Right You Are concerns a family whose arrival in a small town causes much gossip and speculation. Florencia portrays 'Signora Ponza,' the mystery wife who comes onto the scene at the last moments of the play to reveal "the truth."
Preview: Tuesday, November 25
Opening: Sunday, December 7
Closing: Sunday, December 21
The Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University, NYC
Spruce Street between Park Row and Gold Street
Right You Are will play Tuesday-Saturday evenings at 8 PM with matinees on Saturdays and Sundays at 3 PM.
Tickets, priced at $60, are available by calling (212) 239-6200. Student seats are priced at $15 and are available only at the theatre's box office in cash with a valid I.D. Tickets also available on www.telecharge.com.
The cast of Right You are includes company founder Tony Randall as well as Yolande Bavan, Brennan Brown, Fred Burrell, Edmund C. Davys, Mireille Enos, Herb Foster, Penny Fuller, Peter Ganim, Tom Gualitieri, Jurian Hughes, Addie Johnson, Florencia Lozano, Peter Maloney, Natalie Norwick, Henry Strozier and Maria Tucci.
Tony Randall’s National Actors Theatre’s current presentation of Pirandello’s masterwork Right You Are is - despite the hapless efforts of the director and much of the cast - actually rather engaging. The NAT, which now operates out of Pace University’s downtown campus, has always been a mixed blessing for the classical cannon. While the company nobly takes on rarely seen works by the likes of Ibsen, Brecht and Aeschylus, the resulting productions are seldom worthy of the material.
To stage Pirandello’s intriguing and nimble farce - in which a village of busybodies is eaten up with curiosity about the mysterious behavior of a newly arrived family - Randall has enlisted Fabrizio Melano. Melano is primarily a director of operas, and it shows. He positions the cast about James Noone’s coldly quasiclassical set in a series of static groupings. The stiff blocking, in which actors mostly face front, is what one associates with opera singers, whose main concern is not character creation and organic movement, but the projection of arias.
The unexpected reward of this numbing mishandling of the drama is that, with nothing particular to delight our eyes, we have no choice but to focus on the words. And what words! Pirandello’s three-act lesson about the unknowability of any soul - even one’s own - is fascinating, hilarious and disturbing theater, even when unintentionally distilled into what is essentially a deluxe staged reading.
A man moves to a small Italian town with his wife and mother-in-law, keeping the former woman hidden under lock and key in a squalid walk-up flat while the latter woman lives in one of the best sections of town, seemingly at liberty. The man’s actions scandalize the community and they work tirelessly to get to the bottom of the "mystery" behind the man’s actions.
In the hands of most playwrights, such a scenario would be fodder for light farce or perhaps social criticism, but this is the story for Luigi Pirandello’s Right You Are, which opened last night in a National Actors Theatre production. There are farcical aspects to the piece, and the writer does make certain that his disdain for bourgeois niceties and nosiness is apparent. Right You Are, though, has a more weighty question at its core: Who are we and how can anyone really know who another person is?
These questions begin to arise when Amalia and Dina, the wife and daughter of Councillor Agazzi, a government official and the newcomer’s superior, attempt to pay a visit to the more available mother-in-law. They are denied access, and thus, Councillor Agazzi must demand that Ponza, his colleague produce the old woman.
She arrives and tells the Agazzi family as well as other nosy friend of the family that the reason for the unusual living situation for her daughter and herself is that her son-in-law’s love for his wife is so great that he can’t bear sharing her with anyone, including her mother. The mother-in-law, Signora Frola, is content with seeing her daughter from afar and communicating through simple notes.
After the Signora has departed, Ponza himself arrives and announces that what the old woman has just told the group is a lie and that the woman to whom he is married is his second wife. Signora Frola’s daughter has died and the old woman lives in a delusion that this second wife is indeed her daughter. Ponza’s departure is followed by another visit from the mother-in-law, who amends her story, saying that it is Ponza who is living under a delusion.
Pirandello uses this hall of mirrors to examine how we each inhabit our own reality as well as the realities that are created by those who see our actions. As the Agazzi family and their friends become increasingly frantic to uncover the truth about Signor Ponza and Signora Frola’s stories, bringing in the town’s police commissioner and even the local governor, the audience comes to stand that, here, "truth" doesn’t really matter thanks to the running jaded view taken by Amalia Agazzi’s brother-in-law, Lamberto.
He laughs at the family and friends’ vain attempts to untangle the two stories. He understands that both Ponza and Frola’s worlds rely entirely on the other believing that he or she is mad. Lamberto, played dryly and sardonically by NAT’s founder Tony Randall, can’t understand why such a fuss is being made and takes great glee in tormenting them all with their pettiness.
