Pirandello's Wife

N.B.  PIRANDELLO'S WIFE is available in both stageplay format--all action limited to the asylum--and screenplay format.  The latter allowed me to create and intermingle later scenes in Antonietta's life--within the asylum--and, ealier scienes from her life in Sicilly and Rome. 

Antonietta Portulano was a quiet, religious girl raised in Agrigento, Sicily by a single parent (a protective, overbearing father) and educated in a convent. In 1894 she married the man destined to become Italy's most famous twentieth-century playwright, Luigi Pirandello, and was whisked off to Rome.

After the loss of her substantial marriage dowry (mismanaged by her father-in-law), the ensuing poverty, three difficult childbirths (the last of which paralyzed her for several months), and growing suspicions about her husband's fidelity, Antonietta Pirandello (nee Portulano), in the twenty-fifth year of her marriage, was committed to an asylum for the insane in Rome. Here she spent the remaining forty years of her life, dying in 1959, twentythree years after her famous husband.

Why was Antonietta committed? Critics, wishing to sustain the positive image of her playwright-husband, point to the cause as Antonietta's insane jealousy, gelosia suprema, a genetic disorder supposedly inherited from her father. The result was years of suffering for Luigi Pirandello. Yet the years prior to Antonietta’s commitment were also his most productive: It Is So (If You Think It Is So), Six Characters in Search of an Author, and Henry IV.

The above information is fact. The movie moves between the reality of her life as she lived it (through FB) and, in the asylum, as she experienced it.    While an inherited genetic disorder, “gelosia suprema,” is used to incarcerate Antonietta, the "little drama" performed in the asylum reflects her marginalization and complete loss of self.

In the drama performed within the asylum, the audience witnesses the circumstances of Antonietta's life through her eyes, her perception. Unable to control outside events, Antonietta’s destiny (financially and socially) lay in the hands of the males who surrounded her. Her “little drama,” as performed by the inmates of the asylum, is a desperate attempt to reveal her truth to the authorities of the asylum. If successful, she hopes to leave Rome, the city of her disintegration, and return to Sicily, where she can die surrounded by family and friends.

It is important to note that Luigi's constant companion in the FB/Agrigento and Rome section , Ricardo, although fictional actually quotes many lines from the prose work of Luigi Pirandello.  In those prose works, we see life in the Pirandello household and Rome through Luigi's eyes.  Repeatedly, in thosse prose works, he comments he comments on his wife, Antonietta's madness.

In the asylum, Antonietta's "little drama" is interrupted by the Director (Direttore) of the asylum. He sees her revisionist history as an affront to the absolute veracity of the Pirandello biography. Unwilling to accept her reimagining of events, he rewrites her play forcing it towards the more established interpretation of married life in the Pirandello household. But whereas Antonietta knows something of the craft playwriting, our Direttore does not. His poorly written script is thrust into the hands of the actor-patients. In their hands lies the Direttore's script. But, in their heads, is that of Antonietta, a fellow patient.

The result is a joyous, farcical disintegration — with serious consequences.

The screenplay version (same name) gave me the opportunity to portray the reality of Antonietta's life and blend it with the fictionalized, imagined account of her life in the insane asylum.    Winner of many Film Festival awards, national and international.  A real-life event, such as Luigi's choice of Antonietta as his future wife, is first played out as recorded in history books.  Then the event is repeated but this time sixty-five years later in the asylum.  Amidst the old Antonietta's difficulties with using patients as actors in her "little drama," Antoniette gives a re-imagining of the event.   She was a pawn in her father's business dealings with Luigi's father.   But, before the Old Antonietta can continue, the Direttore of the asylum intrudes.  He immediately puts his stamp on Old Antonietta's play, reducing her life and focusing instead on that of Luigi Pirandello.

Repeat: It is important to note that Luigi's constant companion in the FB/Agrigento and Rome section , Ricardo, although fictional actually quotes many lines from the prose work of Luigi Pirandello.  In those prose works, we see life in the Pirandello household and Rome through Luigi's eyes.  Repeatedly, in thosse prose works, he comments he comments on his wife, Antonietta's madness.

OLD ANTONIETTA:  What about my life?  My pain?  Why I spend my final days in this asylum?

DIRETTORE:  Your life?  Your pain?  Ha!  You would be another unknown if you weren’t married to a famous playwright.