Pirandello's Wife

a full-length, serio-comic drama

It's an age-old question: What determines us? NATURE OR NURTURE?

Simplistic, true, but what if that distinction is used as a weapon against another person? Critics tell us that Antonietta Pirandello's father, Calogero Portulano, was so insanely jealous, gelosia suprema, he would not allow a doctor see his wife naked, even though critically ill during childbirth. She died, and her new-born baby, Antonietta lived.

What if that trait, insane jealousy, was supposedly inherited by Antoinetta? Some 40 years into their marriage, and Luigi Pirancello used this argument, gelosia suprema, to have Antoniatta institutionalized!

But doesn't such a decision--accusing her of a genetic leap of 40 years--deny the life she lived in those 40 yeasrs? Why wasn't any of her lived experience, her marginalization as a woman, taken into account before sending her to the asylum for the remainder of her life?  

Short vimeo on the topic of Nature vs. Nuture as it applies to Antonietta: 

https://vimeo.com/814664007

or

https://www.instagram.com/p/Czg-K_ux2yO/

"At its heart, "Pirandello's Wife" is a meditation on the silent struggles of women whose voices have been silenced or overshadowed by the achievements of their male counterparts. The titular character, Pirandello's wife, is portrayed with sensitivity and depth, her quiet strength and resilience shining through despite the confines of her circumstances. As she grapples with her confinement in an insane asylum, she reflects on her life, her marriage, and the unspoken desires and dreams that have been suppressed for decades."  (Critique, American Dreamscreen)

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 play itself is fiction. Antonietta employs the patients of the asylum to act out her life—as she sees it. While an inherited genetic disorder, “gelosia suprema,” is one possibility, there is, potentially, another: marginalization and complete loss of self.

In the first act of this play, the audience witnesses the circumstances of Antonietta's life through her eyes. 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.

But the Director (Direttore) of the asylum interrupts this rehearsal of Antonietta's play. 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.

 

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.

 

 

 

Pirandello's Wife


 info@pirandelloswife.com

2024 Lynn H. Elliott. All rights reserved.  TDB - Masters of the Machine - White Label Site