Madness, masks, mirrors, and portraits symbolize the shifting and inter-penetrating theatricalities of Luigi Pirandello's Enrico IV -- the third production of the 2002 New Jersey Shakespeare Festival season. The play constitutes a long philosophical and poetic diatribe on the fact that to be human is to be mad. Pirandello's dark view was influenced by a variety of sources: his wife's insanity, his own paranoia, existentialism, theater of the grotesque, Einstein's theories of relativity, and, most importantly, the ideas of nineteenth-century philosopher Henri Bergson. In "Matter and Memory," Bergson writes that life is characterized by freedom, fluidity and flux and that to trying to fix it into a permanent, unchanging form leads to reification and death. On the other hand, life cannot exist without a form -- hence, a constant struggle between life and form.
In Enrico IV, as in many of Pirandello's plays, this struggle is manifested as one between the roles (masks) that we assume to wrest an identity from the terrifying flux of life and the fact that these roles also cut us off from life. We tend to believe that it is we who chose the roles that we play, but, according to Pirandello, they are thrust on to us by others. Pirandello was the first playwright of the modern theater to recognize what Sartre was to elaborate many years later in No Exit, that "Hell is other people" because they have the power to bequeath or deny us identity with their gaze. The Father in Pirandello's best-known play, Six Characters in Search of an Author, stated this problem succinctly, "With different persons, we may be a quite different individual. We cling to the illusion that we remain identical for all persons and every situation. Nothing could be more false than this illusion..." In Enrico IV Pirandello dramatizes these ideas by portraying a mad protagonist, who has been locked in the historical role of Enrico IV for twenty years. When he is suddenly visited by significant characters from his earlier life who are forced to play roles in his imaginary court, they, and we, begin to wonder who is truly insane.
The play opens at the NJSF F.M. Kirby Theater on a stage within a stage. Set designer Charles T. Wittreich, Jr. provides a standard shadowy medieval throne room with a centrally located throne and baldachin flanked by two huge portraits, one of a youthful Enrico IV and the other of his then girlfriend, The Marchesa Matilda Spina, costumed as Matilda of Tuscany. Wittreich also adds an effective raked perspective backdrop of intersecting lines that suggests the threads of human logic.
The guards (ably, if sloppily, played by Jason Bohan, Mark Thornton, Jeffrey M. Bender, Kevin Rolston, and Jay Leibowitz) are having great fun coaching a terrified and bewildered newly-hired guard (Michael Allen Stewart) in the details of his role. Enter The Marchesa Matilda Spina (Vivienne Benesch) and her daughter Frida (Jenny Gravenstein), who is the spitting image of her mother in the portrait. The Marchesa's lover, Baron Tito Belcredi (Michael Nichols), Frida's fiance (Geoff Wilson), and a doctor (Herman Petras) accompany them. As they await the entrance of Enrico IV in the throne room, we learn that he became mad after falling from a horse while riding in an historical pageant with The Marchesa and Belcredi. As result of a concussion, he has come to believe that he is Enrico IV, the 11th century Emperor of Germany and has supported this illusion with his considerable fortune for twenty years by hiring a staff of actors and re-enacting in exact detail the political events surrounding the historical Emperor. The newly-arrived visitors from the protagonist's past have come to shock him out of his madness by staging an elaborate theatrical hoax. Meanwhile, they are asked to play precise historical roles in Enrico IV's court.
What follows is layer upon layer of irony as the characters perform roles similar to those they have played in the events that lead up to Enrico's madness. In the midst of this comic masquerading stands the tragic, Lear-like figure of Enrico IV (Sherman Howard) who pulls the strings that set these marionettes performing. In words and actions loaded with double meaning, he appears to recognize his old flame and his rival Belcredi. The game is brought to an abrupt, tragic end, when the shock cure takes an unexpected turn and Enrico IV, who has really been sane for eight years, is permanently sealed into the role of a madman by his desperate act.
Enrico IV engages our minds but not our emotions. If Pirandello intended us to "feel" for his protagonist and the human condition, he fails miserably. Yet emotions are an important and necessary dimension of learning and certainly one of the reasons we go to the theater. Director Bonnie Monte seems to realize this truth by taking on the Herculean, if not impossible task, of trying to humanize Pirandello's characters. Sherman Howard (Enrico IV) comes across as a tragic hero of Oedipal proportions, whose suffering is an open wound. Every word he utters seems to tear at his soul, setting him seething with anger or trembling with regret. Vivienne Benesch, as the world-weary Marchesa, conveys her character's suffering and existential angst with elegance and understatement.
Yet, despite the superb acting of Howard and Benesch, the play generates little emotional heat. Part of the problem is that Monte directs with a Shakespearean ponderousness -- attempting to make each of Pirandello's pronouncements "meaningful" which slows down the play considerably. When she tries to capture some of Pirandello's Sicilian humor -- as in the opening guard scene, it lacks the necessary polish and verve of the commedia dell'arte.
In the final scene, as the shadows of night engulf Enrico IV and his guards -- entombing him in his 11th century role, we feel an overwhelming sense of relief that we are to be let loose from this solipsistic hell to resume our relatively mundane lives. Shakespeare's lines from Macbeth come to mind, "Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing..." We have witnessed almost two and a half hours of verbal gymnastics, ranting and raving and yet leave the theater feeling strangely empty. No doubt that Pirandello is one of the greatest figures of the modern theater, but it's clear he was also one of the most tormented. What he writes about in his plays stems from his own paranoid and delusional inner world -- one Freud would have loved to study.
