On Stage
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE By Joseph T. Shipley Fertile Fusion Of Art and Life Tonight We Improvise. By Luigi Pirandello. Translated by Claude Fredericks. Directed and designed by Julian Beck. Presented in...
...There may seem a measure of presumption in one company’s pre-empting “The Living Theater” as its name, but there is no doubt that in this production art and life have made a fertile fusion...
...pops in again and tells them they’ve done a good job...
...The evening begins with the director explaining to the audience that today the author is negligible...
...Life, say fewer but no less astute observers, strives to imitate art...
...At the end of this story the director, whom the actors have thrown out...
...The boys take the La Croce girls to a show...
...Presented in repertoire by and at The Living Theater...
...But the first actor he calls, Alan Ansara, objects...
...Pirandello will not tip the scales...
...And as the wrangling begins again, the final curtain falls...
...During intermission, the characters of the play are in the lobby with the rest of us...
...Somehow the players get started with the story of the La Croce family...
...Papa La Croce, his shirt dyed deep with blood, interrupts his death scene to complain that those onstage ignore his dying entrance...
...IN THE THEATER, Nobel Prize-winner Luigi Pirandello has been the prime explorer of the tenuous border line between life and art...
...The fresh translation, the understanding direction and the concordant company, make this the best Pirandello production New York has seen in a score of years...
...Other problems of art break into the story...
...He has already begun to put himself into the part, he protests...
...they go off—and come to our theater...
...Art, say many critics, imitates nature...
...He shows you events and situations: you may—if you are sufficiently presumptuous—judge them...
...What you see in them depends upon what you may be...
...He does not seek to make up your mind...
...Julian Beck seems a man of unstrained good will and patience...
...He marries her, then sets her in the prison of his jealousy, shrouding her in reproaches of her past...
...Rico’s fancies of the things she used to do with other men crush Mommina...
...Rico is coming to life, and must neither be interrupted nor ordered about...
...The director should dismiss the writer, set the actors rolling, and—actors planted in the audience start to heckle...
...Near a drinking-fountain, Rico continues his jealous quarrel with Mommina...
...why bother with him, dying?—and several versions are proposed before the story moves on...
...The engineer father is cuckolded by his bossy wife, and dismayed by his four wanton daughters, who are giving the young men of their Sicilian town untold pleasure, except for jealous Rico, who wants Mommina all for himself...
...In the latter, a company of players, told by the director to forget the script and to improvise, begin to live their parts, throw out the director, and complete their story...
...In a sparking translation by Claude Fredericks, deftly directed by Julian Beck, the harum-scarum incidents spin across footlights into the audience, and out into the lobby at intermission, until with theatrical assurance the author goes onstage again for a deeply moving scene—then in a sudden finale swoops back to the entanglement of life in art...
...Down the aisle they flaunt their noisy way, looking for their seats, variously tangling themselves with our lives in front of the travesty of Pagliacci that has somehow gotten onto the stage...
...But before it ends, the playwright pulls 15 full minutes of sincere and poignant emotion, as the imprisoned Mommina sets her child on the floor and before the silent infant tries to recreate her joyous past...
...he will have the actors out, to introduce them...
...he is not Alan, he is Rico...
...Actress Judith Malina rises in this scene to deeply moving art...
...In the former, six characters, tossed aside by their author, break in upon a director and insist that their story be completed...
...Pirandello’s most complete explorations of the range where art and life commingle are the well-known Six Characters in Search of an Author and the even more entertaining Tonight We Improvise...
...Pirandello suggests that there is a haunting region where you cannot tell the two apart...
...At once they protest...
...Note that he is in no way dogmatic...
...They protest that they must act as they feel—no one paid any attention to him while he was alive...
...Some demand set speeches, precise lines to memorize: What’s an actor for...
...as one of his titles puts it: “Right you are—if you think you are...
...despite the drab fidelity of her wedded years...
...Tonight We Improvise is the latest production of The Living Theater, whose repertoire has been making off-Broadway history...
...To make clear the play’s Sicilian setting, we are shown a motion picture that is a whirr of meaningless colors and lines that would curdle the abstract blood in Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet...
...Imagination is more powerful than reality...
Vol. 42 • November 1959 • No. 44
