Giorgio Strehler Directs Carlo Goldoni 9780739181928, 9780739181911

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Giorgio Strehler Directs Carlo Goldoni

Giorgio Strehler Directs Carlo Goldoni Scott Malia

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

Published by Lexington Books A wholly owned subsidiary of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom Copyright © 2014 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Malia, Scott, 1977Giorgio Strehler Directs Carlo Goldoni / Scott Malia. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-8191-1 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-7391-8192-8 (electronic) 1. Strehler, Giorgio, 1921-1997--Criticism and interpretation. 2. Goldoni, Carlo, 1707-1793--Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PN2688.S8M35 2013 792.02'33092--dc23 2013036345 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Introduction 1 2 3 4 5

vii

Strehler and Goldoni in Context (Re)Discovering Commedia dell’Arte A Brechtian Arlecchino Refractive Theatricality Copeau, Inversion, and Integration

1 25 47 69 93

Conclusion

111

Bibliography

117

Index

123

About the Author

125

v

Introduction

When a great director brings to the stage the work of a great playwright, the result is not necessarily successful or even worthy of critical attention. When a playwright and director hail from the same country and are both highly regarded in their respective fields, their combination merits some consideration. The playwright/director intersection in this instance raises questions about the culture itself and whether or not this artistic intersection is emblematic of larger truths about that culture. Ultimately, the playwright/director combinations most worthy of scholarly analysis are those that mutually elevate both artists’ critical and popular reputation. For Italian director Giorgio Strehler, his reputation is inextricably bound to his role as the premier twentieth-century interpreter of the works of Carlo Goldoni. When Strehler and Paolo Grassi founded the Piccolo Teatro di Milano in 1947, Goldoni’s Arlecchino servitore di due padroni, was a crucial part of their first season. 1 It represented an effort simultaneously to establish a repertory for the company and build an audience for that repertory. This single play would receive five more productions over the next forty years, along with other Goldoni plays such as the Villeggiatura trilogy (three productions), Le baruffe chiozzotte, and Il campiello. The popularity of these productions in repertory and on tour speaks to the success of Strehler’s attempts to build a definitively Italian theatre. The goal of this text is to use Strehler’s Goldoni productions (and Arlecchino servitore di due padroni in particular) as a means of defining his aesthetic. Approaching directorial style and aesthetic is always difficult from a critical standpoint because the scholar courts two great dangers: (1) writing as if she/he were inside the director’s head and understands fully the director’s intent, and (2) delimiting or obscuring aspects of a director’s work if they do not agree with the scholar’s critical agenda. The purpose behind this vii

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book is to do the opposite: to provide a framework for examining a director’s career that is expansive rather than restrictive. This scholarship uses Goldoni and Arlecchino servitore di due padroni as a through-line for Strehler’s fiftyyear career at the Piccolo Teatro by asking the following questions: How did Strehler’s work with Arlecchino define his aesthetic as a director? How did the influence of other artists, both direct (Brecht) and indirect (Copeau), manifest itself in his productions of Goldoni? How does Strehler’s work with Goldoni and Arlecchino fit into the larger framework of the history of Italian theatre? Finally, what about Strehler’s work with Arlecchino sets it apart from his other productions? A cursory review of bibliographic resources reveals the relative paucity of English-language critical material on Strehler’s work, much of which groups him with other twentieth-century European directors. In comparison, European sources on Strehler (in Italian and French, among others) are far more abundant and diverse. Furthermore, his work with Goldoni receives far more critical attention in European texts than in their English-language counterparts. Certainly the logical conclusion of this discrepancy is that Strehler is simply better known in his homeland. Yet, underneath this basic truth lies another crucial distinction. In English-language sources, Strehler is known primarily for a few iconic productions (mostly the non-Italian The Tempest and The Cherry Orchard). In Europe, his artistic identity is closely linked to his interpretations of a few key playwrights (including Brecht, Pirandello, and Shakespeare), of which Goldoni is the most significant. 2 Therefore, one of the key goals of this book is to attempt to reconcile and even integrate these identities. Ironically, Strehler’s own varied output may be one of the biggest obstacles to critical assessments of his work in any language. While his productions of The Tempest and The Cherry Orchard are seminal, they tend to overshadow the rest of his large body of work. Furthermore, the plethora of playwrights whose work he staged during his long and prolific career makes defining his aesthetic that much more elusive. This is a pervasive problem that plagues critical assessment of many directors. They become famous for a few key ideas or productions, which subsequently obscure the rest of their work. While with many other directors, these ideas/productions serve to iconize them, in Strehler’s work, it produces the opposite effect. Rather than being pigeonholed by a “signature style,” Strehler runs the risk of being written off as a dilettante because of the range of material in his oeuvre; however, this eclecticism is Strehler’s strength, not weakness, and it is crucial to understanding his directorial aesthetic. Thus, the importance of this research is to define Strehler’s multifaceted style and illuminate interrelationships among his various works. To do so would be to create a base from which a variety of subsequent critical inquiries could be made. It would also help establish Strehler’s identity within the

Introduction

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larger scope of the Italian theatre as a whole. Finally, it creates the critical challenge of finding more expansive notions of directorial style and concept that unite diverse ideologies without restrictively delimiting our understanding of the director. To accomplish this goal, a clear and innovative critical framework is needed for examining Strehler’s work. What makes Strehler’s work with Goldoni so significant is his continual reimagining of the same plays. This revisiting was crucial to Strehler’s career, therefore it must be the basis for examining his directorial aesthetic. The importance of his repeated reworking of existing productions is that it provides a baseline for examining what elements were maintained and what elements changed or evolved. Arlecchino servitore di due padroni received more productions by Strehler than any other play and is therefore the logical choice for analyzing the various elements in his aesthetic. Within the many productions of Arlecchino, each element can be analyzed in terms of its evolution, application and integration. It is this framework that makes this study unique. Rather than treating the seemingly disparate aesthetic elements as separate periods in Strehler’s career, it uses a single play as a lens for examining and unifying these elements. To achieve this, source material has been used in the following ways: First, conclusions about Strehler’s directorial style are based largely on photographic and video documentation of his productions. To provide perspective on the reception of these productions, critical material and Strehler’s own writings about his process and experiences have been consulted as secondary sources. While a wealth of critical models could be applied to Strehler’s work, they are not the emphasis of this research. Rather, each aesthetic element is defined by specific terms and contextualized within the artistic and social climate of the periods covered. As Arlecchino is the primary focus of this book, non-Goldoni productions are referred to only insofar as they reflect Goldoni-esque aspects of Strehler’s style or as they altered Strehler’s approach to subsequent Goldoni productions. Finally, it is important to determine how non-Strehler productions of Goldoni fit into this study. Before a complete definition of the aesthetic elements in Strehler’s directorial style can be reached, the precedent for Goldoni productions and other important Italian theatre movements must be established to clarify and contextualize the Strehler-Goldoni relationship. In reviewing the ample material available on Strehler’s career, a few key sources were integral to this book. They include (but are not limited to) David Hirst’s Giorgio Strehler, written as part of Cambridge’s Directors in Perspective series (edited by Christopher Innes); Per un teatro umano, a collection of Strehler’s own writing on his work in the theatre; the previously noted Giorgio Strehler: Intorno a Goldoni; and Fabio Battistini’s Giorgio Strehler. These sources provided a wealth of photographic information and

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analysis, along with quotations by Strehler, his contemporaries, and other critics about the nature of his work. Finally, the most invaluable resource for this research was the Archivio storico, the Piccolo Teatro’s archive of all materials relating to its productions. Located in the Teatro Strehler (the newest of the three Piccolo theaters in Milan), the Archivio storico contains a multitude of scripts, programs, and, most importantly, videotapes of many of their productions. In addition, the Archivio has more than 10,000 images available online. These images and the videos of the productions provide much-needed firsthand evidence of the various stylistic elements of the productions. This evidence creates the possibility for an interrogation and analysis of the productions that is not filtered through other scholars’ critical lenses and perspectives. The critical framework described above, utilizing the sources just mentioned, will break down Strehler’s work in the following ways: chapter 1 provides a context for examining Strehler’s productions of Goldoni. The chapter begins with an overview of the Italian theatre in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in an attempt to draw some larger conclusions about public taste, repertory, and cultural milieu. The purpose is to provide a general understanding of the period, focusing on a few key elements that help define the environment in which Strehler began his work. The goal of this chapter is to answer the following questions: How do we define the Italian theatre in the years leading up to Strehler and the Piccolo Teatro? What was Goldoni’s reputation as playwright prior to the productions at the Piccolo Teatro? What was the general cultural atmosphere that Strehler was reacting against when he founded the Piccolo and staged his first Goldoni production? Why was Goldoni a starting point for Strehler and his new company? In chapter 2, the first of Strehler’s key aesthetic elements is analyzed. In his initial productions of Arlecchino servitore di due padroni in 1947 and 1952, Strehler began to approach the idea of incorporating elements of commedia dell’arte into his productions. The incorporation of comic lazzi into the performance was the first step in addressing the oxymoronic nature of Goldoni’s text—a written interpretation of an improvised tradition that sought to simultaneously preserve and sophisticate it. As evidenced by the appearance of lazzi in other, non-Goldoni productions, the improvisatory, commedia performance style pervaded Strehler’s early work. The important questions to be addressed in this chapter are: How do we define a twentiethcentury performance style based on a 500-year-old art form? What does Strehler’s repeated use of this technique say about his understanding of the relationships among actor, director, author, and text? How did Strehler realize, interpret, and alter Goldoni’s commedia aesthetic? Chapter 3 analyzes the crucial impact of Brecht upon Strehler’s oeuvre. Strehler formed a brief, but important, relationship with Brecht in the mid1950s at the time of Strehler’s first Brecht production, The Threepenny Op-

Introduction

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era, in 1956. Although Brecht died shortly thereafter, his influence upon Strehler is significant, particularly in Strehler’s subsequent interpretations of Goldoni. Tellingly, his 1956 and 1963 productions of Arlecchino servitore di due padroni introduced and built upon decidedly Brechtian elements. In addition to the comic lazzi that had been developed in the previous productions, Strehler now introduced a completely improvised play-within-a-play framework to the telling of Goldoni’s story. This new Brechtian component ties together ideas and questions raised in the previous chapter. What did the combined effect of Brechtian theatricality and commedia elements have on the audience? How did Strehler manipulate the audience’s awareness of the theatrical event? How do Goldoni’s texts function in terms of this kind of performance style? Chapter 4 analyzes how “real life” was reflected (and, more importantly, refracted) in Strehler’s work. With his second productions of The Cherry Orchard and The Villeggiatura Trilogy in the 1970s, Strehler established a broad spectrum for refracting real life. This kind of “refractive theatricality” allowed him to stylize his productions according to the needs of the script and his conception of the play. One of the purposes of this refractive theatricality was to emphasize political and social issues. Perhaps more than any other period in Strehler’s career, the 1970s were a time when his productions were replete with parallels to and commentary on Italy’s tumultuous social and political scene. Never was this more apparent than in Strehler’s next incarnation of Arlecchino servitore di due padroni in 1977, which further developed the refractive theatricality and the sociopolitical overtones explored in The Villeggiatura Trilogy and The Cherry Orchard. In this new version of Goldoni’s play, the Brechtian play-within-a-play device had been retained, but the tone had grown remarkably dark. Indeed, the whole production was enveloped in a kind of Chekhovian weariness reflecting late-1970s Italy, disillusioned by a decade of terrorism and political upheaval. The questions raised by this approach are: What happens when Goldoni is theatrically refracted to emphasize social issues? How does the production acknowledge Strehler’s own awareness of his evolving style? How can Strehler keep the tradition of Goldoni and Arlecchino servitore di due padroni fresh without settling into routine and repetition? Chapter 5 attempts to address some of these questions by examining how Strehler integrated the different aesthetic elements he developed over his lengthy career. His 1987 production of Arlecchino servitore di due padroni (dubbed the “Farewell Edition”) represented his most cogent attempt at integration. In this incarnation, the Brechtian elements were considerably reduced (although not entirely eliminated), the text was given a virtuoso interpretation by its cast at a breathless pace, and the technical elements were stripped, save for vibrant costumes and a few key set pieces. It is important to distinguish this interpretation of Goldoni, not as a radical departure from his

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aesthetic ideals, but simply as a reinterpretation (or, in some cases, an inversion) of their meaning. All of his aesthetic elements defined in the preceding chapters are there, but they have been utilized in new ways. Strehler acknowledged his admiration for French director Jacques Copeau, even though the two never met (Copeau died two years after the founding of the Piccolo). Citing Copeau as a key influence on this “farewell” production of Arlecchino servitore di due padroni is based on key elements in Copeau’s aesthetic that manifested themselves in Strehler’s work, most potently in the 1987 Arlecchino. The pared-down design aesthetic and the refocusing on the text certainly speak to Copeau’s approach, yet noting the differences in his and Strehler’s aesthetics is as important as citing the commonalities. The purpose in this chapter is to reassess the aesthetic elements defined thus far. Rather than define them in restrictive terms, it seems more critically useful to open these elements up to a variety of interpretations and analyze how they change when integrated together. The important questions this raises are: Is the “farewell edition” of Arlecchino servitore di due padroni any less theatrically refractive than Strehler’s mammoth Tempest production, or for that matter, his previous Arlecchino productions? How do the commedia and Brechtian elements function within this refractive theatricality? How does this production fit into the fabric of all of the other Arlecchino productions undertaken by Strehler? How does Goldoni’s play benefit from a Copeau-influenced aesthetic? Since Goldoni and Arlecchino servitore di due padroni have been used as the through-line for examining Strehler’s work, it seems appropriate in the concluding chapter to acknowledge his influence on productions of Goldoni, in Italy and beyond. In other words, if we have been working to define how Goldoni shaped Strehler, how then did Strehler shape Goldoni? How does Goldoni fit into the Italian and world theatre today? Did Strehler succeed in capturing that elusive idea of a truly Italian theatre? If so, what role did the Piccolo Teatro play in its creation? If the preceding sequence of chapters has built cumulatively towards defining each of the various elements of Strehler’s style, then the conclusion attempts to analyze the impact of Strehler’s approach. Therein lies the import of this study: to determine how working with texts of a classic author ultimately shaped and defined Strehler’s career, and those of the subsequent artists who followed in his footsteps. NOTES 1. The translation of the original title is simply The Servant of Two Masters or A Servant to Two Masters. In the original version, the lead character’s name is Truffaldino, rather than the more familiar commedia name Arlecchino, upon which his character is based. 2. See Flavia Foradini’s Giorgio Strehler: Intorno a Goldoni, a compendium of Strehler’s writings on Goldoni as evidence of this notion.

Chapter One

Strehler and Goldoni in Context

In order to create a framework for analyzing their intersection, Strehler and Goldoni must be placed in some kind of context together. First, it is crucial to understand the sociopolitical milieu out of which the Piccolo Teatro (and Strehler’s productions of Goldoni’s Arlecchino servitore di due padroni) was born. Within that milieu, the changing role of theatre and the types of drama that emerged must be examined, particularly in terms of their influence on one another. Finally, Goldoni’s reputation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is crucial to establishing the existing traditions before the inception of the Piccolo Teatro. Therefore, the period between Goldoni’s lifespan (1707–1793) and the founding of the Piccolo (1947) must be put in context. The purpose of this analysis is to extract key ideas about the evolution of Italy and Italian theatre from Goldoni to Strehler. In doing so, a foundation can be laid for analyzing why Strehler went back to Goldoni. Placing Strehler within the Italian theatre proves a complicated task. The idea of an Italian theatre inherently presupposes an Italian national identity. The fractious constituency of the Italian state in the years between the lives of Goldoni and Strehler makes defining that national identity a challenge. The realization of this national identity has been a driving political and cultural force in Italy for centuries. Indeed, it remains a constant throughout the country’s tumultuous history. In a country that often comprised numerous “mini-countries” with stronger regional than national ties, what is the starting point for a national Italian identity? Goldoni’s life dovetails with the end of a significant period in Venice and Italy’s history that is a crucial turning point for these questions of identity. His life spans most of the Settecento, from 1707 to 1793. Four years later, in 1797, Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Italy, bringing an end to the way of life that characterized the Settecento and, eventually, the Republic itself. Gold1

2

Chapter 1

oni’s Venice was a period awash with seemingly conflicting identities. In one sense, it could be argued that Venice in the eighteenth century was emblematic of the Enlightenment, producing a flourishing of culture and ideas (certainly, the emergence of Italy’s greatest playwright during this period does not contradict this notion). Conversely, there is another view of Venice in the late Republic years as less cultured and more indulgent: Settecento Venice was later interpreted virtually as a caricature of life lived in sensual gratification, canceling all responsibility, all intellectuality, all seriousness of mien. The sheer wish-fulfillment that such a state invokes has led to many a later recreation of a mythical eighteenth century: Philippe Monnier’s study is just one example of the classic treatment of city-as-rococo, relishing in its own decadence. 1

This view of Venice as a counterpart to pre-Revolutionary France has both merits and limitations. A more conservative picture of Venice and its most famous playwright portrays Goldoni as being emblematic of the more traditional Venetian values, such as “il decoro, meaning something more than propriety.” 2 The truth was most likely somewhere between the views of Venice as either puritanically moral or decadent and out of touch; however, the idea that the Republic grew increasingly insular and corrupt, perhaps even as a result of this cultural boom, is not easily dismissed. John Julius Norwich approaches the seemingly oxymoronic nature of Settecento Venice and challenges it, asserting “that for the greater part of the century, so generally castigated as one of demoralization and decay on all fronts, Venice was enjoying a period of unusual commercial prosperity and economic growth.” 3 One way of reconciling the seeming disparity between the views of eighteenth-century Venice is to see the Republic’s success as masking its impending downfall. Politically, Venice maintained a policy of neutrality for much of the 1700s that accounts for some of the stability, economic successes, and cultural flourishing that produced writers like Goldoni and Gozzi. Unfortunately, that policy of neutrality ultimately proved untenable and led to Venice’s fall in the late 1790s. Italy’s geography made Venice’s neutrality impossible to maintain, and contributed to the peninsula’s regionalized culture. One of the simplest causes for Italy’s inability to avoid the Austro-French conflicts is the layout of the country itself: “Mountains and hilly areas represent 77 percent of the peninsula’s territory; plains make up 23 percent. Arable land is thus strictly limited, which has contributed to a high population density in the cities and towns and to vast emigrations.” 4 This points to a number of cultural and historical factors influenced by Italy’s geography. First, the mountainous territory served to separate the different regions and created a particular divide between the northern part of the country and the southern peninsula; this also left the north more vulnerable to invasion than the south. The differ-

