The World in Shirtsleeves

Luigi Pirandello was no stranger to madness. His younger sister suffered from hysteria, and later his wife’s paranoid jealousy erupted when the family’s fortunes faltered – driving the playwright further into his work and causing their daughter, whom the wife accused of sleeping with her father, to attempt suicide. In 1919, twenty-five years after their wedding, Pirandello finally had his wife hospitalized. In Enrico IV, written two years after the institutionalization, Pirandello takes his wife’s place, dramatizing delusion and withdrawal from the madman’s point of view.

Pirandello’s intensity, verging on mania, disconcerted others. His friend, the French critic Alfred Mortier, said, “Pirandello is a haunted man, possessed by his characters; they encroach upon him, control him, compel him to take pen in hand and write. They dominate his mind.” Streetworkers outside his home would sometimes observe him, seated at his desk, “talking to himself, his body shaking, rolling his eyes, and making the strangest faces in the world.” Backstage at his plays, he would speak along with his actors, mimicking their gestures and tones of voice. One night while inspecting the theatre a fireman assumed the gentleman in the wings gesticulating wildly was addressing him and gamely entered into the conversation. His “fourth wall” shattered, Pirandello blushed and ran for the exit.

A glutton for lunacy, Karin Coonrod, director of Enrico IV, devours opportunities for staging madness. In the nineties she carved out her niche by reviving vintage surrealism off-Broadway. In Roger Vitrac’s Victor, or the Children Take Over she staged a nine-year-old’s birthday party with a high body count; in Christmas at the Ivanov’s, she dropped chickens on her actors and killed her characters off as they danced around the Christmas tree. At the A.R.T., she directed The Idiots Karamazov – “total madness,” she calls it. Recently, though, she seemed to change colors, turning her attention to Shakespeare’s history plays. Her King John and Henry VI garnered kudos from the New York Times’ Ben Brantley (who called her “vigorous and imaginative”) to Harold Bloom (who chose her to direct his acting debut in last year’s Falstaffiad). But this season she comes full circle, tackling Enrico IV, Pirandello’s masterpiece. With this production, she will braid together the threads of madness and history, and she comes to the task with a wild glint in her eye.

She does not tackle the work alone. Artistic Director Robert Brustein has written a new adaptation of Enrico IV, and the two will excavate what Brustein calls “the spine of the play.” The collaborators could not appear more different from one another. I spoke to Brustein in the crimson dining room of the New York Harvard Club, surrounded by portraits of handlebar moustaches and one large elephant head. Waiters muffled the occasional clink of silver as we squinted at each other in the stately gloom. Coonrod, in contrast, coasted into the East Village on her bike and took me to a neighborhood trattoria for coffee. We hollered our conversation over the clattering of an Italian barmaid and a noisy, busy dog. However, despite approaching the play from opposing ends, they find they are meeting plum in the middle with madness.

Getting Coonrod to talk about her process isn’t difficult: her conversation about the play comes as an avalanche. She juggles images of commedia dell’arte, costume palettes, and fractured throne-rooms while curling and uncurling in her chair, giving the impression of running about the room without getting up from the table.

The play’s language excites her; she sees it as an opportunity to reveal the mad Enrico’s lucidity. In a philosophical piece like this one, it will be the “use and abuse of language,” she says, that will guide the audience.

Enrico and the invading voyeurs employ language in different ways: while Enrico uses it to blur reality and illusion, Belcredi and the Marchesa use it to belittle. Enrico, waylaid by his lover twenty years after her betrayal, tells her, “we all grasp on to a single idea of ourselves, the way aging people dye their hair . . . no matter how serious you are, you are still wearing a mask . . . the memory of your blonde hair, or dark hair, if it was dark. . . .” In response to this glissando of philosophy, the Marchesa can only seize on the fact that she dyes her hair and that Enrico may have recognized her. Belcredi scoffs: “He was talking generally when he said ‘dark!’… but as usual, you have to turn it into theatre!” Belcredi is wrong. It is Enrico who makes his life into theatre by finding truth in fiction. Enrico is the “poet in their midst,” pushing them to see a reality beyond reality. Here, Coonrod quotes Shakespeare, “the lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact.”

Coonrod and Brustein agree that the play must be “a whirlwind, respecting the humor and the fast pace.” Together they are recapturing the sensation that the play was part of an explosive burst of creativity: Pirandello wrote Enrico and Six Characters in Search of an Author in the same blistering five weeks. Back at the Harvard club, exploding – or even not wearing a tie – will get you politely bounced. But Brustein is anything but restrained when it comes to Pirandello’s theme of the “existential agony of being alive and subject to chance. We can only combat it by embracing a role, because the role of father, or teacher, or student is comprehensible. But when you embrace those roles, you reduce yourself to them, losing the complication of being human. That is the source of anguish.” The real madness lies in “living in time, being subject to its whims and caprices.”