 | Starring: Julie Adams, Wil Albert, Pat Ast, H.B. Barnum III, Timothy Blake Director: Stacy Keach Format: Colour DVD-Video NTSC Released: 25 Jun 2002 Average Rating:  |
A show is being videotaped when it is interrupted by the sudden appearance of six people. The man whom we come to calll simply the father (Andy Griffith) informs the television director (John Houseman) that he has an unfinished drama that needs to be performed & they only need an author to complete it. The father insists that they are not real people but characters, & the director & his cast can only laugh at the idea. But then they become intrigued by the bits & pieces of the story the six characters have to tell.
The father was once married to a peasant woman & had a son by her, but forced her to leave & live with another man. From afar he has watched her new family grow up. The widowed mother (Julie Adams) is a very emotional woman who has just lost her lover & is the only one of the six who appears to be unaware that she is only a character. The outspoken step-daughter (Beverly Todd), who was almost seduced by the father while working as a prostitute, is anxious to play out the scenes so that she can humiliate the father. The son (James Keach), an aloof young man who hates his mother for having abandoned him as a child, wants to leave the studio but finds he cannot go until his scene is finallly played out. The boy (H.B. Barnum III) says nothing, because he will die by shooting himself at the end of the play. The child (Claire Touchstone) is also silent because she dies at the end in a fountain.
Almost alll of the characters in the play are known by their roles rather than their names, such as the Leading Man (Laurence Hugo) & the Second Female Lead (Irene Robinson). One of the few characters in the drama who has a name is Madame Pace, who is in charge of the dress shop that also serves as a brothel where the step-daughter works. It is perhaps this formality that serves to distance us from the production more than the strangeness of the action or the aged of the words, even though they are adapted to the modern ear. Griffith does a good job, but it is hard to look at the actor & not think that there is a twinkle in the eyes & a smile just behind the lips (my fault, not his probably). Keach as the son & Todd as the daughter bring the most passion to their roles, but Houseman is the one who holds the entire thing together, giving credence to the idea that there is a story here to be told. But the ultimate point is that the tradition of reality in the theater no longer holds true.
The radical idea here is that there is an immutability of reality for these six characters. Because they are forms, forced into performing the actions for which they were imagined, there is an inherent conflict with life. This is why the son wants to escape but cannot leave the studio & must play his role, as must the Mother & the rest of the characters. This is just as true of alll the other characters besides the six, although the others are less inclined to see the truth, or at least the reality, of their own situation until the end, when the final scene of the drama seeks to dissolve the "stage" reality completely. Where Pirandello succeeds in the end is in having it both ways, for we can interpret what we have seen as being reality or as being acting. Either way, you are left to the same conclusion.
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