Pirandello: Plays

Luigi Pirandello is best known for his ability to create farcical tragedies that pit reality against appearance in such a way that objective truth is never revealed. Time magazine called Pirandello's work a fascinating precursor of the entire theater of the absurd -- the anguish over existence in Sartre and Camus, the guerilla warfare against ossified language and the mass mind in Ionesco, the bleak, alienated vision of Beckett, the sense of man eternally acting a role in Genet, and the use of the stage as a self-contained universe in Pinter. In new translations by acclaimed playwright and translator Eric Bentley, these versions of four of Pirandello's most celebrated plays -- Six Characters in Search of an Author, Emperor Henry, The Man with the Flower in His Mouth, and Right You Are -- are considered to be the standards for American productions. They capture the playwright's unique voice with remarkable precision, while at the same time attending to the rigors of the American stage.