Using a somewhat stilted translation (at least for ears in the year 2003) by Eric Bentley ("hot off the griddle" is an idiom that jars, Fabrizio Melano, a director primarily in the world of opera, has staged Right You Are elegantly on James Noone’s 1930s black and white marbled set backed by black glass and flanked by two enormous Roman statues. The staging is not so much naturalistic as stylized - with the performers sitting in an arc as Frola and Ponza are interrogated by their "hosts". Given the nearly 50 feet that separates the first row of the audience from the lip of the stage, it gives one a sense of watching the world of Right You Are almost as if in a diorama. It distances, and yet, somehow simultaneously, draws one into the world and, more importantly, the emotional core of the Frola/Ponza story.
Helping in no small measure here is the heart-wrenching performance by Maria Tucci as Signora Frola. Dressed in a simple gray suit (Noel Taylor’s period costumes are both handsome and witty), topped by tightly and elegantly coiffed white hair, Tucci resembles a kindly grandmother. One empathizes with her instantly, and is willing to believe her implicitly. The questioning Frola undergoes feel not only unmannerly, but vaguely cruel.
Equally impressive is Brennan Brown’s volcanic and mercurial performance as Ponza. Brown is a handsome and somewhat imposing presence onstage, but there are moments in which the actor seems to actually shrink as he interacts with Agazzi and family, making him seem dangerous and yet also strangely vulnerable. When it comes time for Ponza to berate his mother-in-law, Brown does not hold back, but unleashes a torrent of venom upon the older woman that is shocking and heartbreaking.
Surrounding these performances are a number of highly enjoyable turns. Penny Fuller delights with the seriousness and earnest weight she brings to the flightiness of Signora Agazzi; and Jurian Hughes, who, as one of the prying neighbors, continually amuses, somehow managing to turn her body into a human question mark. Peter Maloney plays this character’s husband to great effect, making him a kind of dimwitted lapdog; and Henry Strother brings a pomposity and arrogance that both amuses and grates, as he plays Councillor Agazzi.
There are two or three performances in Right You Are that go over-the-top, but they do not diminish the power of Pirandello’s serio-comical questioning of reality. Nor do they weaken the final moments of the play, staged with grace by Melano, which leave the characters assembled onstage, as well as the audience, concurrently satisfied and shaken.
"Pirandello's plays, are grenades that explode in the mind of the spectator," a contemporary once wrote, "causing all preconceived ideas of reality to collapse." Precious little of that volcanic energy, alas, survives the bizarrely inert staging that the National Actors Theatre has given to the Nobel Prize-winning author's 1917 drama Right You Are (If You Think You Are). Although it musters up a few mildly animated sequences in act III, the production--badly directed by Fabrizio Melano--meanders dispiritedly through Pirandello's metaphysical hall of mirrors. What is truth? Is seeing believing? Is there one reality--or are there several? This Right You Are poses these quintessential Pirandellian questions, but it doesn't give them much urgency. If this is a grenade, it's been substantially defused.
"Set in provincial Italy, Right You Are revolves around the curious domestic life of Signor Ponza, a man who has newly moved to town with his mother-in-law, Signora Frola, and with his wife, whom he has mysteriously shut up on the top floor of a tenement. This bizarre set-up unleashes a flood of gossip in the neighboring household of Councillor Agazzi, especially once it's revealed that Ponza's wife may not be Signora Frola's daughter, and that Frola may be crazy. As Agazzi's nosy relatives and friends work themselves into a lather of agitation over the matter, it becomes clear that humankind can never know anything for certain.
