This is the third of Pirandello’s modern myths.

After the religious myth (Lazarus) and the social myth (New Colony), The Mountain Giants represents the myth of art.

Performed posthumously in 1937, it is the last of Pirandello’s masterpieces and was left incomplete due to the death of the author.

The last act has been passed on by Pirandello’s son Stefano who pinned his father’s account as given by his father after the penultimate night of his life, when Pirandello woke up and confided to his son to be very tired as he had to build up the whole epilogue in mind only, without other aids..

 

The story tells about a company of actors that reaches in its wanderings an undetermined time and place: at the border between fairy tale and reality, a Villa called "la Scalogna" (the Unlucky).

 

The Company of the Countess, on the verge of collapse, drenched in misery and poverty, fighting to stage their own show, get to the Villa of the Unlucky, inhabited by grotesque characters led by a kind of magician, Cotrone.

As Shakespeare's Prospero in The Tempest, Cotrone is able to create illusions and fantasies.

When the Countess Ilse (whose name is a pun for the Italian expression “The-Self”) leading the company, reaches the Villa on a cart along with her actors, Cotrone already seems to know the reasons for the failure of their artistic endeavor.

 

I will not add further passages to the plot, but I would like to write about other possible ideas and interpretations that I’d like to convey. 

I've always been very fascinated by the unfinished, by the incomplete.

I've always had a great attraction for the so-called unfinished texts. They seem to me so right for theater.

Incompleteness is for literature, for theater it is something ontological.

I find it perfect that last Pirandello’s legacy of is without a conclusion. Without a definition. Without the final point and without the closing curtain.

 

I think The Mountain Giants is a text for which we can now afford the luxury of exploring other possibilities and interpretations.

After the beautiful shows that great directors and actors of our recent and contemporary theater have staged, I think we have the opportunity to indulge in the temptation of exploring something different.

Or to try, at least.

 

The company of actors that arrives at the villa of Scalogna seems to have, in some way, an appointment with his own double.

Cotrone and Ilse are to each other as knowledge is to belief. Even the Giants, never seen and not even visible, are so close to each and everyone of the actors that you can imagine them as projections of themselves.

I want to imagine all the imagination I can to move from Pirandello's words to a limit I don’t know. I want to take his words out of time and space, take them away from the characters and their nuances, from the mechanisms of the dialogues, wishing they can take me to something else I don’t know, which I don’t foresee before I start working.

 

If the limits of my language are the limits of my world, and if I want to go just  a little bit over them, or at least try to, then it’s from those limits I have to start.

 

R. L.