The Pirandello Society of America BOARD OF DIRECTORS Jana O’Keefe Bazzoni Stefano Boselli Janice Capuana Samantha Costanzo Burrier Mimi Gisolfi D’Aponte John Louis DiGaetani Mario Fratti Jane House Michael Subialka Kurt Taroff (Europe) Susan Tenneriello HONORARY BOARD Stefano Albertini Eric Bentley Robert Brustein Marvin Carlson Enzo Lauretta Maristella Lorch John Martello PSA The Journal of the Pirandello Society of America Susan Tenneriello, Senior Editor Michael Subialka, Editor Samantha Costanzo Burrier and Lisa Sarti, Assistant Editors Lisa Tagliaferri, Managing Editor EDITORIAL BOARD Angela Belli Daniela Bini John DiGaetani Antonio Illiano Umberto Mariani Olga Ragusa John Welle Stefano Boselli, Webmaster PSA The official publication of the Pirandello Society of America Subscriptions: Annual calendar year subscriptions/dues: $35 individual; $50 libraries; $15 students with copy of current ID. International memberships, add $10. Please see Membership form in this issue, or online: www.pirandellosocietyofamerica.org Make all checks payable to: The Pirandello Society of America/PSA c/o Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò 24 West 12th Street New York, NY 10011 All correspondence may be sent to the above address. Submissions: All manuscripts will be screened in a peer-review process by at least two readers. Submit with a separate cover sheet giving the author’s name and contact information. Omit self-identifying information in the body of the text and all headers and footers. Guidelines: Please use the current MLA Style Manual; use in-text references, minimal endnotes, works cited. Articles should generally be 10-20 pages in length; reviews, 2-3 pages. Please do not use automatic formatting. Send MSWord doc. to Editor, PSA: [email protected] Contents, PSA Volume XXVII Editor’s Note 7-11 “Continental Air”: Performing Identity in “Leonora, addio!,” 13-43 L’aria del continente, and Questa sera si recita a soggetto Elisa Segnini La canzone dell’amore: Adapting Pirandello to Fascist 45-61 Propaganda Paolo Campolonghi Scripting “il cielo di carta”: The Men behind the Curtain in 63-81 Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Cesare deve morire Alessia Palanti Pirandello’s Humor and the Intersections of Translation and 83-99 Dramaturgy Laura A. Lucci Pirandello’s Unrealized Film, Treatment for Six Characters: 101-115 An Interview with Film Director and Artist Anne-Marie Creamer Anne-Marie Creamer with Lesley G. Sullivan PERFORMANCE REVIEWS Tonight We Improvise in Providence, Translated and 117-122 Directed by Rebecca Maxfield Anna Santucci Reality Theater: Staging Film in the University of Notre 125-128 Dame’s Six Characters in Search of an Author Thomas Graff Six Characters in Brooklyn 131-133 Suzanne Epstein Mattia Pascal: The Man Who Lived-A Multi-vocal Exploration 135-139 of Pirandello’s Anti-novel Krysta Dennis BOOK REVIEWS Alessandra Sorrentino. Luigi Pirandello e l’altro. Una 141-145 lettura critica postcoloniale[ Luigi Pirandello and the Other. A Postcolonial Reading]. Rome: Carocci Editore, 2013. Lisa Sarti Michael Rössner and Alessandra Sorrentino, eds. 147-150 Pirandello e la traduzione culturale [Pirandello and Cultural Translation]. Rome: Carocci Editore, 2012. Michael Subialka Pirandello Society Membership Form Pirandello Society History Inside Back Cover Call for papers MLA 2016: For topics, deadlines, and updates please visit our website: pirandellosocietyofamerica.org Submit 250 word abstracts via email to: [email protected] Call for Articles PSA Vol. XXVIII (2015): 10-20 page articles in current MLA format by 5 June 2014 on the topic (but not limited to): 1. Modern Consciousness: Pirandellian Obsessions 2. Global Pirandello Submit articles (MSword.doc) in MLA format via email to: [email protected] Call for original, unpublished one-act plays and short stories reflecting a Pirandellian influence. New translations of non- English language works also welcome. In an effort to further extend our examination of Pirandello’s legacy into the 21st century, we plan to include one-act plays, short stories and translations of plays and stories in future issues of the journal. Our project aims both for publication and whenever possible, a staged reading of the work. If you have a play or story you’d like to submit, or know a promising writer you can encourage, please send two hard copies of manuscripts to: Editor, PSA The Pirandello Society of America c/o Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò 24 West 12th Street New York, NY 10011 Editor’s Note What it means to think of Pirandello as a “Sicilian” writer in an Italian context has long been a question of interest to his readers—it is a question that raises pertinent problems about how we conceive of cultural identity as well as the ways in which works are translated and transformed across cultures. In our new issue of PSA (Volume XXVII, 2014), a series of interventions reflect on similar problems and expand the scope of the question. Our authors consider Pirandello’s work in light of how it is translated and adapted, not only across cultural contexts (from Sicily to Italy to Europe and beyond) but also across time periods and media. The volume opens with Elisa Segnini’s essay, “’Continental Air’: Performing Identity in “Leonora, addio!,” L’aria del continente, and Questa sera si recita a soggetto,” a study of how notions of cultural identity are translated and adapted to fit different contexts in Pirandello’s own re-working of his short story from 1910, “Leonora, addio!” [“Goodbye, Leonora!”]