Although it's packed with reputable actors, the NAT production manages to misplace most of the suspense inherent to this scenario. The fault lies chiefly with director Melano, a veteran of the international opera scene who, it seems, has not yet made a successful transition into theater. The cast of Right You Are spends much of its time sitting or standing around like blocks of wood--maybe a viable option if you're rendering an aria by Verdi, with a swelling orchestra in the background, but not optimal for actors interpreting a play. Stage business that might have fleshed out some of the characterizations; blocking that might have invigorated the swaths of talkiness--Melano's Right You Are boasts none of this, and its absence particularly mars the play's earliest scenes, in which the actors sit nearly motionless in an arc of chairs, their hands in their laps, like some particularly sluggish version of Meet the Press. The performers do their best to surmount these considerable impediments. Admittedly, NAT artistic director Tony Randall doesn't do the low-wattage production any favors by emphasizing the listlessness of Lamberto Laudisi, Agazzi's insightful brother-in-law. But Maria Tucci conjures up a shy Signora Frola, amiable enough to urge her version of truth as long as she's on stage, but reserved enough to remain an enigma. Henry Strozier pulls off a jovially impatient Councillor Agazzi, his pompous squint giving him an amusing air of Mr. Magoo. Brennan Brown marshals the most charisma as Ponza, and his dramatic outbursts--"What do you all want of me, in God's name?"--do galvanize a few moments of the show. But, the performances being largely stymied by the direction, it's James Noone's set that winds up being the most successful element of Right You Are. Director Melano has opted to set the play in the early 1930s, and Noone's imposing fascist chamber--a black-and-white flagstone floor; shiny black walls; and two hideous, vaguely allegorical statues--fairly reeks of Mussolini. The political allusion implied by the set, and by Noel Taylor's period costumes, lends a certain timeliness to Pirandello's story: in a world of cataclysmic ideological conflict, this vision of incompatible realities feels depressingly familiar. "You are faced with two things--fantasy and reality," Laudisi says at one point, "and you can't tell one from the other. That is your punishment." Hearing lines like this, one can only wish that Pirandello's grenade had been given full leeway to explode.
Right You Are By Luigi Pirandello Directed by Fabrizio Melano The Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University
National Actors Theatre (Tony Randall, artistic director) presents a revival of Pirandello's Right You Are. The play is about a group of gossipy neighbors who are fascinated by the puzzling nature of the relationships of a newly arrived family. Randall co-stars, along with Maria Tucci, Penny Fuller, Herb Foster, Peter Maloney, and others.
It’s impossible to discover the truth. That seems to be one of the main messages in Luigi Pirandello’s brilliant play Right You Are, which is now playing at Tony Randall’s National Actors Theatre. Pirandello was like a literary scientist, experimenting with perception, illusion, and reality; using the theater as his laboratory. Although he wrote almost a hundred years ago, his plays fit perfectly in today’s world.At the top of the show, Amalia Agazzi and her daughter Dina are arguing with Lamberto, Amalia’s brother, about their strange new neighbors, a newly-wed couple and one mother-in-law. It seems that the mother of the bride lives in her own apartment, and is never allowed into the new couple's home—which both infuriates and mystifies the locals. Lamberto, played with droll panache by Tony Randall, tries to reason with his sister and niece, but to no avail. Soon, more of the locals come in, along with Mr. Agazzi, and everybody proceeds to gossip incessantly about the strangers. The mother-in-law in question, Signora Frola, is brought before the curious townsfolk on the pretense of a social call, but it quickly turns into an interrogation by the locals about her living arrangements, carried out with the same amount of indignation that most people these days save for discussing Michael Jackson.According to Signora Frola, the reason that she is not allowed into her own daughter's home is that her husband is insanely jealous, and won’t let anyone see his wife, not even her mother. While this strikes the locals as an odd arrangement, they are satisfied with the answer, and Signora Frola leaves. Almost immediately afterward, Signor Ponza, the son-in-law of Signora Frola, shows up, with a very different version of the facts. According to Ponza, Signora is mad with grief over the death of her daughter, who died two years previous. Ponza explains that he has since remarried, and is pretending that his new wife is the deceased daughter of Signora Frola to keep her from completely losing it.What follows is an often hilarious, and thought-provoking, absurd comedy that examines truth, illusion, and the instability of the human personality. What drives the show is the almost insane need of the locals to know exactly what is going on in their new neighbors' homes. The problem is, there is no way to ever arrive at a solid truth when it comes to human beings and their perceptions. We all have our own specific truths, and it is this relativity of human existence that Pirandello explores. I won't say what happens in the rest of the play, except that everyone’s idea of the truth gets turned on its head by the end of the piece.The direction by Fabrizio Melano moves at a brisk pace, but still lets the audience follow the complicated plot. Maria Tucci, as Signora Frola, is excellent. Brennan Brown as the passionate, deeply troubled Signor Ponza, is wonderful. Brown electrifies the stage every moment he is on it. And as Councilor Agazzi, Henry Strozier is fantastic—absurdly funny but entirely believable. The set, by James Noone, is gorgeous, as are the costumes by Noel Taylor. But the true standout of the show is the script itself. Right You Are is a wonder—it made me want to go out and read all of Pirandello’s plays, or better yet, see them performed. Last update: 12/8/03
Tony Randall's National Actors Theater moves one step closer to oblivion with this amateurish staging of Pirandello's philosophical comedy about the elusive nature of truth. All but undirected and clearly underrehearsed, the production was playing to maybe 100 patrons at the reviewed performance, not counting a very glum-looking cadre of critics.
