New Play Workshop
Masquerade
playwright/ director Douglas Beattie
adapted from plays by Luigi Pirandello
featuring Wayne Best, Melissa Good & Geordie Johnson
dramaturge: Rod Beattie
Reading Presentations:
Fri Jan 7, 2011, 7.30 PM, Registry Theatre, Kitchener
Sat Jan 8, 2011, 7.30 PM, The Arts Project, London
Sun Jan 9, 3.30 PM, Temple Studios, Guelph
Admission is free. Reservations required. If you would like
to attend please email: dbeattie@execulink.com
My intention with Masquerade is to adapt and breathe new life into two one-act plays
which I came across a number of years ago in an English translation.
They were written early in Pirandello's career and in conventional theatrical styles popular in
Italy at the time. The Vise, written in 1892, first published in 1910, is a domestic
drama in the realistic or verismo style which we know in North America
through its operatic exponents like Cavalleria rusticana and I pagliacci.
Ci-ci, written in 1913, first performed in 1920, is a satirical farce.
Pirandello did not become famous until he broke with conventional forms and wrote
his highly original Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) and Henry IV
(1922) which anticipated and influenced existentialist thinking and what we now call Theatre
of the Absurd. After these plays appeared, his singular approach to
theatre, his obsessive concern with identity and the masks we all wear or are
compelled to wear, depending on the circumstances of our lives, combined with his keen sense
of what makes for effective dramatic action, led to his being widely celebrated as a dramatist
and novelist of stature and an eventual Nobel prize winner in 1934.
His early one-act plays may be conventional in form, but Pirandello's radical
thinking, his stagecraft and sense of drama can be found in them nonetheless,
not to mention the compassion with which he treats his characters, caught up in
their tragic or absurd dilemmas. I thought it would be a wonderful project to take
these plays out of the library, so to speak, dust them off, bring them up to date
so they could resonate with a twenty-first century sensibility and show today's
theatre-lovers on this side of the Atlantic another side of this extraordinary
playwright. Douglas Beattie, Producing Artistic Director
Photo: Luigi Pirandello