. This story became the Sicilian blueprint for his famous play, Questa sera si recita a soggetto [Tonight We Improvise] (1930). As Segnini argues, by applying a postcolonial theoretical lens to these works, and considering them together with another adaptation of the same story, Nino Martoglio’s play, L’aria del continente [Continental Air] (1915), it becomes possible to see a complex notion of the Sicilian character that Pirandello engages and transforms, responding to the traditional stereotypes of the island and complicating them. This game of elaborating on stereotypes in order to put them to new use involves not only an Italian adaptation of the “Sicilian” narrative, but also a further adaptation for a German audience with different cultural expectations. Segnini offers insight into how Pirandello’s texts, and Martoglio’s rendition, operate with a complicated cultural understanding on these multiple levels. From this focus on Pirandello’s self-adaptation across cultural contexts, the volume then moves to a consideration of how Fascist film appropriated and made use of his work, the topic of Paolo Campolonghi’s essay on “La canzone dell’amore: Adapting Pirandello to Fascist Propaganda.” Like Segnini, Campolonghi examines the adaptation of a short story, Pirandello’s “In silenzio” [“In Silence”] (1905), the source of Gennaro Ringhelli’s La canzone dell’amore [The Song of Love] (1930), which had the distinction of PSA, Vol. XXVII, pp. 7-11 7 being the first sound film produced in the Italian film market. Because of this distinction, readings of the film have often focused on its use of the medium, and specifically of its experiments with sound; but as Campolonghi shows, there are also important questions to be raised about its content, and specifically the way in which it transposes Pirandello’s story into the colonial and racial discourse of Fascist propaganda. Thus both Campolonghi and Segnini offer readings of adaptations that expand on the increasing consideration of colonial and postcolonial discourse in Pirandello’s work. Alessia Palanti’s intervention also focuses on the move from Pirandello’s written work to the medium of film. However, in her essay, “Scripting ‘il cielo di carta’: The Men behind the Curtain in Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Cesare deve morire,” Palanti draws our attention not to a direct adaptation but rather to one in which the deep influence of Pirandello’s ideas is manifest in a new story that is contemporary to our present moment. The Tavianis are known for their adaptations of Pirandello’s short stories in their earlier films, Kaos (1984) and Tu ridi [You Laugh] (1998); in Cesare deve morire [Caesar Must Die] (2012) they film the inmates of Rome’s maximum security prison in Rebibbia. These inmates become the actors performing Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caeser, in a Pirandellian film that blurs the lines between reality and fiction. As Palanti argues, these blurred distinctions point to the central role that aporia plays in Pirandello’s works, and she thus compares their film to his early, modernist novel, Il fu Mattia Pascal [The Late Mattia Pascal] (1904), as well as his famous plays, Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore [Six Characters in Search of an Author] (1921/5) and Enrico IV [Henry IV] (1922). This central role of apoira is likewise replicated in the Tavianis’ film about staging Shakespeare’s play, which problematizes the audience’s desire for authenticity in a Pirandellian fashion. Laura Lucci’s essay, “Pirandello’s Humor and the Intersections of Translation and Dramaturgy,” moves in a more theoretical direction, considering translation and adaptation in relation to Pirandello’s own theories of the difference between the translated text and the original, as well as through the lens of his multifaceted concept of humor. With this conjunction in mind, Lucci argues that dramaturgy is itself an act of translation in important respects, and that this process of translation is actually 8 central to the potential meaning of the work, rather than being an obstacle