The director of record is Fabrizio Melano. Who he? "An established figure of the international opera scene for more than 30 years," notes his bio, protesting a bit much. No doubt he is, but one is tempted to surmise that none of the city's established theater directors would countenance Randall taking the central role of Lamberto Laudisi, as he does here, with painful results.
Laudisi plays the devil's advocate and the voice of reason in Pirandello's 1917 play about an Italian town whipped into a frenzy of curiosity by some mysterious new arrivals. A firestorm of gossip is ignited when it's discovered that young Signor Ponza (Brennan Brown) will not allow his mother-in-law, Signora Frola (Maria Tucci), to visit her daughter.
The townsfolk, who gather in the parlor of a leading citizen, demand an explanation. They get several, all contradictory. The mother-in-law says Ponza is so besotted with his wife he can't bear to share her -- and she insists she's happy to oblige. But Ponza, arriving soon after she's left, explains that the poor dear is mad; her daughter died in an earthquake, and after he remarried, Signora Frola conceived the idea that his second wife was his first. To accommodate her belief without upsetting his wife, he keeps them apart.
Who is telling the truth? Or is the truth, as Laudisi insists, merely a matter of subjective perception -- to each his own truth? Unfortunately, neither the escalating comic confusion nor the potentially touching human drama that follow upon these events is competently rendered here. A more persuasive recent London production, starring Joan Plowright and directed by (oddly enough) a better-known Italian opera director, Franco Zeffirelli, found plenty of laughs, if little pathos, in the proceedings.
But the cast of this production, which boasts several talented stage performers (Penny Fuller, Herb Foster, Peter Maloney, for starters), seems to have been tossed onstage and left to fend for themselves. They move awkwardly around the chairs scattered across James Noone's grandiose set, which looks like a hotel lobby designed by Albert Speer, and fail to find any collective comic rhythm. Performances range from uneven but promising (Tucci and Brown at least exhibit some potential in their scenes) to simply unformed (most of the rest).
Randall, who is nearly twice the age of the character he is playing, seems particularly ill equipped to handle the demands of the role. He looked and sounded physically unsteady, and had repeated trouble with lines -- as did other members of the cast. At times the production threatened to devolve into a new kind of Pirandellian parlor game, "Twelve Actors in Search of Their Next Line."
The play, while on the surface a classic Pirandellian game of truth and illusion, is most potently a deeply felt defense of individual perception against collective truth, a salvo against provincial fascism. But it's hardly worth exploring Pirandello's ideas in the context of a production that does them such a disservice. Who's lying? Who's telling the truth? Who's mad? Who cares?
Right You Are
(Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts; 498 seats; $60 top) A National Actors Theater at Pace U. presentation of a play by Luigi Pirandello, translated by Eric Bentley.
Directed by Fabrizio Melano.
Lamberto Laudisi - Tony Randall
Amalia Agazzi - Penny Fuller
Dina - Mireille Enos
Butler - Herb Foster
Signora Sirelli - Jurian Hughes
Signor Sirelli - Peter Maloney
Signora Cini - Yolande Bavan
Coucillor Agazzi - Henry Strozier
Signora Frola - Maria Tucci
Signor Ponza - Brennan Brown
Signora Nenni - Natalie Norwick
Police Commissioner - Peter Ganim
The Governor - Fred Burrell
Signora Ponza - Florencia Lozano
Set, James Noone; costumes, Noel Taylor; lighting, Kirk Bookman; sound, Richard Fitzgerald; production stage manager, Neil Krasnow. Artistic director, Tony Randall. Opened Dec. 7, 2003. Reviewed Dec. 3. Running time: 1 HOUR, 40 MIN.
The story goes that, when Luigi Pirandello's Cosi e, se vi pare (usually translated as Right You Are, If You Think You Are) opened in Rome during the 1918 season, much of the attending crowd cheered but some were infuriated by the dramatist's inconclusive ending. Apparently, one incensed patron -- not content to shout obscenities as others were doing -- ripped his seat from the floor and heaved it at Pirandello, who'd been called on stage. The outsized object missed Pirandello, who righted it, sat down, and said: "Thank you so much, it's been a very tiring day."
It's unlikely that anyone seeing the National Actors Theatre production will react like the chair-throwing fellow. After all, when the first viewers of Pirandello's early play took it in, they'd never seen anything comparable; now, the experimental dramatist's concern with truth and illusion has been under consideration for over 80 years. Much of Pirandello's seminal propositions about theater, life, and the relationship between the two have been adopted, adapted, and developed to the point where some contemporary theatergoers might scrutinize what the company calls simply Right You Are (the text used is the Eric Bentley translation) and comment, "Been there, done that."