Strehler and Goldoni in Context

3

ence in elevation is directly connected to difference in climate, which affected the feasibility of agriculture and farming, thus affecting the diversity of diets in different parts of the country. Related to this, the country’s economy was dictated by the types of industry its land was capable of producing. Limited farmland inevitably meant that Italy’s economy would always be dependent to some degree on other countries to fill in the gaps in its available resources. This also explains the population clustering around larger cities and towns as urban, mercantile areas would have easier access to foreign resources than smaller rural communities. In addition to economic and agricultural concerns, the paucity of navigable passes through the Alps had a huge impact on Venice’s inability to remain neutral. Whoever controlled these passes controlled all the land-based access to what would later become Italy. This placed Venice at the crossroads of French and Austrian powers. When the two fought battles on Venetian soil, the Republic came under fire for violating its own neutrality and siding with one of the two. 5 Italy’s regional culture and geographical separation help explain the ease with which Napoleon took the Republic in 1797. It is hard not to see some validity in the notion that Venice was felled by its own myopic self-glorification and the desire for change by many of its constituents—even if change meant foreign occupation. Venetian historian Joanne Ferraro supports this idea in her analysis of 1797 as a crucial turning point for Venice, and for Italy: “When the Republic fell in 1797, it was a mere relic of its medieval past . . . Venice’s inferiority to the major European players on the chessboard—the Hapsburgs and the Bourbons—had relegated the government to a provincial power with little military muster.” 6 Internally, Venice also suffered as the eighteenth century came to a close: “The towns and villages of the empire, ruled by entrenched local elites, looked less toward Venice to resolve their difficulties, their detachment presaging the demise of the regional state.” 7 Paradoxically, the periodic occupations of parts of Italy by the French and Austrians (who passed Venice back and forth several times as a political pawn) encouraged both the regional separations within the country and the emerging Italian nationalism that was a reaction against these foreign powers. Locating Goldoni in Settecento Venice calls into question how the period shaped Goldoni and, conversely, how it was shaped by him. In analyzing this period, Marvin Carlson notes that Goldoni was raised in an environment rife with the culture that defined the latter part of the century. 8 It makes sense that his interest in the arts was cultivated at an early age, since he would later struggle with balancing his theatrical pursuits and his legal training. Conversely, Goldoni is one of the cultural icons of this period, posing the question, “How would our understanding of the Settecento change without Goldoni’s contribution?” Had he stayed in the field of law instead of moving to

4

Chapter 1

the theatre, how would that change our understanding of classical Italian drama? The pertinence of this question to the analysis at hand lies in Strehler’s “rediscovery” of Goldoni. Would Strehler have reached back to Settecento Venice to bolster the Italian theatrical canon without Goldoni’s contribution? Would he have devoted the same kind of attention to works by Gozzi and Alfieri that he instead lavished upon Goldoni? This question is more complicated than it first seems because Goldoni has for so long been a point of comparison for Gozzi and Chiari, as well as Alfieri and the playwrights who followed him. Thus, our understanding of them (and Strehler’s as well) is inexorably linked to our understanding of Goldoni. Goldoni’s artistic squabbles with Gozzi and Chiari meant that in their own time, they were understood in relation to each other. When Strehler sought to reinforce the existing Italian canon and even expand it, he too had to wrestle with questions about what the ideal Italian theatre should be. In this way, Goldoni’s eighteenth-century Venice and Strehler’s early twentieth-century Milan are more closely linked than they first appear, despite the long, convoluted history that divides them. Furthermore, the censorship, political struggles, and economic woes that characterized much of the nineteenth century may actually have further contributed to the preservation of Goldoni’s reputation. During the years of occupation and the ensuing revolution, the paucity of dramatic output ensured that productions of Goldoni would further bolster his reputation as “Italy’s Moliere,” an assertion made by Goldoni’s contemporary, Voltaire. 9 Goldoni’s upbringing was thoroughly Venetian, with Jesuit education and an early infatuation with the arts. As a young man, Goldoni studied law despite his deep love of the stage. His father was relatively understanding of Carlo’s conflicted feelings, and he allowed his son’s theatrical pursuits to continue even as Carlo was completing his doctorate. Goldoni’s writing career got off to a slow start; he famously burned his musical drama Amalasunta after its rejection. Early attempts at serious writing also yielded little response. When he turned to writing comedy, his playwriting career eventually took off, allowing him to leave the legal profession behind (except for periods such as the mid 1740s, in which debt problems forced him to return to the law). His career can be broken down according to his associations with three theatres: the San Samuele (1734–1744), the Sant’Angelo (1748–1753), and the San Luca (1753–1762). 10 His early period tied him closely to the tradition of the commedia dell’arte (to be analyzed in chapter 2), as evidenced by his production of scenarios or incomplete plays that allowed the actors plenty of opportunity to improvise. One of these, in collaboration with famed actor Antonio Sacchi, led to the earliest version of Servitore di due padroni. Goldoni would wait a decade before writing a complete script of the play. It was not until the Sant’Angelo period that Goldoni’s program for reform truly emerged (the

Strehler and Goldoni in Context

5

works that best evidence the success of his ideas fall under the San Luca period). Goldoni’s reforms also coincided with his rivalry with differently minded playwrights Carlo Gozzi and, to a lesser extent, Pietro Chiari. In many ways, the Gozzi-Goldoni wars over the best approaches to Italian theatre ultimately helped define both men. These differences were rooted not only in their artistry, but also in their backgrounds. Heniz Riedt, along with a number of Goloni scholars, has noted that the playwright’s diverse and prolific output is at least partly rooted in economics: The competition with both men—to which Goldoni was compelled by the public’s constant demand for new material, as well as by financial insecurity (authors who wrote for the theater were paid little, and only by the work)— understandably, however, led to a few slips, such as his use of Martellian verse and occasional indulging in literary fads. 11

In contrast, Carlo Gozzi (1720—1803) was aristocratic and associated with the Accademia di Granelleschi (sometimes anglicized as “The Testicular Club”). 12 The Testicular Club was an elite, misogynistic circle who shared their writings and sought the preservation of Tuscan Italian and the veneration of Renaissance writers. This directly opposed Goldoni’s tactic of using local dialects appropriate to location or characters’ origins. They further differed in their viewpoints about commedia dell’arte and the appropriate stylistic approach for Italian playwriting. Prior to his confrontations with Gozzi, Goldoni had written about his proposed reforms in a number of ways, most notably in the play il Teatro Comico, or The Comic Theatre. The play finds a troupe of actors metatheatrically grappling with the changing nature of theatre. Along the way, the characters mouth Goldoni’s ideas about sophisticating comedy by freeing it of the indulgences of masked performers and embracing the truth of everyday people. In his introduction to the play, Goldoni writes, “This work which I entitle The Comic Theatre should be called less a Comedy in itself than a Foreward to all my Comedies. . . . I have tried here to state explicitly a large part of those defects which I myself have attempted to avoid.” 13 Goldoni goes on to excuse his periodic lapses into the traditions of improvisation by emphasizing the significance of his reformative efforts. These efforts put Goldoni into a pre-Gozzi conflict that introduced a third party to the reform debates of the mid-1700s: the abbot Pietro Chiari (1711–1785). The Jesuit Chiari criticized Goldoni’s work even as he imitated it. This battle of words is mostly keenly observed in the attacks and counterattacks surrounding Goldoni’s late-1740s play La Vedova Scaltra (The Artful Widow). Chiari responded with The School for Widows, enraging Goldoni further. In posterity, Chiari’s reputation as a writer is far less significant than that of Gozzi or Goldoni; however, his role in shaping Goldoni’s career is

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Chapter 1

crucial. In his biography A Servant of Many Masters, Timothy Holme suggests the publicity surrounding the feud furthered the playwriting careers of both men. 14 Holme goes on to point out that the decade between Goldoni’s dust-up with Chiari and his subsequent squabbles with Gozzi may have allowed public interest in Goldoni to wane. In other words, Goldoni’s disagreements with Gozzi may have similarly served as publicity for both writers. Initially, that publicity would mostly serve Goldoni. Gozzi and his Testicular Club cohorts began their attack on Goldoni in the late 1750s primarily through pamphlets and other non-theatrical writings beginning with a mock almanac published in 1756. 15 The famed turning point in the debate came when the two Carlos met during a chance encounter in a bookshop. A mixture of history and legend, the meeting climaxes with Goldoni challenging Gozzi to write a play of his own. Gozzi did, and the result, The Love of Three Oranges, was a commedia-inspired fable that turned out to be a huge hit with the public. It led Gozzi to write further fiabe which distinguished his point of view from that of Goldoni. Gozzi’s successes led Goldoni and Chiari to side with each other against the aristocrat. Some of Goldoni’s later plays faltered with the public, and he bid farewell to Italy with Le Baruffe Chiozzotte (The Squabbles at Chioggia), an ode to the common people who were so important to his playwriting aesthetic. Goldoni left Venice in 1762, never to return; he died in relative obscurity and poverty in France in 1793. Both Gozzi and Goldoni wrote memoirs detailing their theatrical careers; however, the differences between the two say a lot about both their personal and artistic bents. In his autobiography Useless Memoirs, Gozzi repeatedly criticizes Goldoni and his efforts to reform the theatre. Goldoni, whose French Memoires are notable in their efforts to shape his own legacy but highly questionable in terms of the accuracy of some of its information, does not mention Gozzi at all. Goldoni’s decline coincided with that of Venice itself, and his program of reform was complicated in the next century by the risorgimento (the nationalist movement that preceded Italy’s emancipation). While some factions within the country pushed for unity among the disparate Italian cultures (recognizing it was the only path to independence), other powerful forces were less encouraging. Some Italian scholars have asserted that the Catholic Church perpetuated divisiveness within the country with the following objective: “keeping Italy divided between two equal powers. . . . [With] one taking on the other, Rome would not fall under the control of either one.” 16 The notion that warring factions within Italy helped preserve the Church’s power is not limited to the pre-Unification years. The Church’s resistance to certain aspects of Unification in the late nineteenth century further emphasizes its complex relationship with Italy’s political process. Writing in 1899, just a few decades after unification, Bolton King makes similar assertions in his

Strehler and Goldoni in Context

7

analysis of the Law of Guarantees, which offered some freedom from the law for some of the church’s officials, but rendered others legally liable if they abused their powers: The Law passed through parliament on March 21, 1871; two months later the Pope refused to recognize or accept it. On July 2 the King took up his residence at Rome; on November 27 he opened parliament in the new capital. The great drama had come to its end. Italian Unity was completed by the capture of Rome; with the Law of Guarantees the first act of struggle with the Papacy was finished. That struggle still runs its course. 17

The Church was a potent force in the period that bridges Goldoni and Strehler, most notably in the ways in which the political climate may have impacted the reputation of Goldoni and his reforms. The complex history that divides Goldoni from Strehler is also what unites them. Like Goldoni, Strehler faced the challenge of creating an “Italian” theatre in a severely divided country. In Strehler’s case, the issue was compounded by two opposing drives in Postwar Italy. While Italy sought to create a national identity, it wanted to achieve it without sacrificing the identities of the individual regional cultures. This pervasive regionalism persisted well into the twentieth century and one of the most tangible, fundamental problems associated with it is the question of language. Should plays be written or performed in stage Italian or regional dialects? Strehler would confront this directly in his productions of Le Baruffe Chiozzotte, in which he made his actors learn to speak in an unfamiliar Venetian dialect. One of the key effects occupation and the independence movement had upon Italian culture was the shift in its cultural epicenter: “The political and cultural rise of Milan was directly paralleled by a decline in Venice. The thousand-year republic fell to the French in 1797 but its situation in the years before its fall was so difficult that many of its citizens welcomed occupation.” 18 During the height of the Settecento, Venetian theatre thrived. Following the occupation, Venice’s theatrical prominence faded quickly and Milan became the new artistic center of the still-fractious country. At that time, theatre and opera were subject to stringent government censorship; thus plays like those of Goldoni were less likely to be cut than more politically incendiary material. Although Venice would not remain in a state of permanent decline, the balance had clearly shifted towards Milan. Tellingly, Strehler’s revitalization and redefinition of the Italian theatre in the mid-twentieth century would happen in Milan, still the artistic nucleus of the country. Political struggles were not solely responsible for the fall of Venice and the rise of Milan as the country’s cultural capital. The popularity of another theatrical art form also played an important role in this change. Opera had a two-hundred-year history behind it and an established identity while plays were still trying to find a uniquely Italian voice. Opera (particularly Italian

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opera) was able to establish its reputation internationally, and thus enjoyed the greatest success of any Italian theatrical form during the nineteenth century. Therefore, it made both fiscal and artistic sense for Italian writers to devote themselves to writing libretti for operas rather than plays. The monetary motivations for the playwrights’ defection changed little following the liberation. What few subsidies had remained during the last period of occupation vanished as the newly united country struggled economically. In his examination of the political and cultural changes during the Risorgimento, Harry Hearder notes that “the prose and verse drama of the period had a short life.” 19 Hearder goes on to connect opera’s successes (in part) to the various nationalist movements: “[Opera] had been essentially an Italian invention. . . . It was in the nineteenth century that the opera reached its peak of popularity.” 20 Opera’s rising popularity was closely tied to Milan’s cultural blossoming because of the tremendous impact of one composer in particular: Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901). Carlson observes that Verdi’s popularity helped establish Milan’s La Scala as the world’s premiere opera house. 21 That Verdi eventually parted ways with La Scala for a period (over what today would be termed “artistic differences”) in no way hurt this reputation. In fact, by the mid-1800s, opera was increasingly an international phenomenon, and many of Italy’s star composers and performers toured other countries and sometimes established permanent residency there. The migration of Italian talent in some ways prevented opera houses in other areas from competing with La Scala. Another important innovation of the theatrical shift from Venice to Milan was the establishment of the first government-supported theatre, the Compagnia Italiana. Founded shortly after the turn of the nineteenth century, the Compagnia Italiana received an annual subsidy from the French government. While French and other foreign drama made up a considerable percentage of their repertory, the Compagnia Italiana regularly produced classic Italian plays—most often works by Goldoni. 22 The importance of the theatrical company in nineteenth-century Italian theatre was crucial and its influence extended beyond Milan. As repertory companies, they helped determine what works continued to hold the stage: “Its repertory, varied enough, was composed of Alfieri’s tragedies, Goldoni’s comedies, residuals of Chiari, of Gozzi, of Sografi, [and] Italian and foreign contemporary melodramas.” 23 The Italiana’s attempts to establish and perpetuate reportory parallels the work of the stabili (government subsidized) theatres of the twentieth century, of which Strehler’s Piccolo Teatro was the first. On the heels of the Compagnia Italiana, the Compagnia Reale Sarda was founded in Turin in 1820. The Reale Sarda followed the Milanese model closely, even recruiting Milanese actors for their initial company. While the Compagnia Reale Sarda ultimately lasted longer than its counterpart, the

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Compagnia Italiana, the burgeoning of theatre companies in the nineteenth century was an important turning point for theatre in Italy. Indeed the heyday of Italian actors at the end of the century would not have been possible without the companies, where most of those future stars began their training. Amidst the changing artistic environments and political upheavals, how was theatre affected? Most surveys of European history devote little or no attention to theatre in Italy in the nineteenth century, the critical consensus being that few (if any) noteworthy achievements were made during this period. One of the reasons for this assessment is the lack of an Italian dramaturgy. The nascent country’s artistic output was rich and diverse, perhaps so diverse that it did not yield the Italian equivalent of a Lessing. 24 Despite this, one way that Goldoni’s legacy can be traced in the nineteenth century is through the work of Giuseppe Moncalvo (1781-1859). His most significant contribution was his popularization of Meneghino, a commedia-esque character. While the well-known character had been around for quite some time, in Moncalvo’s hands, Meneghino came into sharper focus. Rather than a lover, a buffoon, or a doddering old man, Meneghino was a revolutionary whose razor-sharp bon mots reflected the satirical acumen of Moncalvo. Although the popularity of commedia had waned, this new interpretation of a familiar performance style helped preserve some of the ideas behind commedia. The actor-playwright Moncalvo wrote original pieces featuring the crowd-pleasing character Meneghino, but also inserted him into extant plays, both Italian works and those of other European countries. 25 It was the improvisatory aspects of Moncalvo’s performances that raised eyebrows among the censors. In performance, Moncalvo was famous for slipping in political humor, satirical commentary on the occupying regime and other unification propaganda. The character caused additional concern because he spoke in a Milanese dialect. The Austrians astutely recognized that language had been a powerful force in keeping the provinces separate. If Meneghino’s popularity continued to grow unabated, the language might spread with him. This theatrical and linguistic revolution never happened. Moncalvo’s career peaked at the uprisings of 1848. When the Austrians were restored to power, Moncalvo resorted to using a more obscure dialect to avoid the censors; however, his heyday had passed, just as commedia’s had. Although Moncalvo’s impact is relatively minor, his work does provide an interesting precursor to the Dialect Theatre movement of the following decades and serves as a parallel to Strehler’s work in the next century. Both Milan-based auteurs sought to revive commedia, albeit for different ends. In addition, both were politically minded, and the satirical edge of commedia was one of its key attractions. If Moncalvo’s legacy could be felt anywhere, it was in the eventual emergence of Italy’s Dialect Theatres. During the risorgimento and particularly in

