiliarity with everything around them (...)".
Bibliography
Banciu, Mihai, "Foreword" in Luigi Pirandello, Nuvele pentru un an [Short Stories for a Whole Year], Bucharest, Univers, 1989;
Pirandello's technique for the construction of his short stories is fundamentally theatrical in nature and relies on surprising elements - such as the protagonist from The Wheelbarrow abandoning his role as a law professor and successful lawyer - or the use of dialogue - like in The Breath, where there is a clear surrealist influence. The dramatic quality of his texts is facilitated by the acute tension.
In the short stories he wrote once he was a fully-formed author, Pirandello is characterized "by a remarkable artistic substance, where the dominant elements are the chiaroscuro, the interference of the narrative planes, indeterminacy bordering on ambiguity" (Mihai Banciu). Here, "the ambiguous breath of poetry" survives "the dismemberment of the real, the disintegration of the character, of polemics and logical reasoning" (Ferdinando Vidia, Invito alla lettura di Luigi Pirandello, quoted by Mihai Banciu).
"The exterior spectacle" is almost absent from Pirandello's work; instead, he highlights "the interior spectacle, the intimate mechanism which produces sensations and reactions to the external stimuli or the impulses in one's consciousness (...) Everything is drowned in Pirandello's humor and irony - either subtle, taking part in the characters' lives, or acid, almost caricatural" (Mihai Banciu). "Pirandello's humor (...) always borders on the tragic, even when the comic nature of the situations points to a paradox or distorts reality through a grotesque lens. It is a game of distortive mirrors which disintegrate the very physiognomy of the characters" (Ferdinando Vidia, Invito alla lettura di Luigi Pirandello, quoted by Mihai Banciu).
To find out more about the choice to dramatize these two short stories by Pirandello, I asked the direct Roberto Bacci a few questions. Bacci is on his fifth production at the National Theater of Cluj, after Hamlet by W. Shakespeare (2012), The Cherry Orchard by A.P. Chekhov (2014), Don Juan by Molière (2016), and Il Nullafacente. I Choose to Do Nothing by Michele Santeramo (2019).
Eugenia Sarvari: Mister Roberto Bacci, can you tell us if you've ever seen yourself "from afar", like the lawyer in The Wheelbarrow?
Roberto Bacci: Self-observation is a primary technique for obtaining awareness regarding one's own existence. For many years, I have been part of Gurdjieff's school, where various observation and reflection techniques constituted the foundation of the entire praxis. Therefore, I hope I learned some things there.
E.S.: Have you ever experienced the feeling of being absent from your own life?
R.B.: Being absent from our own lives is a given, seeing as we can't really know what it means to be present, besides the mere identification with the manifestations of reality.
E.S.: What about the questions asked by the protagonist from The Wheelbarrow: "Who created the man embodying me?", "Who wanted him that way?", "Who imposed on him all those obligations?" etc. Have they ever haunted you? What answers have you come up with (at least to a part of them)?
R.B.: I think these questions have the same answer for all of us. It is enough to think of the names we received, of our parents' work to "educate us", of the way in which information is passed on in schools, standardizing our behavior, of the information which educates us to know only those things which are useful to the information itself, of the world of politics, which asks us to choose a model to identify with and so on. What is left for us? Being a kind of mannequin, bearing a name in life's showcase and always being for sale.
E.S.: Going back to Pirandello's theory, which role is the most comfortable for you?
R.B.: The role of the man doubting everything and always asking questions. Preferably, true questions.
E.S.: What made you choose the second short story, The Breath?
R.B.: The way in which having power over other people leads to cruelty. If you could kill somebody without being prosecuted and punished accordingly, that would be a good place to observe yourself. Although we already do this in real life, without having to blow through our fingers to take someone's life. After all, the value we assign to other lives is almost zero. But what about the value we assign to our own lives?
E.S.: Could it be the desire to highlight human vulnerability and frailty?
R.B.: Human vulnerability is extremely well protected by our little "ego", who always wastes our time by deflecting any questions about its real nature.
E.S.: Is there a connection between the two short stories?
R.B.: Pirandello. I picture him standing in front of a window, watching the lives of other people, just passing by. All of the characters whom he described and who helped him ask questions about human nature. The Wheelbarrow and The Breath are just two examples in this sense. A black mirror in which we keep trying to see ourselves but which should be well-polished first of all.