But extremely theater-wise people aren't the only ones who may resist the intellectual and comedic charms of the NAT's take on the play. The production has a static quality that perhaps can be attributed to its having been directed by Fabrizio Melano, who more regularly directs operas. Melano's familiarity with singers' talents, which don't always extend to sophisticated acting, could account for staging that often consists of performers remaining in one place at long intervals while delivering lines as if they were about to launch into arias. This is not good when a play, no matter how intriguing (which this one is), is also talky (which this one also is).
The frenzied chatter in Right You Are is carried on at the home of Councillor Agazzi (Henry Strozier) and his wife, Amalia (Penny Fuller), when the lady of the house and daughter Dina (Mireille Enos) return after attempting to visit a new neighbor. The lady whom they weren't able to see is seemingly being kept from her daughter, who lives some further distance away, by an oddly behaving husband. After friends drop in on the Agazzis -- Signor and Signora Sirelli (Peter Maloney, Jurian Hughes) and Signora Cini (Yolande Bavan) -- speculation about the mysterious lady intensifies. It further escalates when the lady herself, Signora Frola (Maria Tucci), is ushered in and explains that she's perfectly content communicating with her immured daughter from a courtyard. That confession settles little in view of what happens immediately after she's departed: Signor Ponza (Brennan Brown) barrels on to say that Signora Frola is off her rocker, that her daughter died four years earlier, and that the woman he won't let Signora Frola call on is his second wife.
Panting to ascertain whose story is accurate, the Agazzis and coterie devise a plot by which Signora Frola and Signor Ponza will be asked to the house at the same time but without the other one knowing. The prying group hopes and expects that the ruse will result in the whole truth being revealed. The only participant who holds himself apart from the scheme is Signora Agazzi's no-nonsense brother, Lamberto Laudisi (Tony Randall), who insists that truth is relative and that, in the end, people are right if they think they are. The upshot of the forced Signora Frola/Signor Ponza confrontation hews to Laudisi's -- and, by implication, Pirandello's -- view. This deliberately indecisive denouement may have been what prompted that irate Roman first-nighter to toss a chair in lieu of a handy rotten tomato. (Earlier this year, a London production of Pirandello's artful and somewhat artificial comedy-drama was directed and designed by Franco Zeffirelli, with Joan Plowright as Signora Frola and Oliver Ford Davies as Lamberto Laudisi. Zeffirelli and Martin Sherman, who translated and adapted the play, were evidently so struck by how closely Lamberto Laudisi represents the author's philosophy that they depicted the contrary brother-in-law taking notes and holding sheets of paper as if preparing a Pirandello-esque script. Incidentally, the title used for the West End mounting was Absolutely {Perhaps}.)
Pirandello's pulling the rug of certainty out from under his characters -- and by extension, demanding that observers also question the nature of absolutes -- remains compelling, even if director Melano only livens things up during the second act with the agitated arrival of Frola and Ponza as well as the police Commissioner (Peter Ganim) and the governor (Fred Burrell). The play's allure may even be enhanced by the fact that, nowadays, gossip is not just a household or court pastime but has become an international industry. Pirandello pinpoints and then pooh-poohs this "inquiring minds need to know" syndrome, and Melano underlines it with a deft bit of business in which all of the characters repeatedly and simultaneously lean forward in their seats whenever they think that something dishy is about to be divulged.
Catching the playwright's spirit, set designer James Noone even provides a visual pun on Pirandello's joke about the inquisitive citizen's longing to learn indivisible truths when partial truths and illusions are all that anyone might expect to gain. Noone has fashioned a large drawing room with marble columns and a black-and-white floor that calls to mind the urban vistas painted by Renaissance artists when they first mastered perspective. One's perspective is all that can be counted on, Pirandello is saying, and Noone recognizes that in this modish interpretation of a rich man's home during the years of Italian fascism. (Here, the action is set in the 1930s, even though the play was written in 1917.) Noone also positions a music room beyond the drawing-room, but it's not seen until Act II, when Kirk Bookman's lights go on inside it and the characters repair there to buzz some more. It should also be noted that costume designer Noel Taylor's colorful '30s suits and frocks look particularly gorgeous in the black-and-white surroundings and even more gorgeous when reflected and distorted in the shiny upstage walls. (This is another of Noone's puns.)