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the last years leading up to unification, local theatres began focusing exclusively on productions in their own regional tongues. In smaller or more rural communities, mystery plays, and farces were popular. Many of these farces contained recognizable, recurring dialect characters, the heirs to the commedia characters of old. In larger cities, the more traditional types of plays held the stage, such as historical fiction plays (in which history served only as a loose framework for melodramatic conventions). In Venice, understandably, plays by Goldoni and Gozzi remained popular. Furthermore, many nineteenth-century playwrights wrote comedies in the style of Goldoni. Perhaps the most popular of these Goldoni-influenced playwrights was Paolo Ferrari (1822-1889), a playwright whose work often aped Goldoni’s style. In his 1851 comedy, Goldoni e le sue sedici commedie nuove (Goldoni and His Sixteen New Comedies), however, he took a different approach. Rather than mimic Goldoni’s style and stories, Ferrari dramatized the Goldoni-Gozzi artistic wars for comic effect. Satirizing (and vilifying) the longdead Gozzi was no threat to the censors. Ferrari’s work is the most cogent example of the way a later playwright’s imitative efforts preserved and augmented Goldoni’s style and reputation. If it can be argued that Ferrari and plays like Goldoni e le sue sedici commedie nuove helped cement Goldoni’s reputation as the classical Italian playwright, then their significance to Italian theatre history is this: they help establish a throughline between Goldoni and Strehler and move towards establishing an identity for the Italian theatre, a concern Strehler would face a century later. It is also worth noting that Strehler himself staged Ferrari’s play in 1958, providing his audience with further contextualization for Goldoni. Pointedly, it was this very play that prompted a letter to Ferrari that noted the financial and artistic difficulties of the theatre at that time: You have written a fine play, I am sure; your letter goes half-way to proving it. But for some time now all I can say is a quoi bon? What’s the use? By the time I have printed and posted up notices all over Turin advertising Goldoni and His Sixteen New Comedies I shall have 50 francs left—that’s 50 less than I need to pay the company’s wages. I tread the boards just to keep myself from perishing in the gutter. . . . Therefore, in four months’ time I shall be closing my business, selling the scenery for scrap, and taking the costumes to the rag dealers in the ghetto. . . . Consider me dead! 26

The concerns voiced by the letter’s author, Gustavo Modena (an important political and theatrical figure), highlight the practical difficulties that impacted theatre and its repertory in the nineteenth century. In such a climate, the Dialect Theatre movement made cultural and economic sense: it kept costs low while preserving local traditions and culture. The variety of dialect strains has a history almost as old as Italy itself. When coupled with the geographic issues presented earlier, it further under-

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lines the idea that regionalism has been an intrinsic part of Italian culture for centuries. The history of Italy’s questione della lingua has proven to be complicated, both socially and politically: Before the political unification of Italy, Italian was a language used, outside Tuscany and Rome, only by the literate few. Even by these, it was reserved chiefly for writing: in everyday conversation, the great majority of Italians either had to or chose to use one of the dialects of Italy or, in certain areas, a minority language such as French. By the end of the twentieth century, well over 90 per cent of Italians could speak the national language, but most still chose to use dialect or a minority language as well. 27

Even in the twenty-first century, the degree to which the Italian government should implement and mandate a national language is heatedly debated. Crucial to this debate is the fact that “standard” Italian is based on a literary tradition, not a spoken one. In the sixteenth century, it was decided that the fourteenth-century writers Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio were the standard in the beauty of the Italian language and thus, their Tuscan dialect was adopted as the “national” language. 28 Furthermore, only about five to ten percent of Italians were literate in Tuscan Italian when the country was unified in the latter part of the nineteenth century. 29 The unfamiliarity of Tuscan Italian was just one part of a much larger issue of illiteracy in Italy. An 1861 report on this issue revealed an eighty-percent illiteracy rate, proving just how widespread the problem was. 30 In this light, the Dialect Theatres were a product of a cultural milieu in which the localized spoken word was the primary means of communication. The Dialect movement also had a direct connection to Goldoni himself. One of the things that made Goldoni’s work revolutionary was his use of dialect in his writing (the Venetian idiom). While the use of dialect was not without its challenges in performance (as well as translation), it redefined what theatrical language could be. 31 The incorporation of local tongues was revolutionary and gave credence to the idea of theatre written to reflect the language of the people. A century later, following unification, the Dialect Theatre movement continued to develop this idea of plays about locals written in their own vernacular. Though the movement lasted into the early twentieth century, its peak was probably the 1880s and 1890s, yielding mixed results. Certainly, Dialect Theatres encouraged Italian playwriting, which otherwise suffered for much of the nineteenth century. The movement also helped propagate the rich diversity of writing attributable to the varying aesthetics and tastes of the different cities and regions. Furthermore, it also helped preserve attributes of previous forms, with stylistic nods to commedia and Goldoni. The downside, as always, was the regionalism it perpetuated. The popularity of these plays drowned out the cries of the few advocates who called for a more unified

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Italian dramatic writing. Even though many of these theatres performed plays translated from other dialects, they did little to confederate the regions or their theaters. The dialect issue would continue to plague the Italian theatre into the twentieth century, through Strehler’s time and beyond. If there was a positive aspect to the regionalism and dialect theatres, it was the verismo movement of the late nineteenth century. Like many countries, the term “realistic” began to appear with increasing frequency in writings about theatrical performances, most notably in regard to acting. The early “realism” gave way to its heightened counterpart, naturalism, which dominated the theatre in the years preceding and following the turn of the twentieth century. In Italy, this verismo worked in tandem with the regional nature of theatre at that time, and the dialect theatres were closely tied to the verismo movement: A more local but in the history of the Italian stage equally important effect of verism was the encouragement of dialect theatres, presenting pictures of common life in the language best suited to such portrayals. Led by Turin, Venice, Milan and Naples, most major cities of Italy had at least one significant dialect theatre by the end of the century. 32

Verismo first took hold in Italy in the mid-1880s and, as in other parts of Europe, it began as a literary movement before moving to the theatre. Mimicking patterns in other countries, the verists reacted against the popular entertainments of the day, attacking them as outmoded, irrelevant, and inartistic. Novelist and playwright Giovanni Verga (1840-1922) is arguably the most famous of the verists; he often adapted his own books and short stories into plays (some of which later became operas), such as Rustic Chivalry and The She-Wolf. Although it would seem easy to connect Italy’s versimo movement to Zola and the boom of naturalism in the late nineteenth century, it is important (and perhaps more accurate) to look at the movement in terms of its uniqueness to Italian culture at that time. While Zola provides an interesting counterpoint for comparison, Italian verismo differs in ways that are intrinsic to the very regionalism analyzed thus far. First, verismo should be understood in reaction to Italian theatre itself. Dating back to the heyday of commedia, Italian theatre troupes were organized under the capocomici or actor-managers who often served the function of the director. In the nineteenth century, as elsewhere in Europe and America, this translated to the star system, an actor-centric approach to the theatre. Indeed, the late nineteenth/early twentieth century was one of the great periods for Italian actors, with Salvini, Duse, and Rossi the most famous of the stars who dominated the stage during this period. These actors headlined touring companies that further established them as international stars. Although many star actors included Italian works in their repertory, the

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plays were consistently subject to drastic editing to suit the needs of the stars. Ancillary characters and scenes were cut, lead characters’ speeches were extended and stage business that played to the particular strengths of the star were added, all as a means to the same end: to keep the focus solely on the star throughout the performance. 33 The autocratic nature of the capocomici imposed a strict hierarchical structure upon Italian theatre companies: In every troupe there existed a strict hierarchy of acting ranks: the highest grade was the artista di cartello (an actor of international fame), followed by primo assoluto (one with a major national reputation and the right to choose his or her roles), primario (lead), secondario etc. down to the generico (bit player) and comparso (non-speaking part). 34

If this autocratic star system had potentially deleterious effects on Italian theatre, the verismo movement and the popularity of its plays helped change the way theatre was made in Italy: During the period of the ‘great actors,’ playwrights were very much at their mercy. But during the latter part of the nineteenth century, with the advent of versimo, two transformations took place. First, [respected playwrights] were in a position to command greater respect from the actors . . . Secondly, dialect was increasingly used for dramatic texts. Dialect was perceived as being closer to the linguistic reality of both characters and audience, and was also more acceptable to certain companies. 35

The verismo movement helped change Italy from an actor-centric theatre and made the advent of the regista (director) in the early twentieth century possible. Thus, the veristi shifted the theatrical culture in the direction of the auteur, which ultimately benefited artists like Strehler who sought to effect further change in the theatre. Beyond the changing of the star system, the verismo movement was also uniquely Italian in its social and political concerns, speaking to a kind of “regional nationalism” that verist drama embodied; it exemplified an emerging national identity created in part by highlighting the unique culture of each region. The movement also reflected economic and class differences, and the roles they played in the theatre-going public, particularly as these regions attempted to integrate into a united nation at the end of the nineteenth century. The unification, while a pivotal turn in Italian history, did not free Italy from its centuries-old cultural and economic problems. The impact of the pervasive regionalism could now be felt on economic lines, as the poorer, southern part of the country grew increasingly resentful of the richer North and the uneven distribution of wealth. The battle for independence had also left the country virtually barren of industry and resources. A large national

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debt, massive illiteracy, and restricted voting privileges hit the already poor South particularly hard. 36 Veristic dialect drama, then, spoke to the cultural difficulties created by unification; difficulties to which the Fascist culture of early twentieth-century Italy responded by advocating a different kind of nationalism. It was once again Milan that birthed a significant new artistic movement in Italy in the early 1900s: Futurism. Although, the movement would later spread to Venice, Florence and Rome following World War I, its genesis was in Milan. The Futurists sought to create new artistic forms in reaction against everything traditional in the theatre, including verist dramas. They attacked these institutions as stale and outmoded and derided them for their saccharine, sentimentalized emotions. Futurist theatre was confrontational, political, and at times deliberately synthetic—it sought to combine a variety of forms (including poetry, music, and scenes) to create a decidedly antirealistic effect. For example, “one sintesi entitled Feet consisted of seven brief scenes in which the audience could hear dialogue but see only the performers’ feet.” 37 In Futurist offerings, the proscenium was stripped away along with the fourth wall and the audience was forced into direct contact and conflict with the performers and the performance itself. 38 The First Wave of Futurism, based in Milan, started in the first years of the twentieth century. By the early 1910s, manifestos began cropping up, and by the middle of the decade, Futurism had found its way into the performing arts. Early Futurist theatre was characterized by much experimentation as theatre artists employed an ever-changing variety of tactics to assault their audiences. The Second Wave of Futurism, after the War, evolved into a much more established form. These forms were based on the ideals of the Futurist companies, who spread throughout the country after the war and even into the provinces. 39 One of the most important long-term effects of Futurisum was its influence on much of the experimental political theatre of the 60s and 70s (for example Julian Beck’s Living Theatre in the United States). Furthermore, some of its tenets would appear later in Strehler’s work, specifically the political bent and the breaking down of barriers between the audience and the players. In a similar vein, Strehler’s work was influenced by another theatre movement concurrent with futurism and Fascist drama: the Grotesque. As with many of the avant-garde theatrical movements in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the lines between the Grotesque and some of its contemporary counterparts often become blurred. Like Fascist and Futurist drama, the Grotesque was based in social and political commentary and observations. It was, in short: a genre of theater wherein the passions and tragedies of life are mechanically simplified and shockingly distorted. The grotesque incorporates positivistic

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disenchantment, social criticism, and an unusual concept of ethics which denies traditional values and leans toward a relativistic philosophy. Authors adhering to it scorn such a miserable mode of existence. They expose contradictions, absurdities, vanity, [and] hypocrisy. 40

Jack D. Street rightfully notes the parities between the goals of the Futurist and Grotesque movements, noting 1916 as a pivotal year in which the overall dissatisfaction with traditional theatre that often leads to the development of new forms had reached a critical mass. The two movements were united in their “contempt for the general theater public” and its willingness to settle for banality. 41 Nineteen-sixteen is also a starting point for any discussion of the Grotesque because it marks the date of the short-lived movement’s seminal play, The Mask and the Face by Luigi Chiarelli. The Grotesque embodied a variety of approaches to playwriting, but the various plays can be united in their spirit of revolt. As Chiarelli himself explained, the play “was born of a critical as well as philosophical and polemical position . . . shattering the prevailing threadbare norms on which European dramatic literature is based.” 42 In its unwillingness to accept what passed for theatrical entertainment, the Grotesque served as a key influence on Strehler and the Piccolo Teatro. As the title of Chiarelli’s play suggests, the Grotesque often focuses on masks (in Chiarelli’s case, social ones). The idea of social masking and unmasking was particularly important to Strehler’s take on the ages-old commedi dell’arte. These stylistic overtones of both the Grotesque and commedia aspects manifested themselves in Strehler’s work with both Goldoni and Pirandello, a playwright whose early work is often connected to the Grotesque movement. Strehler also worked on several Pirandello plays throughout his career (most notably, his multiple productions of the uncompleted The Mountain Giants—the ending of which was improvised, commedia-style, by Strehler’s company). Just as Goldoni’s reputation was shaped by Enlightenment-era Venice, Pirandello’s was shaped in part by the Fascist Italian government. His association with Mussolini was and continues to be a source of controversy and critical debate; however, the support of Il Duce indubitably brought Pirandello national and international notoriety. In this way, Fascism affected not only the political and social culture in which Strehler began his work at the Piccolo, but the artistic environment as well. The rise of Fascism in Italy and its effects have been interpreted a number of ways: From the start, there were those who argued that Fascism was to be seen as a nasty and regrettable aberration or mistake, which one of Italy’s most famous intellectuals, Benedetto Croce, called a “parenthesis” in Italian history, a “gap” in Italy’s development which had little relation to what happened in Italy before or afterwards. Others, alternatively, thought that Fascism was, in the

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Chapter 1 famous description of an anti-Fascist writer of the 1920s, the autobiography of the nation. 43

Perhaps some truth can be found in both the notion that Fascism was deeply rooted in Italian culture or that it was a kind of anomaly. The politics of Strehler’s theatre in the early years of the Piccolo Teatro were largely defined by their reaction against Fascism and what it left behind. Yet it also wrestled with the same regional-versus-national concerns that may have facilitated Fascism’s rise in the post-Risorgimento. Fascism also counteracted the establishment of repertory that had begun in the previous century. The traveling-company system that dominated Italian theatre in the 1800s had a profound effect on the repertory and how it was handed down. In many ways, it preserved the traditions of characters, plays, and performance styles from other periods. The apprenticing of younger actors in each generation created a kind of through-line in that the performance of certain plays and characters had “signature moments” that the audiences could always count on seeing. The downside to this system (as elsewhere) was that many of the plays became stylistically petrified; the theatre artists’ desire to preserve what was special about the plays was precisely what stripped them of that specialty. Fascism’s oppression of theatre up to the end of World War II ultimately presented the next generation of artists with a relatively clean slate from which to develop new approaches and perspectives in opposition to the remaining outmoded systems. Yet Fascism alone is not solely responsible for the relative dearth of Goldoni productions in the first half of the twentieth century. The analysis thus far finds that a variety of cultural influences contributed to Goldoni’s reputation at the time of the founding of the Piccolo. First, the star system that dominated the late nineteenth century largely sidelined Goldoni in favor of showcases for the star players. Plays during this period were subject to the rewriting and indulgence that plagued this kind of vehicular approach to theatre. Moving into the twentieth century, veristic, futuristic, and grotesque writers rebelled against this type of drama. As a result, many of the plays (both the “classics” like Goldoni and his later imitators) were grouped together with the actor-driven production methods as a kind of ossified, monolithic museum art which these newer forms intended to destroy or reinvent. With the advent of Fascism (and the severe limits that censorship and inconsistent government support), the theatre went into a kind of artistic hibernation. Finally, there is the difference in language and culture. Goldoni’s depictions (often critical ones) were of a society that was, if not decadent, at the very least indulgent. That indulgence was easily dismissible as frivolity in a country with such a strong socialist, anti-capitalist base. In addition, the plays were written in a tongue that was both aristocratic and anachronistic. This language barrier was in many was emblematic of the changes the country

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itself had undergone in the century and a half between Goldoni and Strehler. Goldonian Venice, with its old-fashioned aristocracy, mercantilism, and semi-rural life was no longer relevant. Early twentieth-century Milan, which had long since superseded Venice, embodied everything modern in Italian culture. As the cultural and financial capital of the country, it had led the move to urbanization in the decades preceding the founding of the Piccolo. Fascism’s entrenchment in Italian culture in the years during and between World Wars I and II defined the artistic milieu leading up to its liberation in 1945. The Fascist regime was in full control in Italy by the mid-1920s and its rise coincided with a turning point for theatre in Italy. Much like the theatres of the Syndicate in America, Italian theatres in the first two decades of the twentieth century became increasingly commercialized as more and more of them fell under control of corporate trusts. While these trusts did create some stability and regulation in theatres, the need for profit usurped artistic concerns and in some respects inhibited artistic growth. Broad comedy and foreign dramas continued to be the most popular attractions, overshadowing native Italian drama. In addition, the country was still less than half a century old and its growing pains were reflected in the content and attendance of the theatre. Large portions of the country were still undereducated and underpaid, so theatre-going was often not a priority or even a possibility for a significant segment of the population. 44 The lack of support for native Italian drama continued in the early years of Fascism: The first thing to underline, and that is confirmed by the examination of the repertory, is represented by the continuity between the preFascist scene and that of Fascism in the first seven, eight years of the regime. A clear sign of Mussolini’s substantial disinterest in theatre. Nevertheless, it cannot be said that he cut himself off from all things theatrical. 45

This apparent apathy changed somewhat when Mussolini later realized that theatre might serve as a tool for Fascist propaganda. Il Duce famously spoke of a teatro di massa, or “theatre of the masses,” which was supposed to reach out to all corners of the population, particularly the poor, whose attendance was being increasingly siphoned off by the more affordable cinemas. Mussolini’s interest in the masses aligned with his Fascist goals for the country and his belief in the emotional power theatre could have. He envisioned stadiumlike theatres that would provide the ultimate platform for educating the masses. In his own words, Mussolini addressed what he saw as a “crisis” in the theatre: The art work of the stage has to possess the wide-ranging appeal that people are asking for. It must stir great collective passions and must be imbued with a sense of vivid and deep humanity. It has to present matters that truly count in

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Chapter 1 people’s spiritual life and that reflect their aspirations. We have had enough of the obsession with this ill-famed ‘theatre of adultery’! The spectrum of these ‘triangular’ complications has at last been exhausted. Allow the collective passions to find dramatic representation, and you’ll see the stalls crowded with people again. 46

