Guernica Editions

Naked brilliantly illustrates the theatricalist mode Pirandello invented for dramatizing multiple points of view simultaneously. As characters unwittingly echo each other, we come to see them as aspects of one controlling consciousness, the playwright's. For ultimately, metaphysically, Pirandello's deep subject is the creative process, his characters' as well as his own. An outer, physical world of objective events thus surrounds an inner, subjective one of feelings and perceptions to form an incipient play-within-play - another of Pirandello's legacies to twentieth century theatre. Typically provocative, at once comic and tragic, Pirandello's Naked (Vestire gli ignudi) uncovers the machinery of guilt, deceit,...