Randall, NAT's indefatigable artistic director and founder, has chosen a large-cast foreign play to add to the company's growing list of not-seen-every-day items. For the most part, his troupe comes through, and Randall himself does a bang-up job as Laudisi. Beginning to stoop physically now that he's 83, Randall is little diminished otherwise and gives an amusingly tart reading; his beetle-browed skepticism is fun to watch. Tucci's Signora Frola is entirely believable and utterly touching; this is nothing new from her, since she's always believable and touching, but it's reassuring. Of the others, Fuller and Enos as mother and daughter Agazzi are effective, and Brown as the passionate Signor Ponza is especially noteworthy.
What's most appealing about both Tucci and Brown is that they don't put ironic distance between themselves and their characters; both seem to be, umm, telling the truth. When all is said and done, truth isn't black-and-white. And, despite James Noone's stunning set, neither is this production.
Pirandello is one of those playwrights whose name has become a common allusion. Thus a reference to something as Pirandellian immediately conjures up a sense of a blurring between illusion and reality.
The spinmeistering of current news events, the rash of tabloid celebrity stories and TV reality shows make it ever more difficult to tell where truth lies. No wonder, that Tony Randall thought that Pirandello's own Right You Are, which makes a satirical case for truth being subjective and relative, would prove as apt and timely a revival for his National Actors Theatre as last season's superb production of The Persians. Unfortunately, as director Ethan McSweeney made Aeschylus's play soar, director Fabrizio Melano has done little to make Pirandello's farce gain altitude. His production moves at a snail's pace with the actors too often sitting and standing around as if in one of the operas he most frequently directs.
On the positive side we have Eric Bentley excellent translation which is colloquial but never slangy and captures the farcical flavor of a group of provincial gossips bent on pinning down the truth about the unconventional and mysterious behavior of a newly arrived government official, his mysteriously unseen wife and her mother. These players are not actors (as in Pirandelllo's most famous play, Six Characters In Search of an Author) but real and quite ordinary people. Since there are six principal gossips -- the Agazzis (Councillor Agazzi, his wife, daughter and brother-in-law) and their neighbors, Signor and Signora Signelli -- this might well be called Six Real People in Search of the Truth about Two Strangers. Except for Lamberto Laudini, the more open-minded Agazzi in-law and Pirandello's stand-in, the truth these characters seek is a logical, either/or truth. The truth the author, via Laudini, asks us to accept is one which separates reality from illusion and truth from fiction.
While The Persians evoked sharp parallels to world events, what we have here is an attempt to do the same for a drawing room fable. The sense of a too grand production can be attributed in part to the Michael Schimmel Center's imposing stage which is separated from the front row seats by the equivalent of about four rows and doesn't lend itself to intimate staging. Consequently, James Noone's black and white marble and mirrors set does rather aptly echo the sense of identities reflected and shattered in the mirror of perception (in fact "mirror theater" was a term often used in relation to Pirandello's work like Six Characters in Search of an Author). The set is also a more obvious reflection of the time shift from 1917, when the play was written, to Italy during the 1930s. All that's missing is for one of the two monster statues at either side of the set to be of Mussolini for us to hear the rumblings of facism in the various characters demands to know the truth about their new neighbors' behavior as a way of protecting the conformity to accepted standards.
The situation that throws the assembled citizens into such a tizzy that the police commissioner and governor of the province must be brought in to help adjudicate the matter is this: Village newcomers Signor Ponza (Brennan Brown), his wife (Florencia Lozano) and mother-in-law, Signora Frola (Maria Tucci) have moved into separate establishments next door to his employer Councillor Agazzi (Henry Strozier). After Agazzi's wife (Penny Fuller) and daughter's (Mireille Enos) social overtures to Signora Frola are rejected, first the widow and then her son-in-law try to explain their behavior to the Agazzis, who are joined by their friends Signore and Signora Sirelli (Peter Maloney and Jurian Hughes) and several curious townspeople (Yolande Bavan and Natalie Norwick). The trouble is that each has a different explanation for Ponza's wife being locked up in the upstairs apartment, so that her mother's visits are restricted to her standing below the window where Senora Ponza stands as a shadowy figure.