Unfortunately, these ideas were not always backed up with monetary support. A growing interest from theatre artists in a National Theatre in the mode of France and other European countries became particularly strong in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Part of this interest was fueled by concerns over the power exerted by the corporate trusts over Italian theatre and its repertory. Despite some promises made early in the movement, no funding was provided and the movement died off. 47 This made the Piccolo Teatro’s role as the first stabile (government-supported) theatre following the end of World War II that much more significant given the limitations of government support for theatre during the Fascist reign. In place of a National Theatre, Mussolini began to focus his efforts on regulating the existing theatres. Echoing the theatrical climate of a century earlier, censorship became increasingly rigid and widespread. Local prefects had the right to close down any productions they felt were in moral violation. In 1935, the Ispettorato del Teatro or Theatre Inspectorate, was established. The Inspectorate further moderated the country’s theatrical output to ensure that it was in line with the goals of the regime. Censorship on both the national and municipal level became even more widespread and the content of what was acceptable for the stage narrowed further. 48 Since the government could not pour a lot of money into the theaters themselves, they put their resources into regulating the existing theatres. In 1930, the Corporazione dello Spectacolo was formed. Much to their chagrin, the Corporation usurped the trusts as the controlling economic force in the majority of Italian theaters. The Corporation managed wages and other theatrical regulations and brought about a stability-with-a-price similar to what the trusts had achieved a few decades earlier. Fascist government organizations also instituted “Theatre Saturdays,” which offered drastically reduced ticket prices to make drama more affordable to the masses Mussolini so desperately sought. The movement met with some success, as did the Mussolini regime’s attempt to celebrate classic Roman drama by staging it in restored ancient theatres—a statement about Italy’s powerful artistic and military legacy. In light of these developments, it is only logical that in this environment, drama specifically devoted to Fascist ideals appeared. 49 The First World War loomed large over early Fascist drama and was personified onstage by the struggle between the socialist and the Fascist. In many of these plays, “misguided” socialists eventually see the light and convert to Fascism by the end of the story. So many of the plays dealt with

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military or ex-military characters that the ghost of the Great War could almost be considered another character in these works. Often, these political struggles were placed on the family plane, placing brothers or fathers and sons on opposite sides of the ideological fence. 50 The inevitable conversion became part of the formula for Fascist drama, most of which followed a very familiar structure. Political theatre is often synonymous with nonrealistic (even abstract) settings, caricatures, or archetypes rather than characters and a profusion of direct contact with the audience. None of these elements were present in traditional Fascist drama. Indeed, the plays themselves would seem to have been plucked right out of the late 1800s, save for the political content and references to the War. By the time of the Second World War, the struggles of those in combat left the wings and became more prevalent onstage. This should have provided the ideal platform for mouthing Fascist rhetoric, but in fact, it had the opposite effect. As had been the case in plays from other countries, an increasing focus on the individual changed the response of the audience. Suddenly, the War was a personal struggle, and the sacrifices of the individual for the good of the state no longer struck the balance that the Fascists might have hoped they would. Ironically, the avant-garde structures and aesthetics that Fascist playwrights rejected might ultimately have served them better. 51 In many ways, the challenges that faced Italy in the postwar period of 1945–1947 mirrored those it faced during the unification of the late 1800s. Italy’s reconstruction lasted until the mid-1950s, but its most formative years were the two following the end of the War in 1945. Although the overall economic impact of the War on the Italian economy may not have been exclusively negative (due in part to the Mussolini government’s massive industrialization during the Fascist regime), the reality was that Italy was politically and economically devastated. The early years of the reconstruction were marked by mass poverty, high unemployment, and huge inflation (with some estimates stating that prices in 1947 had increased thirty-two-fold from prices in 1938). 52 Politically, the country was severely divided as a plethora of partisanships lobbied for control over the newly liberated nation. Among the most potent of these groups were the Action Party, the Liberal Party, the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, and the ultimately victorious Christian Democratic Party. Under the leadership of Alcide De Gasperi, Italy abolished the monarchy that had nurtured the Fascist regime and became a Republic on June 2, 1946. 53 Although anti-Fascism colored all of the political and social reform, it did not stop the Communist and Socialist parties from being important forces in their own right, often accounting for as much as thirty percent of the electoral vote. 54 Both parties suffered from the anti-Fascist climate, particularly the Socialists, who broke from the Communists in the early 1920s

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shortly before Mussolini’s rise to power—they were often blamed for not preventing Il Duce’s takeover. The anti-Fascist, communist, and socialist sentiments had a major impact on the art of that period as neorealism became the defining force of the early postwar years. Wary of repeating the totalitarian control of the previous two decades, Italy saw a renewed regionalism as local culture was celebrated while regional municipalities were given more political autonomy. Artistically, this was reflected in a rejection of all things corporate and materialistic (indeed, a subsidiary strain of this idea resulted in strong anti-Americanism, as Italians viewed the United States as the embodiment of imperialism and materialism). As a movement, neorealism (to be analyzed further in chapter 4) began with literature but is most commonly associated with film, characterized by: on-location shooting, non-professional actors, lengthy takes, unobtrusive editing, natural lighting, a predominance of medium and long shots, respect for the continuity of time and space, use of contemporary, true-to-life subject matter, rejection of conventional dramatic structure, open-ended plot workingclass characters, dialogue in the vernacular, active viewer involvement and implied or overt social criticism. 55

Italian scholar Ann Hallamore Caesar notes that the industrial and economic boom that followed Italy’s initially shaky recovery from the war created an environment where new writing practices were possible and encouraged. Also, the neorealists were most closely associated with capturing the emotional, political, and social tumult of the postwar moment. Once that moment had passed, new creative venues were needed to express both contemporary sentiments and views of recent and distant history. 56 The history analyzed thus far puts Strehler and the birth of the Piccolo Teatro in a unique position. First, the regionalism intrinsic to Italy defined much of its political history in the years in between Goldoni and Strehler. Following the Second World War, the long shadow cast by Fascism resulted in a resurgence of regionalism that had been suppressed by Mussolini in the years leading up to the founding of the Piccolo Teatro in 1947. Theatrically, the country’s stunted sociopolitical growth contributed to a spotty dramatic output in the century-and-a-half between Goldoni and Strehler. Furthermore, the dominance of film placed theatre in a precarious place. All of this made Strehler’s artistic choices, his success with the Piccolo Teatro and his “rediscovery” of Goldoni all the more important. In a country experiencing its second rebirth, Strehler played a crucial role in its artistic development. Politics, government, and war were not merely ideological interests to Strehler, they were part of his experience. At the end of World War II, Strehler served in the military for two years and, for a time, was a prisoner of war. Thus, he had firsthand experience of the effects of Fascism. Strehler had

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been trained as an actor, but eventually found his way to dramatic criticism (as did his soon-to-be-partner, Paolo Grassi). Being a drama critic has often provided future directors, playwrights, and actors with a forum from which to express their unique opinions on what the state of theatre is and what it should be. For Strehler and Grassi, their writings in Milano Sera and Avanti, respectively, proved even more useful; they allowed them to lay the foundation for their work at the Piccolo. As they decried the staleness of the French boulevard plays that were commonly produced throughout the country, they simultaneously planted the seeds for building an audience for the kind of theatre they would create at the Piccolo. Dramatic criticism also whetted Strehler’s appetite for directing (which he had begun exploring during the war and periodically after his return). This two-pronged attack allowed Strehler to call for new types of theatre and then present examples of them to the public. 57 In the early stages of planning a theatre company together, Grassi and Strehler happened upon an abandoned cinema on the Via Rovello in the heart of the city and broke into it. After looking at the space with Grassi, Strehler stayed in the theatre thinking over all the logistics of creating a new company. His four-hour deliberation inside the theatre is the stuff of legends: an oftrepeated anecdote in many writings about the beginnings of the Piccolo. The image of a galvanized Strehler bursting from the darkened playhouse with a plan to change Italian theatre forever has a kind of bold theatricality that the director himself might have appreciated. 58 In reality, their approach to the foundation of the company was quite practical: they knew they needed financial backing. Both campaigned furiously in every venue and forum possible, ultimately succeeding by securing government support. With the help of the mayor and other officials, the theatre was given to them rent-free, and they were provided with a government subsidy that allowed them to convert the space for its opening in the summer of 1947. Strehler and Grassi were also pragmatic about how they were going to continue to build an audience for the kind of theatre they wanted to produce. They made it their goal to balance the popular with the artistic, refusing to compromise one for the other: “Therefore, it will not be experimental theatre and not even a specialty theatre, closed off in an elitist circle. But, instead, an art theatre for all.” 59 In this light, concluding their first season with Goldoni makes perfect sense. Along with Alfieri and Pirandello, Goldoni was one of Italy’s best-known playwrights. In an international first season that included Gorky and Calderon, finishing with an Italian classic was an astute decision, both artistically and commercially. Goldoni was also an ideal choice because he was both famous and yet ripe for “rediscovery,” an oxymoron made possible by Mussolini’s govern-

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ment. Strehler and Grassi lamented the state of the Italian repertory in the years leading up to and including the Second World War: Between 1930 and 1943 the Italian stage was dominated not by neoclassical drama, but by dramas of adultery, the worst boulevard theatre, the worst “French” theatre. This was the time of Bernstein and all the little Italian Bernsteins. Lavedan replaced Alfieri, Sardou replaced Shakespeare, Scribe replaced Goldoni. 60

The Piccolo’s founders described a theatrical climate marked by the conspicuous absence of one of Italy’s most famous playwrights for much of this period. Thus, Strehler had the opportunity to introduce Goldoni to the younger generations. For the older population, Goldoni was familiar, but that familiarity had been dampened by the Fascist regime. In a sense, the Fascist culture of the thirties and early forties made Strehler’s rediscovery of Goldoni possible. Furthermore, since the Piccolo defined itself in its manifesto in terms of what it was reacting against, the regime’s remnants gave Strehler and the Piccolo clear artistic goals. In addition to the importance of Strehler “reinventing” Goldoni in the Piccolo’s first season, his choice of which Goldoni text to inaugurate that reinvention was culturally astute. Arlecchino servitore di due padroni was not necessarily the most well known or beloved of Goldoni’s plays, making it easier for Strehler to put his stamp upon it. In I comici goldoniani, Luigi Ferrante presents a history of the major performers and productions of Goldoni from 1721 to 1960. 61 In reviewing his compendium of repertories from various nineteenth-century companies, Servitore appears only a handful of times. Of the other Goldoni plays that Strehler would later direct, the most commonly recurring one in the repertories is Le baruffe chiozzotte, with Il campiello, Gli innamorati, La putta onorata and La vedova scaltra not far behind. Also conspicuously absent were the plays of the Villeggiatura trilogy. It is arguable that the stage tradition of Goldoni is as difficult to define as the identity of Italy itself. While the anti-Fascist push after World War II did engender a kind of nationalism, the country as a whole sought to reinforce the uniqueness of its regions. Thus, while Goldoni was arguably one of (if not the) most well-known playwrights, his renown was more literary than performance based. Strehler, then, had the unique opportunity to create a new tradition for producing Goldoni for the stage. The differences between Strehler and Goldoni would provide unique creative and artistic challenges for the director in his interpretations of the Venetian playwright in the modern Milanese environ. Despite these differences, both Goldoni and Strehler found themselves reacting against established norms that they believed had become ossified

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and outdated. If Goldoni lost the battle with Gozzi, he won the war with the help of artists like Strehler in preserving and reinventing his reputation in posterity. The variety Strehler would bring to these Goldoni productions would become the hallmark of his career. In 1947, Strehler began redefining Goldoni and his history for Italian audiences. In return, Goldoni helped define Strehler and his aesthetic over the next fifty years. NOTES 1. Margaret Plant, Venice: Fragile City (New Haven: Yale, 2002): 11. 2. Joseph Spencer Kennard, Goldoni and the Venice of His Time (New York: Macmillan, 1920): 501. 3. John Julius Norwich, A History of Venice (New York: Knopf, 1982): 584. 4. Spencer M. DiScala, Italy: From Revolution to Republic, 1700 to the Present (Boulder: Westview, 2004): xix. 5. Norwich, 608-610. 6. Joanne M. Ferraro, Venice: History of the Floating City (Cambridge: New York, 2012): 201. 7. Ibid., 201-202. 8. Marvin Carlson, The Italian Stage From Goldoni to D’Annunzio (Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 1981): 4-6. 9. Heinz Reidt, Carlo Goldoni Molinaro, Ursule, trans. (New York, Ungar: 1974): 9. 10. Piermario Vescovo, “Carlo Goldoni, Playwright and Reformer.” in A History of Italian Theatre eds. Joseph Farrell and Paolo Puppa. (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2006): 160. 11. Riedt, 39-40. 12. John Louis DiGaetani, Carlo Gozzi: A Life in the 18th Century Venetian Theater, an Afterlife in Opera (Jefferson: McFarland, 2000): 76-91. 13. Carlo Goldoni, The Comic Theatre John W. Miller, trans. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1969. 14. Timothy Holme, A Servant of Many Masters (London: Jupiter, 1976): 135-36. 15. Ibid., 144. 16. tener divisa l’Italia tra due equali potenze….l’una intraprendendo sopra l’altra, Roma non cedesse sotto la servitu dell’una o della’altra. Francesco Malgeri, “Le radici del Risorgimento: Il problema storiografico.” Le radici del Risorgimento (Fonte Avellana: Centro di studi avellaniti, 1996): 10. 17. Bolton King, A History of Italian Unity (being a Political History of Italy from 1814 to 1871) (Scribner’s: New York, 1899): 382. 18. Carlson, 45. 19. Hearder, Harry. Italy in the Age of the Risorgimento (London: Longman, 1983): 267. 20. Ibid., 267-268. 21. Carlson, 108-114. 22. Ibid., 40. 23. Il suo repertorio, assai vario, era composto di tragedie alfieriane, commedie goldoniane, residui del Chiari, del Gozzi, del Sografi, drammoni contemporanei italiani e stranieri. Silvio D’Amico, Storia del teatro drammatico (Milan: Garzanti, 1950): 80. 24. Mario Apollonio, Storia del Teatro Italiano Vol. 2 (Florence: G.C. Sansoni, 1954): 54445. 25. Marvin Carlson, The Italian Stage From Goldoni to D’Annunzio, 112-113. 26. Costetti, Il teatro italiano nel 1800, Rptd. in Gunter Burghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre 1909-1944 (Clarendon: Oxford, 1998): 17. 27. Bryan Richardson, “Questions of Language.” Rptd. in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture, eds. Zygmunt G. Baranski and Rebecca J. West (New York: Cambridge, 2001): 63.

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28. Ibid., 63. 29. Ibid., 64-65. 30. Indro Montanelli and Paolo Granzotto, Sommario di storia d’Italia: dall’Unita ai giorni nostri (Milan: Rizzoli, 1986): 5. 31. Claudio Marazzini, La lingua italiana: Profilo storico (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994): 333335. 32. Marvin Carlson, The Italian Stage From Goldoni to D’Annunzio, 162. 33. Gunter Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre 1909-1944 (Clarendon: Oxford, 1998): 14-17. 34. Ibid., 12. 35. Anna Laura Lepschy, “Drama: realism, identity and reality on stage.” Rptd. in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture, 198. 36. Spencer M. DiScala, Italy: From Revolution to Republic, 1700 to the Present, 152-6. 37. Donatella Fischer. “The March of the Avant Garde” in Puppa, 287. 38. DiScala. 8. 39. Ibid., 3-9. 40. Michael Vena, Italian Grotesque Theater (London: Associated University Press, 2001): 18. 41. Jack D. Street, Introduction to The Italian Theater of the Grotesque: A New Theater for the Twentieth Century (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2003): 2. 42. Chiarelli in Vena, 14. 43. Philip Morgan, Italian Fascism 1915-1945, Second ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004): 3-4. 44. Doug Thompson, “The Organisation, Fascistisation and Management of Theatre in Italy, 1925-1943.” Rptd. in Fascism and Theatre, ed. Gunter Berghaus (Oxford: Bergham, 1996): 9495. 45. Il primo elemento da sottolineare, e che é confermato dall’esame del repertorio, e rappresentato dalla continuità fra la scena preFascista e quella Fascista nei primi sette, otto anni del regime. Un segno questo del sostanziale disinteresse di Mussolini per il teatro. Eppure non si può dire che egli fosse digiuno di cose teatrali. Giovanni Antonucci, Storia del teatro italiano (Rome: Edizioni Studium, 1986): 111. 46. Roberto Forges Davanzati, “Mussolini parla agli scrittori.” Nuova Antologia 1468 (16 May 1933): 191. Rptd. in Pietro Cavallo, “Theatre Politics of the Mussolini Regime and Their Influence on Fascist Drama,” 47. Doug Thompson, Fascism and Theatre, 96-97. 48. Ibid., 100-106. 49. Ibid. 50. Pietro Cavallo, Fascism and Theatre, 119-120. 51. Ibid., 128-129. 52. Pietro Cafaro, “Postwar Reconstruction,” Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture, ed. Gino Moliterno (London: Routledge, 2000): 467. 53. Spencer M. DiScala, Italy: From Revolution to Republic, 1700 to the Present, 304. 54. David Forgacs, Italian Culture in the Industrial Era: 1880-1980. (New York: Manchester, 1990): 153. 55. Millicent Marcus, “Neorealism.” Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture, 398. 56. Ann Hallamore Caesar, “Post-War Italian Narrative: An Alternative Account.” Italian Cultural Studies: An Introduction, ed. David Forgacs and Robert Lumely (New York: Oxford, 1996): 250. 57. David L. Hirst, Giorgio Strehler (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1993): 4-5. 58. Ibid., 5-6. 59. Non dunque teatro sperimentale e nemmeno teatro d’eccezione, chiuso in una cerchia d’iniziati. Ma, invece, teatro d’arte, per tutti. Giorgio Guazzotti, Teoria e realta del Piccolo Teatro di Milano (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1965): 48. 60. Giorgio Strehler and Paolo Grassi, “Sixteen Years of The Piccolo Teatro.” Tulane Drama Review 8:3 (1964): 31. 61. Luigi Ferrante, I comici goldoniani (Bologna: Cappelli, 1961).