Signora Frola, claims that Ponza, keeps her daughter a prisoner, but that she is a prisoner of love and not unhappy which is why she (Signora Frola) accepts this possessiveness as a weakness in her otherwise kind son-in-law. Ponza, on the other hand, states that his mother-in-law was maddened by her daughter's death in an earthquake and that the woman in the window is his seond wife, who has gone along with the pretense to keep the old woman from sinking deeper into madness. The earthquake which did or did not kill Signora Frola's daughter has also destroyed all records so that the truth of these stories is hard to pin down. Laudini is willing to see the " truth" in both stories but not so his relatives and the rest of the increasingly agitated friends and town folks. When, on the Governor's orders the mysterious Signora Ponzi is summoned, Laudini has the last laugh since the truth turns into a Pirandellian enigma. Even the exemplary cast can't overcome the sluggish pacing and awkward direction. While Noel Taylor's costumes are lovely and authentic 1930s, Maria Tucci's widow Frola is somewhat too elegant in head-to-hose gray (her shoes in a stylish contrasting burgundy). However, she does have the best opportunity to make something of her role, as does Brennan Brown as the increasingly put upon Signor Ponzi. While Tony Randall is to be admired for his continued dedication to the company he founded, he fails to bring the needed panache to the play's most interesting character, the sardonic Laudini.
With many modern theater goers more familiar with what Pirandello stands for than his actual plays, it would be nice to have a more lively production of this rarely done play, more commonly known as (Right You Are (If You Think So). Too bad that the absence of the title tag, which so perfectly fits the Pirandellian you-be-the-judge ending, is the least of what's wrong with this Right You Are.
Right You Are Written by Luigi Pirandello Translated by Eric Bentley Directed by Fabrizio Melano Cast: Yolande Bavan, Brennan Brown, Fred Burrell, Mireille Enos, Herb Foster, Penny Fuller, Peter Ganim, Jurian Hughes, Florencia Lozano, Peter Maloney, Natalie Norwick, Tony Randall, Henry Strozier, Maria Tucci. Set Design: James Noone. Costume Design: Noel Taylor Lighting Design: Kirk Bookman Sound Design: Richard Fitzgerald Running time: 90 minutes, plus one 15 minute intermission National Actors Theatre at Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts, Pace University (Spruce Street between Park Row & Gold St) 212/239-6200 11/25/12/21/03; opening 12/07/03. Tue - Sat at 8pm; Sat & Sun at 3pm-- $60. Reviewed by Elyse Sommer based on December 5th press performance
Right You Are (If You Think You Are) by Luigi Pirandello, translated by Eric Bentley
No sex, no death, but there's plenty of passion in this play about identity and relative truths. Pirandello wrote Right You Are (If You Think You Are) in 1917, before his more famous Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921). In Right You Are, seven characters-he liked to deploy more than the customary two or three on stage at a time-seven respectable, middle-class types in a comfortable, bourgeois parlor argue over their perceptions of a mysterious woman seen at the window of a nearby building.
That's all that happens. Yet the play offered a blueprint to many works thereafter, including the brilliant Japanese film, Rashomon. The performance, a rare treat for New York audiences, never felt dated. Rather, Pirandello is not performed often enough, although every critic of note acknowledges that his plays revolutionized theater. Argument, or debate, is of course the oldest form of drama. What made Right You Are timely was its intellectual "conceit," or central idea, that all is relative; individual perceptions can never reach unanimity. G.B. S Shaw in England and Luigi Pirandello in Italy perfected the strategy of dramatizing ideas that were floating free in the intellectual climate: in this they were more than standard bearers of modernism and modernity. Absolutes at the core of science and philosophy had been crumbling well before Right You Are. By the turn of the century, subjectivity had replaced objectivity as the stance from which to see and evaluate the world and human behavior as well. Einstein, after seeing a performance of Six Characters in Search of an Author, greeted Pirandello backstage saying, "We are soul-mates." The anecdote may be apocryphal, but the point about relativity remains an apt comment on the theme in Six Characters and Right You Are as well. It was one of Pirandello's favorite subjects. In the decades after Einstein (and Freud!), conflicting characters on stage projected a wish, more than an expression of mere nostalgia, for the return of good old, stable, objective truth that could exercise its authority over perceptions, beliefs, facts in a world plunged into a chaos of opinion.
Irrationality came into its own as another favorite, related theme. Doctors like Ibsen's, fathers and philosophers like Pirandello's became arbiters of quarrels that heated up to boiling point, yet remained maddeningly inconclusive--that was the point. In Right You Are, the excitable seven gossips turn to the Governor himself for a final decision about who is "right." Lamberto Laudisi (Tony Randall) stands-in for Pirandello, perched at the edge of the action observing, judging, occasionally remarking to the audience like a skeptical chorus on the folly of the seven, fixed on discovering the identity of the mysterious woman in the window. (There's the gist of another theme adapted numberless times by fiction and film, comically and tragically. Hitchcock called on it for his thriller, Rear Window .)
The play, less of a plot than a situation, pivots on the neighbors' farcical efforts to piece together an air tight case for their own opinions. The "plaintiffs" who come before them consist of the mystery woman's explosive, nearly wild husband, Signor Ponza (Brennan Brown), at odds with his mother-in-law, the submissive widow Mrs. Frola (Maria Tucci), over the very existence of Ponza's wife, perhaps also Mrs. Frola's daughter, who may be dead or alive to each in differing perspectives. Each thinks the other mad and both seem to be in the eyes of the neighbors to whom they appeal. Each is at pains to dispel any notion of their indecorous, or aberrant, or improper behavior--this is a provincial, Italian drawing room in 1936. But manners and social propriety only superficially touch on the play's metaphysical concerns with that old chestnut, appearance versus reality, exploited by Shakespeare and adapted ever since. In Pirandello's hands, the theme became more psychological, an exploration of the power of illusions, individual and collective. Laudisi in a mildly ironic soliloquy addresses his mirror image on their relative realities.
The argument thoroughly engaged the audience, many of whom had never seen a Pirandello play and had no clue what to expect. The excellent Maria Tucci played her role straight: her distress as mother grieving over the trouble she may have caused her son-in-law was real and provided a kind of foil for the comical carrying on of the neighbors. Pirandello had decided in 1905 that the only form for a modern drama was "comic agony," an ambiguous term that Ms. Tucci's performance easily defined for this production. Similarly, Brown played a genuinely distraught husband, barely containing his frustration as he failed to get the jury of seven to understand him. So, again, the contrast between a principal character in pain and those eager for juicy gossip expressed Pirandello's blueprint for theatrical contradictions. Tony Randall as commentator-narrator, of course, played himself. The differing styles complemented each other and sometimes came close to producing the effect of a trio that had been working on the play a long time.
All the actors looked minuscule on the vast, nay cavernous, stage of the Schimmel Center for the Arts. The proscenium is framed by slabs of black and white marble over a diamond patterned black and white marble floor. At either side of the stage, about ten feet above sea level, stand white statues, roughly fifteen feet tall. RAI, Italian television's culture channel, filmed the play long ago and set it in a pretentious parlor; it suggested both the provincialism Pirandello intended and the momentary intimacy of the busybodies caught up in their social curiosity. By comparison, here the tight play and huge set remained at odds until the actors built up the audience's confidence and diverted attention onto themselves. Then the production worked. They sat in a row on (relatively) tiny, armless chairs facing the audience. (The arrangement always has struck me as an enlarged version of visiting day at Sing Sing. But I have no remedy to offer.)
Translation are fiendishly difficult to pull off, and this one included some clinkers. Overall, the style resembled the neutral, mid-Atlantic English that almost effaces itself, and in a translation that might be desirable. Pirandello's style and stylistics, however, also call for sharp, light bursts of dialogue, sometime brusque, nearly always ironic, often probing, and all told producing wry, disjunct conversations. Perhaps intending to stress the play's continuing relevance, for instance, the Governor fell into American slang, not typical of the whole script and odd to find in speeches of the Authority to whom all deferred. He grew impatient at one point with the men, Agazzi, Sirelli, Centuri (sic), and blurted out, "Come off it." At another point he says, "Aw c'mon, drop it." These phrases were sprinkled over the script along with imitation British idioms like, "...hushing the matter up," instead of "hushing up the matter." Then came little patches of veddy British exchange:
Agazzi: Yes, yes, doesn't it seem a bit much?
Gov: It does, rather...
Centuri: It certainly does.
Everyone referred to Mrs. Frola as "the old lady," or "old lady," instead of "the old woman," or perhaps "the lady," without the adjective. In general, her speeches kept the pressure of feeling and broken sentences true of the Italian.
But again, the Governor got stilted when reassuring Mrs. Frola that he would handle the husband (also his employee): "We want nothing of him, Signora." (Not from him? Or something like, "We're not trying to badger him, or fire him.") Or "Just don't worry." (Not, "Please don't worry?"). Or "Be calm and leave us, I beg you." (Not, "please sit calmly in the other room," or "please calm down," or something like that. And so on. To work as a drawing room comedy bordering on farce, the presentation needed a higher style, a dose of artifice, whereas the actors fell into solemnity, especially in Act 3. Such subtleties deserve a great deal of attention and in any case can not be addressed here. It's difficult enough to find the right tone for any comedy, and much more so for Pirandello's: bright, quick, smart, aloof, painful, cerebral, ambiguous--take your pick.