Chapter Two

(Re)Discovering Commedia dell’Arte

In taking on Goldoni, Strehler knew the lack of familiarity and outmoded performance styles were considerable obstacles. As the previous chapter indicated, Strehler had the opportunity to help define Goldoni for his public in the postwar years—however, that definition needed to reflect and comment on the ideas and attitudes of postwar Italy: “With the Second World War and the immediate Postwar years, Italy plunged tragically into modernity, after years of having been a solemn province with its head full of modernist dreams and its roots in the country.” 1 In the years immediately following the end of World War II, Italy was in a kind of adolescence—full of energy, ideas, optimism, and an eagerness for change, yet at the same time wary of authority. In short, the country found itself in an identity crisis and just as the numerous governmental organizations attempted to define their newly independent country through political ideology, so too did artists of all disciplines who were reinvigorated by the freedom afforded to them following the fall of Fascism. Therefore, if Strehler helped define Goldoni’s public perception and performance style during these formative years, then the need to understand Strehler’s approach becomes that much more important because it was a part of the larger movement in Italy to establish its identity as a nation. In this vein, the selection of material was crucial: The saying went, in an Italian theatre, that if you put on a Goldoni work, you would find yourself in an empty theatre. Ours was a fight—difficult for you all to imagine—, a violent battle against the bad theatrical productions of Goldoni, that had taken that extraordinary author far from the public. The public did not accept him then, as in a certain sense it now also refuses Alfieri. To announce Alfieri’s Oreste, even now, is the equivalent of frightening the pub-

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lic, because with Alfieri, we have not finished rebuilding his reputation, as we’ve succeeded in doing with Goldoni. 2

By starting with the less familiar Servitore di due padroni, Strehler increased his chances of surprising his audience with something new. One possible explanation for the familiarity of other Goldoni plays like Le baruffe chiozzotte in comparison to the relative obscurity of Servitore in the years leading up to the founding of the Piccolo was the subject matter itself. Chiozzotte focused on the everyday life and struggles of the members of a working class fishing community, while Servitore was an old-fashioned comedy of mistaken identity built around middle-class characters. Furthermore, much of the humor in Servitore revolved around the title character’s misfortunes—many stemming from the two gentlemen he was trying to serve. The popular appeal of Le baruffe chiozzotte would also explain the absence of the Villeggiatura plays. Although not upper class, the characters in the Villeggiatura were middle class and the tone of the Villeggiatura plays was more serious, which may have diminished their popular appeal. In addition, familiar characters like Pantalone and Arlecchino appeared in some of the other Goldoni plays that continued to be performed, further diminishing the demand for Servitore productions. Most significantly, Servitore was an ensemble piece (albeit with the most prominent role being Truffaldino), while others like La locandiera were star vehicles and, thus, held the stage during the star-driven late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In keeping with this ensemble spirit, Strehler and his company dedicated themselves to infusing his now-titled Arlecchino servitore di due padroni with the traditions of the commedia dell’Arte of the Italian Renaissance. With his first Goldoni venture, the 1947 production of Arlecchino, Strehler strove to rediscover commedia and present it to an audience that had lost touch with it. To do so, Strehler needed to decide what specific elements he wanted to use and how he would incorporate them into his production. In a sense, he had to understand Servitore’s place in Goldoni’s work and then decide what purpose it would serve in his own time. The Gozzi-Goldoni battle over the need (or lack thereof) for reforms in the Italian theatre is somewhat ironic now, given that elements of one of the country’s most famous theatrical forms—commedia dell’arte—appears in the writings of both men. Ultimately, Goldoni was a reformer while Gozzi was not. In Goldoni’s The Comic Theatre, two of Goldoni’s characters discuss their perceptions about the future of theatre in terms of commedia: Eugenio:

Then do you think that we should do away with improvised comedies altogether?

Orazio:

Altogether, no. In fact, it’s a good thing that Italians continue to do what other countries have never dared. . . .

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We have some excellent actors in Italy who do our country and our profession great honor [. . .]. Eugenio:

But our masked characters usually find it very difficult to act when their roles have been written out.

Orazio:

Ah, but when a masked character is given a role that has been written with charm and wit and is well suited to his nature. . . . He will gladly memorize the part.

Eugenio:

Couldn’t we do away with the masks in our comedies?

Orazio:

Heaven help us if we ever made such an innovation. . . . We shouldn’t eliminate them altogether we should try instead to use them properly and to support them in their ridiculousness, even next to the most clever and graceful of serious characters. 3

In this scene, it becomes evident that, for Goldoni, the only way to preserve commedia is to write it down in literary form. For Gozzi, this is theatrical blasphemy: Written works meant to be staged have always fallen short of their intended lives, inducing boredom in a very short time unless they could count on something new to sustain them. . . . Improvised comedy remains always the same, its only variation being the difference that comes with the different wits that represent it. Although it has been continuously opposed in the past three centuries, it nevertheless continues to exist, and I leave to the Italians of the future the task of witnessing its survival in times to come. 4

Both Gozzi and Goldoni saw in commedia a great theatrical tradition; where they differed was in their attempts to preserve and celebrate that tradition. Gozzi asserted not only the “traditional” view of commedia dell’arte but his own role in preserving that tradition, stating that his retention of the masks of the stock characters was a “tour de force of art.” 5 Strehler was forced to confront the same conundrum nearly two centuries later. Arlecchino servitore di due padroni was Strehler’s first Goldoni play and would be a touchstone in his career even if he had not gone on to reshape, redirect, and update the play numerous times over the next fifty years. The Crow, despite receiving several productions at the Piccolo, was the only play of Gozzi’s that Strehler directed. It was the work of Goldoni that Strehler devoted so much of his career to directing, perhaps because his views on commedia mirrored those of Goldoni. He knew he could not recapture something that was inherently ephemeral, so he sought instead to recreate key characteristics of commedia as a way of resuscitating and sustaining this tradition.

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The play itself was improvised from a scenario, and then eventually written before the height of Goldoni’s reformative efforts. Therefore, it is possible to see another consideration in Strehler’s selection of it for the Piccolo’s first season: he was mirroring the path followed by Goldoni in reforming the theatre by reintroducing certain performance traditions that would later be sophisticated. Servitore remains one of the most significant records of the commedia tradition, as its plot and characters mirror those of the improvised form. The Servant of Two Masters is a three-act play that follows the exploits of Truffaldino (renamed “Arlecchino” in Strehler’s production), the titular servant who finds himself in a double employ. Pantalone, an irascible merchant is preparing his daughter, Clarice, for her impending marriage to Silvio. Silvio is the haughty son of the bombastic Dr. Lombardi, a pedant prone to speaking in Latin. The engagement celebration that opens the play is quickly disrupted by the arrival of a garrulous servant named Arlecchino, who claims to work for Clarice’s former fiancé, Federigo di Rasponi. Pantalone and Clarice are surprised because they believed Federigo had been killed in a duel by Florindo Aretusi, the fiancé of Federigo’s sister Beatrice. Beatrice enters disguised as her brother, Federigo, in search of financial resources Pantalone owed Federigo. Brighella, the local innkeeper, recognizes her but promises to keep her secret and offers her a place to stay. Florindo arrives in town, and also stays at Brighella’s inn, but conveniently does not run into Beatrice in drag as her dead brother. Beatrice/Federigo’s appearance has put an end to Clarice and Silvio’s wedding plans. The two, along with their fathers, fight over the broken engagement, and Silvio attempts to duel Beatrice/Federigo. Meanwhile, Truffaldino has fallen in love with Smeraldina, Clarice’s maid. He also has begun waiting on Florindo in addition to Beatrice/Federigo, which culminates in a disastrous luncheon in which he attempts to serve them both simultaneously. Later, when he accidentally makes both Florindo and Beatrice believe the other is dead, the distraught lovers almost attempt suicide before discovering the misunderstanding. Florindo and Beatrice reunite, allowing Clarice and Silvio’s wedding plans to go forward. Finally, Arlecchino receives permission to marry Smeraldina and admits his double identity. The commedia dell’arte (which is often translated as “Play of the Artists” or “Play of the Guild”) originally had all’improviso at the end of the moniker to distinguish its improvisatory nature. It also served to distinguish it from the commedia erudita, or Learned Play, often written by academics and performed by amateurs (unlike the guild performers of the all’improviso). Though the height of its popularity was from the mid-1500s through the mid1700s (when Goldoni wrote Servitore), it lasted much longer and had its origins earlier. How much earlier is a matter of debate, as scholars disagree over the influence of ancient Roman forms such as the Atellan Farce (which

.

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dates back nearly two millennia before commedia dell’arte). Commedia scholar Winifred Smith adopts the critical standpoint of rooting the tradition in more recent historical phenomenon rather than in classical times: the Mountebanks. 6 The name “mountebank” comes from the Italian words montare and banco, meaning to climb or ascend a bench or stage. The mountebanks were a part of street and carnival culture and the nature of their displays shows clear connections to the improvised commedia: Mountebanks, charlatans, jugglers—so they were called, men, women and children together, wandering gypsylike from country fair to city carnival, setting up their temporary stages wherever they might hope for a few pennies from the crowd, free for half an hour from the interference of civil or ecclesiastical officers. They were compelled to lurk in corners partly because they sold quack medicines of doubtful composition, “counterpoisons” more apt to kill than cure, partly because they practiced sleight of hand and magic, still more because their songs and dances and jests were judged unwholesome for the public morals. 7

The mountebanks introduced many elements later found in improvised comedies, including the character of the quack doctor (easily relatable to the commedia stock character Dottore Gratiano). Stock characters became an essential component of the form. Allardyce Nicoll notes the core characters of early commedia falling into two categories: Magnifichi and Zanni. 8 A Magnifico was an older male character, like Dottore or the miserly Pantalone; the Zanni were a group of servant characters typified by Arlecchino/ Harlequin and Scapin/Brighella (many of the characters had multiple iterations with different names but numerous similarities). From these foundational characters developed further characters such as Flavio and Flaminia (a pair of fickle, self-absorbed lovers, each usually the child of a Magnifico); Columbine/a (a crafty female servant who often waited on Flaminia or one of the Magnifichi); and Capitano (a Spanish soldier and braggart, who often created a love triangle with Flaminia and Flavio. The characters also had regional associations which broadened their appeal (for example, Pantalone was Venetian, Arlecchino was Bergamese, and Dottore was from Bologna or Lombardi). Pantalone, Dottore, Arlecchino and Brighella all appear in Servitore, along with Smeraldina (as the Columbine/a type), Silvio and Clarice (representing Flavio and Flaminia—the lovers who often went by many names). Florindo is a variation on Capitano, while Beatrice is a derivation of Isabella, another female ingénue type often used to create romantic complications in commedia plays. The plot of the play also mirrors the scenari of many commedia dell’arte pieces. Since the plays were almost wholly improvised (save for a few stock speeches here and there), an outline of the plot was created and attached to

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the scenery. The two most common terms for these outlines are scenario or canovaccio, each suggesting an etymology that relates to its posting on the canvas scenery. Some scholars, including Smith, assert that these terms were retroactively applied and words such as soggetto or comedia would have been used. 9 Flaminio Scala’s Il Teatro dell favole rappresentative is a compendium of these plot outlines that show numerous similarities to the story structure of Servitore. For example, the scenario “The Faithful Friend” finds two young men, Flavio and Oratio, competing for the love of the same woman. 10 “He Who Was Believed Dead” is an outline in which a woman believes her lover is dead. Both of these plot outlines mirror the romantic quadrangle of Servitore. The 1947 inaugural production and the 1952 revised production were the most characteristic of Strehler’s neo-commedia aesthetic and the other minor Goldoni works that he directed in between these two productions, such as L’amante militare (The Military Lover), and shortly thereafter, such as La vedova scaltra (The Artful Widow), displayed similar characteristics. The 1952 version of Arlecchino servitore di due padroni was filmed for Italian television in 1955. 11 While no film recording of the original 1947 production exists, the vast number of still photographs available through the Piccolo Teatro’s Archivio Storico shows the strong correlation between the film and the first production. In addition, the visual and stylistic elements evident in later productions (both in stills and on video) further support the idea that the 1947 production provided a foundation upon which future alterations and adjustments were made. In viewing these performance records, the individual elements of Strehler’s neo-commedia aesthetic come into focus. The first and most obvious element in Strehler’s reinterpretation of commedia in his Goldoni productions was the use of the mask, which was noticeably absent from the last significant production of Arlecchino servitore di due padroni prior to Strehler’s undertaking. Ironically, this production was directed by non-Italian Max Reinhardt, whose version shared some common elements with Strehler’s early productions, but was purely Reinhardtian in its approach. Reinhardt had directed the play once before, at the Kammerspiele in 1907, in a production of little note. In 1924, he restaged the play, and this version was far more influential, remaining in repertory and on tour for more than a decade. Reinhardt even brought the production to America in 1939, staging the play with Hollywood actors, including a very young Nanette Fabray and Herbert Anderson. 12 The production, which premiered in Vienna, came to Milan in 1932: Writing about The Servant of Two Masters, presented by Reinhardt in Milan in 1932, [librettist and director Renato] Simoni observed of the “naivete” of Arlecchino: “He is not naturally an affected person, and [his naivete] doesn’t exclude a certain frank and unrestrained realism; it is even less a stylization,

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which began with Marivaux in France, but rather it is a kind of instinct, a primitive naturalness, a foolishness which fades into ingenuousness.” 13

Reinhardt’s production was as spectacularly lavish as many of his other famous productions, yet Reinhardt himself was reluctant to fully embrace commedia, specifically the improvisatory elements for which Strehler later became known: 14 The spontaneity of an Italian commedia dell’Arte performance, with its acrobatic tumbling and capering, its near-balletic pantomime and a killing pace, makes an obvious appeal to a director with flair. Not that Reinhardt was free to recreate the improvisatory element that made the original commedia a thing of exciting interaction between stage and audience, encouraging the unpredictable growth of the play in performance. Reinhardt’s commedia style was strictly controlled, line by line, gesture by gesture, like everything else he attempted. 15

Reinhardt’s production reflected the Viennese tradition and the evolution of his oeuvre more than it evoked any kind of Italian aesthetic. Despite recognizable commedia trappings (such as Arlecchino’s famous, colorful lozenge suit), the production was more in the tradition of comic opera. Evincing this, Reinhardt underscored the production with Mozart. 16 What distinguished Reinhardt’s production most clearly from Strehler’s work and the Italian tradition is the lack of masks in his production. Photographs of the various iterations of Reinhardt’s Der Diener zweier Herren (Arlecchino servitore di due pardoni) show his Arlecchino/Truffaldino, Hermann Thimig (and later Truffaldinos like Anderson), without the mask that would become iconic in Strehler’s productions. 17 Despite its ebullient comic energy, the performance technique of Reinhardt’s version was of an entirely different ilk. In many ways, the production was most indicative of Reinhardt’s enthusiasm for lending his unique vision to the works of classical European authors such as Moliere and Shakespeare. This commitment to the classics was shared by Strehler and other early twentieth-century directors like Jacques Copeau, but was realized in markedly different ways in their productions. Reinhardt’s production remains the most notable pre-Strehler production of Arlecchino serivtore di due padroni and it doubtlessly helped raise Strehler’s awareness of the play. 18 In production, however, Strehler took the play in a decidedly different direction, particularly in the use of masks. For Strehler, the mask was transformative, and the use of it by the actor was intended to effect an almost metaphysical change. In his initial production, he insisted upon his actors using the traditional masks, despite their lack of familiarity with them and the masks’ potential to inhibit the actors’ performances. Strehler noted that the masks were both physically uncomfortable and a psycho-

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logical challenge for the actors. The mask’s impact on Strehler’s first Arlecchino, Marcello Moretti, was particularly important: The way in which he gradually came to ‘accept the tyranny of the mask’. . . sheds a wealth of light on the implications of this show in particular and the tradition of commedia in general. ‘The mask’, says Strehler, ‘is a mysterious and terrible instrument . . . it brings us to the very threshold of theatrical mystery, demons are reborn through these immutable, immobile, static faces’. 19

Indeed, the mask is perhaps the most recurrent element in commedia iconography. For those audience members even tangentially familiar with commedia’s history, the use of masks in Strehler’s Goldoni productions served the iconic purpose of creating a starting point for recalling that history. For those unfamiliar with commedia, the mask was arresting—a theatrical tool to surprise and engage the audience. Yet, if the mask’s only function were to surprise the audience, the novelty of the convention would have faded quickly. For Strehler, it was more than simply a theatrical conceit. The difficulties masks created for actors unused to working with them forced them to change their performance styles. The phrase “tyranny of the mask” is evocative of Strehler’s clever employment of this commedia convention. Strehler sought to breathe fresh air into performance modes that had grown arid and stagnant. This rebellion did not extend merely to the canon of plays, but to the performance styles themselves. The mask, then, did some of Strehler’s work for him. Rather than berating his actors in an attempt to rid them of their out-of-date acting styles, Strehler placed a physical limitation upon his actors that demanded a different style of performance. To aid his actors, he began training sessions (with the help of Dario Fo, Jacques LeCoq, and Marisa Flach) to help make his actors limber enough to meet the physical demands of this new approach. 20 The limits engendered by the mask demanded a heightened sensitivity and increased expressiveness in the rest of the actors’ bodies and senses: “The mask presupposes, furthermore, a constant and perfected play of the body which is an art in itself, requiring thorough study; in other words, the body must become a supplement to the mask—a new face, in fact.” 21 This significance of mask work in the production extended beyond tradition. Strehler recognized the usefulness of the mask to the performer, and it is important to distinguish Strehler’s use of the mask and commedia as a reimagining—a tool that recalled history without recreating it exactly. Strehler’s contemporary Dario Fo, speaking about Servitore, noted this distinction: The objection that I hear offered most frequently to this production is that it did not contain so much of the spirit of improvised performance, rather that it presented itself as an extraordinary comedic machine, with pre-programmed

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rhythms, not much imaginative freedom and great precision—in short, it worked like a clock. . . . I would first reply that finding any comedic mechanism which is capable of functioning like a clock is quite an extraordinary thing, certainly not an everyday occurrence. 22

Fo goes on to describe how Strehler, true to Goldoni’s intentions, struck the balance between the technical needs of the comic moments and spontaneity of the actors’ improvisatory efforts. In this way, Strehler created a performance tradition that was both old and new. Strehler’s point of view on masks was in line with those espoused by Goldoni’s The Comic Theatre, which recognized the usefulness of the mask for certain types of characters. As time passed, however, Goldoni became less and less tolerant of the mask and sought its elimination, another point of contention in his disagreements with Gozzi. In a sense, Strehler worked in the opposite direction to achieve aims similar to those of Goldoni. Goldoni, fearing that Italy was falling behind in its theatrical evolution due to the staleness of the commedia conventions, sought a more erudite form of dramatic expression that he hoped would enrich the quality of Italy’s dramatic output and the endurance of its works. Alternatively, Strehler, seeing that the pursuit of erudition had rendered Italian theatre arid and overly derivative of its European neighbors, sought to embrace theatrical artifice as a means of injecting new life into Italian performance style. The use of the mask laid the groundwork for another crucial aspect of Strehler’s approach to performing commedia: the idea of costume as the foundation for characterization. Not only did the costumes affect (and in some cases restrict) the way the actors moved, they also created a physical template for the actors to follow. In Strehler’s Arlecchino, the innkeeper Brighella wore an all-white outfit, mask, and a large, floppy white hat (similar to a typical chef’s hat). He also carried around a large white handkerchief, with which he gesticulated repeatedly. In his characterization, actor Ermanno Roveri affected a prominent stutter with a wavering vocal quality. Furthermore, his movement patterns consisted primarily of bouncy shuffling, with his whole body bobbling about the stage like a rag doll. As a result, the mask and costume communicated initial impressions that were quickly confirmed by the actor’s physical and vocal choices. This interpretation of this character is further evidence of Strehler’s overall approach to recreating commedia-style performance. Historically, the character of Brighella was initially a younger scoundrel with a dangerous, almost sinister edge. Several generations later, the character evolved into the older and more amiably mischievous character found in Goldoni’s play (and Strehler’s production). 23 Strehler’s reconstruction of this character in performance was thus based less on traditional commedia and more on Goldoni’s interpretation of commedia.

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Mask work and the notion of costume as character were both characteristic of what may have made commedia one of the starting points of Strehler’s evolving directorial aesthetic. Inherently, both performance techniques deal with questions of identity, questions that were very relevant to Italy in the late 1940s. Just as the country struggled to define what exactly it meant to be Italian, Strehler’s actors were redefining what it meant to act Italian. Furthermore, the spontaneity of commedia in performance accurately reflected the social, political, and cultural climate of postwar Italy. While as a whole “Italy” had a lot of ideas about where it would go and what it would become, it would spend the next few decades trying to fill in the specifics to achieve its goals. The social consciousness evoked by these elements was more deeply reflected in another crucial element in Strehler’s commedia aesthetic: the grotesque. Nearly one hundred years before Strehler attempted to recreate it, Maurice Sand said of commedia: The commedia dell’Arte is not only a study of the grotesque and facetious, . . . but also a portrayal of real characters traced from remote antiquity down to the present day, in an uninterrupted tradition of fantastic humour which is in essence quite serious and, one might almost say, even sad, like every satire which lays bare the spiritual poverty of mankind. 24

This definition had unexpected resonance for Strehler’s approach to working with commedia in his Goldoni productions. The dichotomies inherent in Sand’s description became one of the focal points for his interpretation of plays such as Gli innamorati, Il campiello, Le baruffe chiozzotte and, especially, Arlecchino servitore di due padroni—and may perhaps begin to explain why Strehler continued to revisit this play from different perspectives. Sand’s description is also quite apposite to the tradition of grotesquerie in Italian theatre: The grotesque was born of the comic and the dramatic or, more simply, of the comic that has roots in melancholy, in pain and yet provokes laughter: it is therefore a conscious form that reveals, underneath the object of ridicule, a foundation worthy of compassion and pain. 25

This definition, like Sand’s, notes the juxtaposition of the comic and the empathetic. Yet the idea of the grotesque in the Italian theatre was not limited to the early twentieth-century movement described in chapter 1. In many ways, the tradition hearkens back to writers as divergent as Plautus and Dante. 26 On a broader level, the grotesque theatre in early-1900s Italy was part of a larger artistic continuum in which contradictory elements were embraced and fused together; in which ridicule and sentiment coexisted. The

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movement simply took this Italian tradition of juxtapositions and distorted it to arresting and provocative extremes. The applicability of grotesquerie to Strehler’s work is manifold because in many ways both Goldoni’s play and the commedia dell’Arte upon which it is based reflect the grotesque tradition of combining high and low ideals, as well as serious and comic overtones. Amidst the slapstick antics of these forms was a social and political commentary, particularly on the level of class issues—an influential idea not lost in Strehler’s work. Strehler carried on some of the traditions of the Italian grotesquerie in his reinterpretation of commedia and Goldoni. Tellingly, one of the quintessential plays of the grotesque movement was Luigi Chiarelli’s The Mask and the Face (1913). While Chiarelli’s mask was metaphorical (the actors’ faces, like those in Reinhardt’s production, were not covered), it at once echoed the commedia of old and presaged the revitalized commedia of Strehler’s work. As was typical of grotesque plays, social mores and behaviors were satirized to absurd, farcical extremes and it was this aspect of grotesquerie that was most influential upon Strehler. 27 As in the works of the grotesque movement, Goldoni’s plays and commedia scenarios both employed farce and social satire, yet the difference in severity was a key point of distinction. Strehler’s challenge was to balance the light, comic energy of Arlecchino servitore di due padroni with the social issues in the play he wanted to emphasize in performance. The play proved to be the perfect vehicle for these pursuits because the dichotomies inherent in the grotesquerie of commedia dell’Arte and Arlecchino servitore di due padroni echoed the atmosphere of postwar Italy. As Simoni noted in Reinhardt’s production, the play’s center, Arlecchino, is a kind of wily naïf—both astute and gullible. The potential for change in postwar Italy and the eagerness for it did not preclude a kind of wariness or even cynicism. Despite its anticipation of great change, the country still felt the repercussions of Fascism and the war. In this way, Arlecchino was the ideal character to reflect an atmosphere of mixed emotions. The use of masks served Strehler’s sociopolitical concerns in numerous ways. First, the grotesque exaggeration created by the mask outlined certain social differences. On the level of class, the mask immediately separated characters like Arlecchino from unmasked characters, such as the young lovers (whose faces were uncovered). The mask instantly established his identity, yet the artifice of the mask called into question who created that identity. Was it Goldoni, making facile generalizations about the poor? Did Arlecchino himself create this identity? Did other characters in the play force Arlecchino to his buffoonish extremes? These questions of identity extended not only to Arlecchino, but to the other masked characters as well. In Pantalone’s case, it was not class that separated him, but age and intellect. The mask helped convey his flabber-

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gasted obtuseness and allowed the audience to laugh at his foibles. The shape of the Pantalone mask is dominated by downturned features and a prominent pointed nose that help communicate his age and often disagreeable personality. The mask was not the only commedia element that reflected the grotesque aesthetic. Indeed the characterizations of Strehler’s actors further evoked these concerns. In the tradition of the commedia of old, the young lovers Silvio and Clarice were unmasked in Strehler’s production, yet their performances still retained a broad comic affect. Indeed, both vocally and physically, they created the impression of overgrown, spoiled children. Initially, the lovers embodied the more satirical end of the grotesque spectrum, while Arlecchino occupied the farcical, slapstick position. As the play progressed, however, the confrontation of these two extremes amplified the comic potential of both and blurred the lines between the two. As a result, satirical characters became embroiled in farcical situations, while farcical characters found themselves enveloped in a larger social satire. This grotesque juxtaposition was further emphasized by Strehler in performance by the physicalizations and vocalizations of his actors. Silvio and Clarice often began or ended their scenes in tableaux. Their gesturing was very formal, and their voices were rich, mellifluous, and declamatory. In contrast, Clarice’s father, the masked Pantalone, scurried about the stage like a life-sized cartoon, barking his lines in a choked, high-pitched voice. Thus, in Strehler’s productions, the grotesque was not just an ideological approach, but a pragmatic performance choice. The idea of the grotesque was perhaps most tangible in the physicalization of the main character, Arlecchino. Indeed, the physical dynamics of original Arlecchino Marcello Moretti’s performance were rife with the hyperbolic energy inherent in grotesque performance. The first physical element contributing to this effect was the incorporation of dance into the physicalization. Early on, Moretti established a signature move for Arlecchino—a series of jaunty, alternating tendus (a pointing of the leg and foot in a turned out position). This move recurred later when Arlecchino courted the maid Smeraldina. Strehler staged the entire scene like a dance, with Arlecchino circling Smeraldina doing tendus, while she responded with a series of sautés (little jumps). This jig that Arlecchino and Smeraldina enacted was a physical exaggeration of the content of the scene. Another physical attribute of Moretti’s performance that blended seamlessly with the dance and traditional stage movement was the athletic or acrobatic. The most famous scene in the play, in which Arlecchino simultaneously attempted to serve a meal to both of his masters was as smoothly choreographed as the Smeraldina mating dance, but contained acts of acrobatic virtuosity. Early in the scene, Moretti twisted and contorted himself in a variety of positions, and even tumbled, all while carrying a tray of food that

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he did not spill. Later, he ran back and forth across the stage in a series of leaps while alternately tossing and catching plates of food from the actors playing the waiters. These same waiters later lifted the head waiter over their heads to avoid careening into Arlecchino as he raced on stage, only to be booted offstage en masse in a single flick of the foot by Arlecchino. The spectacular marvel of the scene was certainly entertaining, but it also fit into the stylized patterns of movement that Strehler had established from the beginning of the production. Finally, animal energy was a crucial aspect of Strehler’s neo-commedia performance style. Amleto Sartori collaborated with Strehler on the making of the masks used in his Goldoni productions. As noted above, the actors had to undergo major adjustments to their methods of performance. For the initial Servitore production, the difficulty of these adjustments was exacerbated by the discomfort the masks caused. The first masks were made out of a kind of cardboard, which caused a variety of physical irritations and distractions to the actors, as well as impairing their vision. Actor Marcello Moretti actually cut the eyeholes so that they were larger in order to make the mask less claustrophobic and inhibiting to his acrobatics. Starting with the second incarnation of Servitore in 1952, the masks were made out of leather. Here, Sartori began to develop animal identities for the various fixed faces on the masks he created: “cat,” “fox,” and “bull.” Thus, the eyeholes that Moretti had cut out of function were now fashioned to accentuate these animal differences. Moretti purposefully incorporated feline elements into his agile performance, once again underscoring the importance of mask and costume as the starting point for characterization. 28 Strehler’s commedia work extended beyond the actors and was further reflected in the use of scenery. In Strehler’s first Arlecchino, the stage rarely had more than one chair and a few props on stage at a time. In addition, the background was created by a painted fabric backdrop with slits for doorways and built-in flaps for windows. This setting was reflective of the commedia troupes of old, whose minimalist approach was largely functional in light of their constant travels. In this element, we can see the beginnings of the contextual ideas that would occupy Strehler’s later, more overtly Brechtian Goldoni productions. More importantly, this scenographic aesthetic would ultimately serve Strehler’s (and the Piccolo’s) need to shape and cultivate its audience. While Strehler began developing the beginnings of his own style, he adopted a visual template that kept the audience’s attention focused on the actors and, more importantly, the play itself. The recurrence of actors, comic bits, costumes and scenographic elements in later productions bolstered the familiarity of the plays, entrenching them further into popular culture. In support of this aim, the sparse scenery reinforced the universality of the piece. Strehler managed the balancing act of reintroducing and contextualizing a faded art form without eschewing contemporary relevance. If eight-

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eenth-century Venice was relatively foreign and less tangible to Strehler’s audience, it would not have affected their appreciation of the production. Strehler stripped the stage of the accoutrements of the period, retaining only a few key pieces that served a functional purpose without creating contextual obstacles for the audience. The basic scenery also helped preserve the rhythm that was so crucial to Strehler. Scene changes for Servitore took less than a minute, with most lasting less than thirty seconds, consisting primarily of changing the painted backdrop and rotating periaktoi-like flats that stood at each wing. The actors executed these scene changes in a smooth, deliberate rhythm that created additional opportunities for the audience to prepare for the boisterous antics of the next scene. As a result, Strehler was able to control the pacing and momentum of the productions even when the actors were not performing on stage. The use of the actors for these scene changes further maintained the focus on them, reinforcing the idea that it was the actor-driven event. Perhaps the most crucial element in Strehler’s redefinition of commedia was the incorporation of comic lazzi. The nature and use of lazzi was central to the differing views of Goldoni and Gozzi. For Gozzi, lazzi were the foundation for commedia, the unique element that distinguished the Italian form from other countries’ theatrical output. For Goldoni, it was an idea that had been abused to the point where storytelling was secondary to slapstick shenanigans and limitless mugging. Ostensibly, the word lazzi comes from the Tuscan word lacci, which could be translated as “tied,” supporting a Goldonian view that this comic business should be tied to the story. 29 A different interpretation of this translation likens it to “tying your shoelaces: you stop what you are doing for a brief moment to do something physical at which long practice has given you skill.” 30 Thus, part of Goldoni’s reform was to convert lazzi from the latter definition into the former. Other scholars have suggested different roots for the word lazzi. Some believe it comes from the Hebrew word latzon, which means “trick”; others suggest it is a derivation of the Swedish word lat, which means “gesture”; and many view it as a colloquial adaptation of the Italian l’azione which means “action.” 31 This third interpretation links the comic business much more closely to the action of the play, and Goldoni’s dramatic adaptation of commedia supports this notion (also, like lacci, it is rooted in the Italian language, making it a more probable origin). Plays like Arlecchino have the potential for comic lazzi built into the structure of the story—an opportunity Strehler seized and expanded upon. Thus, the etymological inquiry into the origins of the word lazzi mirrors Strehler’s use of them in his Goldoni productions—rather than become stymied by apparent dichotomies and contradictions, he embraced them. In Strehler’s productions, lazzi could be superfluous and fully integrated in the same instant.

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While volumes have been written about the various lazzi performed throughout the history of commedia, the specifics of certain types of comic business are debatable. While some sources provide explicit information regarding a specific lazzo, others presuppose that the bit is common knowledge, stating something as vague as “Arlecchino performs a ridiculous scene.” 32 As a result, tracing the origin, evolution and diversification of a specific lazzo is fraught with challenges, particularly in light of regional linguistic and performance variations. Therefore, in examining Strehler’s work, it is more useful to identify comic business in a few large categories that emerged in his production of Arlecchino servitore di due pardoni as definitive of his neo-commedia style. The first key type of lazzi evident in Strehler’s production is what might be described broadly as a “sight gag.” These gags were visual and physical, without necessarily being violent (a la slapstick), sexual, or scatalogical. Rather, the humor often came from a reversal of expectations. For example, in the first act of Arlecchino, Clarice fainted, but in Strehler’s hands, her swooning became an affectation. The actress had to clear her throat several times with increasing volume before someone noticed her and only then did she wilt to the floor. As a follow-up, a drink was brought in attempt to help revive her. In this moment, Strehler had Arlecchino take the drink as it was being handed to Clarice. Once he had drunk the wine, Clarice became fully revived, acting completely refreshed, momentarily reversing the “logic” of the scene. Similarly, Clarice’s paramour, Silvio, enacted a bit of lazzi in his dealings with his perceived rival. He announced that he was drawing his sword, only to have the blade stick in its sheath. The announcement was repeated several times, each time with a more and more frustrated Silvio struggling to wrench his sword from its scabbard. Finally, frustrated and embarrassed, Silvio exited with his sword still in its sheath. What was initially established as a moment of bravado instead became an exercise in humiliation. What was noteworthy about these choices on Strehler’s part was how well they were integrated into Goldoni’s script. In both of the examples mentioned, the lazzi served to reinforce character traits: Clarice’s coquettishness and Silvio’s immature petulance. As a result, these comic moments were not detours from Goldoni’s script. The second type of lazzi incorporated into Strehler’s productions was scatalogical and erotic humor. The physical nature of these lazzi was rooted in bodily functions, primarily the digestive and the sexual. Early in the play, when Arlecchino opened a letter that belonged to one of his masters, Goldoni had the character reseal the envelope using chewed up bread. Strehler emphasized Arlecchino’s desperate hunger by having him go so far as to swallow the bread. To correct his mistake, he then swallowed a string to catch the bread and pulls the chewed-up bread out of his stomach attached to the string. This kind of cartoonish physical extreme typifies the difference be-

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tween Strehler’s approach to masked characters versus unmasked ones. The lovers Silvio and Clarice did not perform any gastrological lazzi. Later in the play, when Beatrice revealed herself to Clarice as a woman disguised as a man, she placed Clarice’s hand on her breast as proof. Again, the issues of class and character figured into the selection of lazzi. While Clarice did not participate in comic bits with a digestive focus, she was featured in a mildly ribald bit of sexual lazzi. The difference was not merely coincidental, rather, the joke underscored the sexual politics and gender issues that acted as an undercurrent throughout the play. Finally, Strehler employed physical exaggeration to complete his trio of neo-commedia lazzi. In these instances, the humor was rooted in physical violence or caricatured movements. Early in the acrobatic dinner scene, Arlecchino entered carrying a plate of gelatin. As he moved downstage, he began to shake with increasing intensity in imitation of the gelatin. This comic business was reincorporated at the end of the scene when Arlecchino coaxed the plate of gelatin offstage while an unseen string attached the plate pulled it into the wings after him. This comic business provided an interesting point of comparison to the aforementioned tumbling-with-a-tray routine also executed by Arlecchino. These moments represented an intersection of Strehler’s careful research and the original, fanciful inventions of Strehler and his actors. The tumbling routine was a long-extant type of physically exaggerated acrobatic lazzi. 33 Such classic bits of comic business were then embellished and enriched by additional physical exaggerations that Strehler and his company added to the scene. Similarly, following Arlecchino’s love dance with Smeraldina, Pantalone entered the scene and initiated a different type of physical lazzo: violent or slapstick humor. In this scene, Smeraldina repeatedly danced Pantalone in circles while Arlecchino swatted him in the backside. This slapstick bit was repeated vigorously as Pantalone became increasingly befuddled. What distinguished this type of lazzi was its contribution to the overall rhythm of the production. In using this broad physical comedy, Strehler tied the physical rhythms of the actors to the rhythm of the dialogue to maximize the comic effect. This combination was crucial to the success of both the production and Strehler’s employment of commedia. Thus, the physical humor was a crucial component of Strehler’s control of rhythm in Arlecchino servitore di due padroni. The entire production was meticulously, breathlessly paced, and dialogue flowed so rapidly that often the physicality communicated information more immediately than the words. In addition, Strehler had the actors overlap their dialogue to keep the pacing even tighter. In this regard, his aforementioned interpretation of Brighella was crucial. Every time the actor spoke, he interrupted the rhythm of the play and slowed it down. Rather than having a deleterious effect, this choice provided a welcome reprieve from the

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racing action and allowed the audience to catch its breath. Strehler used rhythm to establish commedia’s rapid-fire pacing, but also to provide moments of rest to prevent the audience from becoming exhausted too early in the performance. In Strehler’s vision, Goldoni’s version of commedia received one of its fullest realizations. Having established a foundation with his first and second stagings of Servitore, Strehler had established a stylistic commedia palette that he could apply to other Goldoni productions. The most typically commedia-esque of the non-Servitore plays of this period was L’amante militare (The Military Lover) in late 1951. It was better received, commercially and critically, than other recent Goldoni “rediscoveries” such as Gl innamorati and La putta onorata, both presented in the second half of 1950. 34 One possible explanation for this was that these works, both as written by Goldoni and as staged by Strehler, flirted with a more realistic approach. They were not completely devoid of commedia, but they were tonally different from Strehler’s early productions, which emphasized this particular aspect of the plays. Thus, L’amante militare represented a kind of return to form and met with more success than its predecessors. Preceding the second version of Arlecchino by half a year, the play was presented in a double bill with Moliere’s The Flying Doctor, a piece which it matched stylistically and also spoke to the Italian influence on seventeenth-century French comedy. It was a benefit performance for Marcello Moretti, whose neo-Goldonian Arlecchino was, effectively, new. An Arlecchino [who was] essentially a mime and, in a certain sense, severely stylized, as much as his previous ones were, from time to time, clownish and sanguine, whose range was more than varied. 35

This assessment made a crucial point regarding Strehler’s interpretation of Goldoni. On one hand, its original innovation brought attention to Strehler and the Piccolo. The problem with that rediscovery was that once it became accepted as a kind of norm, it required additional innovation to maintain interest in it. Therefore, while L’amante militare was better received than Gl innamorati or La putta onorata, it was marking time. Essentially, Strehler was exercising muscles he had already developed in previous productions. Arlecchino servitore di due padroni had branded the elements of commedia dell’Arte in Strehler’s work and his other Goldoni productions suffered by comparison. While L’amante militare featured the familiar character of Arlecchino (again played by Marcello Moretti), it may have made the comparison to Arlecchino even more prominent. Ultimately, L’amante militare functioned best as a showcase for Moretti’s talents—and as a preview for the next incarnation of Servitore, which appeared about six months after L’amante militare.

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L’amante militare also represented the most extreme employment of Strehler’s neo-commedia aesthetic. The grotesque elements so crucial to Strehler’s early neo-commedia work were realized with greater severity in L’amante militare. The harsh extremities of Moretti’s performance as Arlecchino applied to the entire production as a whole. These extremes were certainly evident in the production design. The set was both more elaborate and more distorted than either of the first two Arlecchino productions. Rather than the flat painted backdrops that comprised the majority of Arlecchino’s set, the L’amante militare scenery was three-dimensional and threatened to engulf the stage from all sides. If the set was more prominent in this production, it was not used to create a realistic environment. Instead, it evoked a dark, cartoonish quality falling somewhere between Salvatore Dali and Dr. Seuss. If the setting was negligible in Arlecchino, in L’amante militare, it was so prominent it almost functioned as another character in the play. Throughout the action of the story, the actors were engulfed by the garish scenery and costumes. While L’amante militare will not be as fondly remembered as Arlecchino servitore di due padroni, it did mark a significant turning point in the evolution of Strehler’s neo-commedia period. While the first production of Arlecchino could be described as exploratory, L’amante militare pursued these neo-commedia ideas much more aggressively. That the second Arlecchino which followed it diluted the extremes of its commedia aesthetic was important in two ways. First, it represented the most balanced, cogent employment of this aesthetic. Secondly, it indicated that Strehler was ready to incorporate a new stylistic element into his signature production. L’amante militare was further evidence of Strehler’s emerging status as a regista, an auteur-director with a potent, recognizable aesthetic that could be applied to numerous plays. La vedova scaltra, which followed L’amante militare by a year and the second production of Servitore by six months, did not fare as well. Public and critical response was a “mixed reception” at best. 36 The play (which was the source of much battling between Goldoni and Chiari) was better known and held in higher regard than L’amante militare, yet paradoxically, Strehler found himself on less sure ground. La vedova scaltra is something of a curiosity in the Strehler oeuvre. Moretti is in his familiar dress as Arlecchino, his costume more garish than in L’amante or Servitore. The triangular pattern of his costume was much larger and his black mask now covers his entire face. In contrast, much of the rest of the cast and the set itself are a kind of staid rendering of seventeenth-century dress and décor. The overall approach was overly reverential and this seriousness mirrored Strehler’s first and unsuccessful attempts at both The Cherry Orchard and the Villeggiatura trilogy a year and a half later. 37 Neither of those plays would reach their creative fruition for another twenty years, when Strehler’s aesthetic elements were more developed. In the meantime, his attempts in those directions were high-

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ly experimental, and not entirely successful. Contrary to the varying critical response, Strehler touted La vedova scaltra as attempting to bridge seemingly disparate styles. He viewed this mixture as one of his strengths, touting it as “an evolution from Commedia dell’Arte to realism.” 38 Yet, it would be two decades before Strehler truly developed an aesthetic for representing real life in Goldoni plays. The mélange of stylistic elements in La vedova scaltra further evinces the notion that his second production of Arlecchino marked an end to Strehler’s neo-commedia period. Certainly, 1953 did not mark the last time Strehler styled his productions with commedia elements. Indeed, it was a signature part of his aesthetic throughout the rest of his career; however, La vedova scaltra was the beginning of a transitional period before Strehler moved on to the next phase of his artistic development. In the Piccolo’s first six years, the young director fashioned a new approach to Italian theatre, changing performance styles and audience expectations almost simultaneously. By the early to mid-1950s, the social and cultural landscape of Italy had changed and, thus, the need for new aesthetics for artistic expression was necessary. The Piccolo Teatro emerged during the honeymoon period of the postwar period, yet the shadows cast by Fascism still loomed large in those early years. As a result, questions of identity were reflected in and shaped by the art of that period. In this environment, the “rediscovery” of both commedia and Goldoni makes sense. While on one hand, ideas of nationalism bore unfavorable comparisons to Fascism, there was an inherent desire during this time to rediscover what was truly Italian (or, at the local level, what was truly Milanese or truly Venetian). Of Strehler’s two “rediscoveries,” the texts of Goldoni and the commedia performance style, the latter was in many ways more pronounced than the former. It would be erroneous to suggest that Goldoni’s plays and the commedia performance style and stock characters had been forgotten until Strehler rescued them from the dusty annals of history. Rather, it is their integration and realization that is the real rediscovery: a renewed understanding of each in cooperation with one another. In Strehler’s vision, commedia and Goldoni were inseparably intertwined. Even when Strehler’s work bore the mark of other artists, other countries, or other styles, it still had commedia as part of its foundation. Instead of merely mimicking Brecht or Copeau, Strehler extrapolated from them, using his unique Italian aesthetic as the base for further discovery. While the audience embraced the production, the critical responses to Strehler’s initial efforts with Goldoni were not universally positive: Strehler has no sense of humor and falls too easily into banality and vulgarity. . . . Poor Moretti, the unfortunate Harlequin, (is) obliged by his third master Strehler to put so much energy into his role every evening that cyclist

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Chapter 2 Coppi’s tribulations on the Pordoi Pass seem trivial in comparison. (“Oggi”, August 3, 1947 ) 39

Another reviewer felt that the young Strehler “lacked experience and culture.” 40 These responses demonstrate that they were collectively still grappling with Goldoni’s text and their own reinvention of commedia in these early productions. Regardless of the differing critical responses, the significance of Strehler’s work with Goldoni and commedia extended beyond Italy. The traveling Piccolo productions of Arlecchino servitore di due padroni helped renew interest in Italian theatre in continental Europe. Furthermore, in later productions, Strehler would become increasingly concerned with the contemporary history of these plays; the society that produced them and how they were represented dramatically. In doing so, Strehler tapped into the larger historical concept of commedia as mirror to the society as a whole: The dwarves, the hunchbacks, the cripples and the lunatics of this strange, eccentric farcical play were the metaphor for a social and professional condition valid for the majority of the performers. Unsuccessful relics, handicapped protagonists of a story in which you can see them forever succumbing. In the [following] centuries, it was rendered obsolete by the theatre of many other pioneers . . . testifying to the irredentist pathology from which every theater was born, in spite of the humanistic plans and the illusions of reform. 41

This assessment of the commedia performers of old had resonance for the country as a whole. The elements of commedia discussed here were often garish exaggerations of real-life pains, social issues, and personal frustrations—many of which could be paralleled to Italy’s own growing pains as a county. On a more universal level, the characters were in many ways broad representations of the best and worst traits of humankind. In approaching these ideas with his early Goldoni productions, Strehler was tapping into a kind of Zeitgeist—an unspoken lack of certainty about the future of Italy as a nation. The instabilities that were the basis for character and plot in commedia spoke to the fragile nature of government, religion, social structures, and personal relationships. Furthermore, the commedia mask covered the neuroses of the irredenti only partially. In this light, commedia was the logical artistic face to present to other countries. In examining Strehler’s work and its place with Italian and European theatre, the notion of the irredenti recurs, further obscuring the questions of Italy’s national and international theatrical identity.

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NOTES 1. Con la seconda Guerra mondiale e con gli anni dell’immediato dopoguerra l’Italia piomba tragicamente nella modernità, dopo esser stata per anni una provincia solenne con la testa piena di sogni modernistici e le radici nelle campagne. Ferdinando Taviani, Uomini di Scena, Uomini di Libro (Bologna: Mulino, 1995): 176. 2. Dire, in un teatro italiano, che si sarebbe rappresentata un’opera di Goldoni, significava ritrovarsi con il teatro vuoto. La nostra è stata una battaglia – per voi difficile da immaginare--, una battaglia violenta contro la tradizione della cattiva rappresentazione del teatro di Goldoni, che aveva portato questo straordinario autore lontano dal pubblico. Il pubblico non l’accettava allora, come in un certo senso oggi rifiuta Alfieri. Annunciare l’Oreste di Alfieri, ancora oggi, equivale a spaventare il pubblico, perché su Alfieri non è stata ancora portato a termine quell’opera di valorizzazione che noi siamo riusciti a fare su Goldoni. Giorgio Strehler, Giorgio Strehler: Intorno a Goldoni, ed. Flavia Foradini (Milano: Mursia, 2004): 32. Text from a speech given by Strehler in 1995. 3. Carlo Goldoni, The Comic Theatre, trans. John Miller (Lincoln, 1969). Rptd. in Sources of Dramatic Theory 2: Voltaire to Hugo, ed. Michael J. Sidnell (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1994):72–73. 4. Carlo Gozzi, Ragionamento ingenuo e storia sincera dell’origine delle mie dieci fiabe teatrali in Opere: Teatreo e polemiche teatrali, ed. Giuseppe Petronio (Milano, 1962). Rptd. in Sources of Dramatic Theory 2: Voltaire to Hugo, ed. Michael J. Sidnell (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1994):103-104. 5. Carlo Gozzi, Useless Memoirs, John Addington Symonds, trans. (London: Oxford, 1962): 187. 6. Winnifred Smith, The Commedia dell’Arte (New York: Columbia, 1964): 29–40. 7. Ibid., 29-30. 8. Allardyce Nicoll, The World of Harlequin: A Critical Study of the Commedia dell’Arte (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1963): 40. 9. Smith, 4. 10. Henry F. Salerno, trans., Scenarios of the Commedia dell’Arte: Flaminio Scala’s Il Teatro delle favole rappresentative. (New York: NYU, 1967): 210–217. 11. Giorgio Strehler, Arlecchino servitore di due padroni. 150 min (approx), Piccolo Teatro Archivio Storico, 1955, videocassette. Unless otherwise indicated, all statements regarding physical action and performance refer to this video. 12. Edda Leisler and Gisela Prossnitz, Max Reinhardt und die Welt der Commedia dell’Arte (Salzburg: Otto Muller Verlag, 1970): 39. 13. Scrivendo del Servitore di due Padroni, presentato dal Reinhardt a Milano nel ‘32, Simoni osservava che la “naiveté” di Arlecchino “non è naturalmente leziosaggine, e non esclude un certo realismo franco é spregiudicato; tanto meno é stilizzazione, che in Francia comincio col Marivaux, ma e una specie di istinitività, una naturalezza primitiva, una balordaggine che sfuma nell’ingenuità.” Luigi Ferrante, I comici goldoniani (Bologna: Cappelli, 1961): 116. 14. A quotation from Reinhardt alludes to this. It is reprinted in John Rudlin, Commedia dell’Arte: An Actor’s Handbook (New York: Routledge, 1994): 192-3. 15. J. L. Styan, Max Reinhardt (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1982): 74. 16. Ibid., 75. 17. Edda Leisler and Gisela Prossnitz, Max Reinhardt und die Welt der Commedia dell’Arte; Herausgegeben Von Hans Bohm, Die Wiener Reinhardt-Buhne Im Lichtbild (Zurich: Amalthea-Verlag, 1926); Margaret Dietrich, ed. Mostra Max Reinhardt e il mondo della Commedia dell’Arte. 18. David L. Hirst, Giorgio Strehler (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1993): 42. 19. Ibid., 42-43. Hirst quotes from Giorgio Strehler, Per un teatro umano (Milano Feltrinelli, 1974): 171. 20. John Rudlin, Commedia dell’Arte: An Actor’s Handbook, 192. 21. Pierre Louis Duchartre, The Italian Comedy, 42.

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22. Dario Fo, Manuale minimo dell’attore (Turin, 1987): 37. Rptd. in John Rudlin, Commedia dell’Arte: An Actor’s Handbook, 198. 23. Pierre Louis Duchartre, The Italian Comedy, 161-164. 24. M. Sand, Masques et bouffons. Comedie Italienne (2 vols., Paris, 1860). Rptd. in Pierre Louis Duchartre, The Italian Comedy, trans. Randolph T. Weaver (New York: Dover, 1966): 17. 25. Il grottesco nasce dal comico e dal drammatico o, più semplicemente, dal comico che ha radici nella malinconia, nel dolore e pur provoca il riso: è perciò forma consapevole che rivela, sotto all’oggetto del ridicolo, un fondo degno della pietà e della pena. Luigi Ferrante, Teatro Italiano Grottesco (Rocca San Casciano: Capelli, 1964): 9. 26. Ibid., 9-25. 27. Michael Vena, Italian Grotesque Theater (London: Associated University Press, 2001): 13-19. 28. John Rudlin, Commedia dell’Arte: An Actor’s Handbook, 43-47. 29. Ibid., 57. 30. Ibid. 31. Mel Gordon, Lazzi: The Comic Routines of the Commedia dell’Arte (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1983): 4. 32. Tim Fitzpatrick, “Flaminio Scala’s Prototypal Scenarios: Segmenting the Text/Performance,” The Science of Buffoonery: Theory and History of the Commedia dell’Arte, ed. Domenico Pietropaolo (Toronto: Dovehouse Editions, 1989): 187. 33. Pierre Louis Duchartre, The Italian Comedy, 36. 34. David L. Hirst, Giorgio Strehler, 52. 35. Fu una beneficiata di Marcello Moretti, il cui nuovo Arlecchino goldoniano fu, effettivamente, nuovo. Un Arlecchino essenzialmente mimico è, in certo senso, rigorosamente stilizato, quanto i suoi precendenti erano stati, di volta in volta, clowneschi e sanguigni, secondo una gamma più che varia. Ettore Gaipa, Giorgio Strehler (Bologna: Cappelli, 1959): 79. 36. David L. Hirst, Giorgio Strehler, 52-53. 37. Ibid. 38. evoluzione, dalla Commedia dell’Arte al realismo. Giorgio Strehler, Giorgio Strehler: Intorno a Goldoni, ed. Flavia Foradini, 117-118. 39. Unknown Author, Review of Arlecchino servitor di due padroni in Oggi (August 3, 1947) rptd. in “A Clapping of Hands as Big as the World” by Paolo Bossisio in the program for Arlecchino servitor di due padroni program for 2005 United States Tour. 40. Unknown Author, Review of Arlecchino servitor di due padroni in Candido (August 3, 1947) rptd. in “A Clapping of Hands as Big as the World” by Paolo Bossisio in the program for Arlecchino servitor di due padroni program for 2005 United States Tour. 41. I nani, i gobbi, gli storpi e i pazzi di questa strana, eccentrica commedia-farsa, furono la metafora di una condizione social e professionale valida per la maggioranza dei comici. Relitti malriusciti, handicappati protagonisti di una storia che li vedra in eterno soccombere. È saranno, nei secoli, sorpassati, giustamente, dal teatro di ben altri pionieri . . . testimoniare la patologia irredenta da cui nasce ogni teatro, nonostante i progetti umanistici e le illusioni di riforma. The term irridentist refers to a country with its own unique culture that is nevertheless overshadowed by the imperial control of another. Siro Ferrone, Commedia dell’Arte (Milano: Mursia, 1985): 44.

Chapter Three

A Brechtian Arlecchino

Giorgio Strehler has gone beyond mere meticulousness. He has given us the highest proof of his grand directorial capacity, bringing a sense of cohesion to the work . . . that does not leave room for gaps or regrets. In the music, in the acting, in the staging, the Epic conception of Brecht is realized through Strehler and with him, his extraordinary collaborators. 1 —Luigi Pestalozza, writing on Strehler’s 1956 production of The Threepenny Opera

On August 14, 1956, theatrical innovator Bertolt Brecht died of a massive heart attack at the age of fifty-eight, leaving behind an expansive, complex, and irrefutable legacy. While his significant work as a playwright was arguably behind him by the 1950s, his impact as a theoretician and founding father of Epic Theatre had diminished little. Less than six months prior to his passing, Brecht traveled to Milan to observe the final rehearsals and opening night of Strehler’s production of The Threepenny Opera. 2 Their creative union, while brief, marked an important turning point in Strehler’s career at the Piccolo. Critics and historians may understandably argue about how much information actually passed between the two men given their brief association. While these questions are far from immaterial, the significance of Brecht to Strehler’s career is one not merely of collaboration, but of influence. Brecht’s ideology was already of keen interest to Strehler and would likely have been an integral part of his career even if he and Brecht had never met. In fact, prior to the production, Strehler traveled to Berlin, armed with a multitude of questions about the first production of The Threepenny Opera. In the years prior to their meeting and this production, Strehler read volumes of material by and about Brecht. The assiduousness of Strehler’s immersion in the material was evinced in their meeting when Strehler recalled more detail about the 47

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production than Brecht. 3 The exact materials Strehler studied remain unknown; however Strehler (who was of Austrian, Slavic and French descent) was fluent in both German and French, in addition to his native Italian. 4 As a result, he would have been able to consult a wide variety of sources, potentially including Brecht’s key text, Theaterarbeit, which was originally published in 1952. 5 Strehler wanted to glean as much information as possible about the original production of Threepenny, which premiered in Berlin when Strehler was just seven years old. In any case, Strehler’s initial immersion in Brecht at the theoretical level bolsters the idea that Strehler’s neoBrechtian aesthetic was characterized more by adaptation and evolution than mere appropriation. Thus, though their meeting was brief, the significance of it lay not only in their discourse, but also in the galvanization of the emerging Brechtian elements in Strehler’s directorial approach. The Threepenny Opera was Strehler’s first significant production of Brecht, but it was not his first altogether. Just one year before (1955), Strehler made his first foray into Brecht with a small, studio production of The Measures Taken. Tellingly, this lesser known play was one of Brecht’s Lehrstucke or “learning plays,” and its low profile was comparable to some of Strehler’s experimentations with minor Goldoni works. It allowed the director to develop his style without sacrificing a beloved (or at least well-known) work in the process. Following The Measures Taken and The Threepenny Opera, Strehler staged more than fifteen productions of Brecht plays, including Schweik in the Second World War, Saint Joan of the Stockyards, Galileo, The Good Person of Setzuan and two more productions of Threepenny (in 1973 and 1986). Tellingly, Strehler devoted a significant portion of his seminal text, Per un teatro umano, to his neo-Brechtian work. In it, Strehler cites Brecht as one of his maestri or master-teachers whose work ranked among the most influential upon Strehler’s career. 6 Strehler’s Brechtian aesthetic shaped his future productions of other important playwrights including Chekhov, Shakespeare, and, perhaps most significantly, Goldoni. Strehler’s production of Threepenny was not Italy’s first glimpse of the landmark play. In 1929, a year after its premiere, Anton Bragaglia had staged a watered-down version of the play, which considerably downplayed the Marxist implications in the text. 7 While Bragaglia was not shy about reminding the public that he had staged the play first, it did not change the fact that, as with Goldoni, Strehler’s entrée into Brechtian performance represented something of a rediscovery for the Italian community. Bragaglia found distasteful the idea that Strehler not only would include the political overtones that he himself had so carefully omitted, but would amplify them as well (though, in truth, Strehler’s later production would be far more pungent and dark). Bragaglia found an inherent hypocrisy in Strehler’s presenting a social satire of economic classism to a group of wealthy Milanese whose patronage was integral to the Piccolo’s funding. 8 Indeed, Strehler’s production under-

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scored the idea that: “At the end of the 1950s producing Brecht in Italy represented an act of courage, a bold choice, as much on symbolic and ideological grounds as on purely artistic ones.” 9 However, what Bragaglia (among others) underestimated was Strehler’s keen understanding of Epic Theatre. While the production was not free from controversy or public ire, Strehler wisely used Brecht’s own idea of historicization to help diffuse potential outcry. Historicization, a way of using past events to draw contemporary parallels without directly implicating present-day figures, is a kind of inversion of present-day “high concept” productions. In such productions, directors often reset the time period and context of a classic work (often in a more contemporary period/milieu) in order to make it more contemporary and, thus, seemingly, more relevant. Conversely, historicization serves the dual purpose of estranging current affairs by placing them in the past and also diluting the potential implication of the writer and production team in the political content depicted in the piece. Strehler set his production in America before either of the World Wars and the choice was significant in several ways: First, it removed the play from any kind of local context by placing the action in a world that most Italians only saw through the media. As a result, the play became not so much a satire of American culture as a representing of that culture as seen from the outside. It also helped alleviate the weight of the social, political, and emotional baggage of the two World Wars. This milieu also allowed Strehler to evoke a kind of vaudevillian aesthetic, both in the acting as well as the design. This elliptical approach to time and place paved the way for Strehler’s future, higher-concept productions of Brecht, Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Goldoni. As always, part of the purpose in this analysis is to find cohesion in the apparent eclecticism of Strehler’s productions. Therefore, it is important to interrogate why this Brechtian aesthetic emerged at this point in his career. If Strehler’s early productions had begun to establish him as one of the most prominent interpreters of Italian theatre—particularly classical Italian theatre—why then would he suddenly shift his focus to a non-Italian aesthetic? Strehler’s persistent disdain for the ossified theatrical practices immediately predating the emergence of the Piccolo may answer this question on artistic grounds. Strehler no doubt realized the very likely possibility that his working methods could easily become stagnant and essentially repeat the mistakes of his predecessors. Certainly, the desire to sidestep complacency was a recurrent theme in Strehler’s writings, yet, on its own, it seems an incomplete answer. In the texts chronicling Strehler’s work with The Threepenny Opera, many photographic images of the production recur. Yet one of the most reprinted is not really from the production itself. The picture is deceptively simple and there is nothing remarkable about its composition, yet its powerful iconic significance cannot be denied. The photo depicts Brecht, standing

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on one of Strehler’s sets for his production of The Threepenny Opera. Dressed all in black with his eyes cast down, Brecht holds in his hand the mask of Arlecchino used in all of Strehler’s commedia productions. In addition to marking a pivotal moment in Strehler’s career, it also suggests a moment of union. In many ways, Strehler’s work with commedia had been preparing the way for his work with Brecht. Commedia allowed Strehler to experiment with new performance styles, new methods of actor training, and new approaches to design. The difficult transition that many of his actors went through from their outmoded performance techniques during Strehler’s early Goldoni productions certainly made his first foray into Brecht less jarring. Furthermore, when Pestalozza spoke of the “cohesion” in his critique, it was not mere critical fawning, but highlighted the focus that Brechtian theatrical practice brought to Strehler’s amalgamation of commedia and Brecht. Therefore, it is important to define that aesthetic, its application to Goldoni plays, and the changes it brought about in Strehler’s interpretation of classical Italian texts. Defining Brecht’s aesthetic is challenging in light of the evolution of his ideas over the course of his career. As John Willett noted in his compendium of Brecht’s writings: Too often the theory is treated as if it were a coherent whole which sprang from Brecht’s head ready-made. The endless working and re-working which it underwent, the nagging at a particular notion until it could be fitted in, the progress from an embryo to an often very differently formulated final concept, the amendments and the after-thoughts…all this is something that tends to be overlooked. 10

Willett’s comments might also apply to Strehler, whose style evolved in a similar fashion. In this light, it seems most pertinent to focus on the key ideas manifested in Strehler’s Goldoni productions. While Strehler was very well read on the subject of Brecht, like any artist, he selectively picked which elements he would incorporate into his own productions. Since Strehler encountered Brecht late in his career, perhaps the most potent element to cross over into Strehler’s work was the notion of the dialectic. The term emerged quite early in Brecht’s career (circa 1930) as a way of describing what he called “non-Aristotelian drama.” 11 Rooted in Marxism, it referred to foundational Epic Theatre tenets reacting against the Aristotelian model of drama, with its emphasis on empathy; however, the term “dialectical” disappeared from Brecht’s rhetoric almost as quickly as it had appeared. When it resurfaced nearly a quarter of a century later, it had a decidedly different meaning. In his later years, Brecht began to move away from some of the ideas of Epic Theatre. While neither divorcing himself entirely from these ideas nor

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recanting their validity, he nevertheless began to write more and more about their incompleteness, their inability to sustain themselves alone. As he stated: The term “epic theatre” may be too formal for the theatre we mean (and practice—up to a point). The epic theatre may be the underlying basis of these presentations, but it does not fully account for the way they show the productivity and malleability of society, which is the source of most of the enjoyment they provide. The term “epic theatre” must therefore be regarded as inadequate. 12

Complicating the matter is a lack of critical consensus on the meaning of Dialectical Theatre and its differences (if indeed there are any) from Epic Theatre. Some Brechtian scholars, including Martin Esselin, consider the term a replacement. 13 Peter Brooker places Dialectical Theatre in the framework of Brecht’s overall political bent and theatrical goals: Brecht sought to use the resources of art, in ways consistent with the tenets of dialectical materialism, to historicise and negate the commonplace and takenfor-granted, to prise open social and ideological contradictions, and so both demonstrate and provoke an awareness of the individuals place in a concrete social narrative. 14

Theorists certainly have had no trouble relating the idea of dialectics to Brecht’s work. 15 Brooker’s notion of provoked awareness can be achieved through a variety of dialectics. Indeed as a concept it can refer to: the dialectic between Brecht the playwright and the history being represented; the dialectic between the performers and the production in which they are performing; the Marxist and Hegelian idea of argument resolution and social change through the direct conflict of opposing ideologies; and even the metaphysical interrogation of concepts such as truth and reality. All of these different understandings of dialectics appear, either directly or inferentially, in Brecht’s writings and seem to lead to a conflation of Dialectical Theatre with Epic Theatre, dismissing his later musings as more or less semantic restructuring of existing ideas. This approach is understandable given Brecht’s lack of complete disclosure regarding the exact nature of his “new” Dialectical Theatre. Its vague and ephemeral nature is both intriguing and confounding, leading scholars like Willett to declare, “It has come to cause as much trouble as it is worth.” 16 In light of these conflicting viewpoints, perhaps it makes the most sense to approach the idea of Dialectical Theatre by examining how these different dialectics all manifested in Strehler’s oeuvre. In other words, how does the Dialectical inform Strehler’s transition into his Brechtian work? Since Strehler’s work, even with Brecht’s plays, could never be categorized as purely

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Epic, the significance of his use of it lies less in the appropriation than in the reinterpretation. In 1956, on the heels of his production of Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, Strehler presented a dramatically reimagined production of Arlecchino servitore di due padroni. This production experimented with ideas that were explored more fully in a subsequent production in 1963. The 1963 production, rather than a completely new reinvention of the text is perhaps more appropriately described as a more evolved version of the 1956 production. The 1977 production, while governed by many of the same precepts as these productions was a more marked departure in tone and will be discussed in the next chapter. In this production, Strehler maintained many of the lazzi familiar to audiences who had seen the previous two productions, but added a deceptively basic contextual element that drastically altered how the audience would interpret the increasingly familiar comic business. Rather than just present the play as is, Strehler attempted to reconstruct the historical context for performing the play. A small stage-within-a-stage stood center, where the action of Arlecchino servitore di due padroni played out. The rest of the playing area surrounding this mini-stage was devoted to depicting the offstage lives of the “actors” playing the parts in Arlecchino. As a result, the audience was watching two stories unfold: the more familiar tale of Arlecchino, and the offstage lives of those who performed the play. This idea presented a plethora of challenges for Strehler, the actors and the audience in its dialectical approach to the text. The aforementioned dialectic between playwright and history was amplified by Strehler’s contextual adjustments to Arlecchino. In rediscovering commedia, Strehler was faced with the challenge not only of recreating the mechanics of it—the lazzi, the costumes, the vocal and movement choices— but also providing some kind of context so that it did not seem stylistically foreign or artificial. Usually, he dodged these inherent complications by merely suggesting the time period. For his artistic purposes at the time, it seemed enough to allude to a different time and place without putting forth the huge dramaturgical effort to recreate that milieu and teach it to the audience. For the 1956 and 1963 productions, that approach was no longer sufficient. The style was familiar by now, making it ripe for exploring some of its historical context. The sets for the 1956 and 1963 productions, while different, both sought to evoke a late eighteenth-century traveling performance troupe. 17 As a result, Strehler’s actors had to develop an entire offstage life for the “actors” they were portraying, mold those lives into a cohesive story, and blend them seamlessly with Arlecchino so that they could portray their offstage lives in the moments when their Arlecchino characters were not on stage. By enacting the offstage lives of the “actors,” Strehler created the opportunity for a

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richer representation and interrogation of history. This device allowed the audience to examine the disparity between Venetian life as enacted onstage by the characters of Arlecchino and offstage by the “actors” playing those roles. 18 The historical dialectic overlaps imperceptibly with the dialectic between the theatrical artists and the production. If Strehler’s initial explorations allowed his actors to nudge the audience through comic asides and direct addresses, this new interpretation took the idea even further. On one level, the fourth wall of the Arlecchino play-within-a-play was broken constantly. Throughout this version, the “actors” not only interacted with each other offstage, they interacted with the other “actors” while they are performing Arlecchino. A recurring sight gag in this production was to have the “actors” on the stage-within-a-stage request props from the other “actors” who are offstage. Handkerchiefs, guns, plates of food, and many other items were demanded by the “actors” as they performed. Conversely, the “actors” who were offstage periodically attempted to interrupt the action on the stagewithin-a-stage and talk to the “actors” in the midst of their performances. In addition, Strehler added the character of the stage manager, who was visible throughout much of the production, promptbook in hand, unafraid of interrupting the “actors” who forgot or misspoke their lines. As a result, Strehler created a complex dialectic among his actors, the “actors” they were portraying and the characters in Goldoni’s play. Dialectical Theatre also allowed Strehler to examine the social and the political following Marxist and Hegelian ideologies. These socio-intellectual underpinnings prevented the production concept from being merely a creative dramaturgical exercise. Crucial to the setup of the offstage lives of the “actors” was a rivalry between two troupes, one headed by the actor playing Pantalone, the other by the actor playing Brighella. 19 By including this in the offstage drama, Strehler provided a lens for examining the parallels between Goldoni’s characters and the “actors” portraying them. Just as a socioeconomic hierarchy existed between Goldoni’s gentry and the servants who work for them, so too did a hierarchy develop among the “actors.” Since this hierarchy was based in part on the significance of their roles in the play (which in turn would have been based on their standing within the company), it in many ways paralleled the social standing of the characters in Arlecchino. As a result, throughout Strehler’s production, minor players such as the waiters and porters made highly noticeable displays of contempt and disrespect for the major players. In some ways, the most basic and yet least tangible dialectics created in Strehler’s new imagining of Arlecchino servitore di due padroni were those that questioned ideas such as truth and reality. While the production would certainly not be described as spiritual, its context evoked certain existential questions without any of the actors (or “actors”) even approaching the topic

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through voice or gesture. This dialectic was all the more potent because many elements of the production were familiar to its audiences and were retained through subsequent interpretations, even given the radical departure of this new incarnation. Since the audience was witness to several different realities and the “actors” were often audience to their own production, the elusive question of what story this version of Arlecchino servitore di due padroni was telling remained a recurring idea. All of these dialectics melded together to create Strehler’s unique take on a quintessentially Brechtian element: Verfremdungseffekt. That a single word could provoke countless volumes of theoretical discourse is an affirmation of Brecht’s importance and legacy. Yet for the twenty-first-century scholar, that voluminous discourse is a theoretical minefield that renders the possibility of reclaiming the word’s essential meaning (if it even exists) daunting. The very act of trying to get at “the source” presumes that even Brecht himself had a clear, single understanding of his own theory, yet his later writings (particularly on the elusive “dialectical”) demonstrated that this was not the case. The irony of a word most often translated as “alienation” or “estrangement” becoming alienated or estranged itself speaks to the need to approach it as a concept. Strehler’s critical reputation has not approached the ubiquitous recognition that Brecht has in academe, but his constant reevaluation of his own process shows a parallel between the two men. The very theoretical territorialism that muddles critical discourse on Verfremdungseffekt hindered neither Brecht nor Strehler in their theatrical evolution. Their intersection found Strehler simultaneously experimenting with new interpretations of both Brecht’s ideas and his own. “Alienation” and “Estrangement” are perhaps the most common English translations of Verfremdungseffekt. Some scholars use both words interchangeably while others argue vociferously for their distinct interpretations of the word. It is an ideological debate masked as an exercise in semantics and translation. While most agree that the term refers to an effect created in the audience, scholars differ in their interpretations of who is responsible for the effect, to what degree the production team determines the effect, and, most importantly, what the emotional impact is. Darko Suvin (who also uses both translations of the word), isolates the element of time to approach some of these concerns: For if people are not temporally fixed points in Newtonian space but futureoriented vectors in Einsteinian time/space, they are not to be encompassed either by a mimic, dramatic present or by a rhapsodic, epic past. Looking at them from the author’s imagined future, they are objects in the past to be shown by epic narrative. Looking at them, simultaneously, from the author’s present, they are subjects in the present, to be shown by dramatic presentation. The new view of them will therefore consist of a precisely graded mingling of

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the ‘epic’ and the ‘dramatic’, of people as an object of cool anthropological cognition and as a subject of passionate dramatic sympathy. 20

This reading embraces the juxtaposition of two simultaneous temporal understandings within the audience rather than trying to choose the perceived dominant and lobby for its supremacy. Suvin’s explanation is that the play is both past and present; both narrated and enacted. In doing so, Suvin posits a Verfremdungseffekt that avoids an either/or ultimatum in its analysis of the intellectual and emotional impact upon the audience. Verfremdungseffekt can be both alienation and estrangement (if a scholar views those ideas as separate). It places Brecht not in contestation with Aristotelian notions of the dramatic, but in a unique conjunction (or at the very least, cohabitation) with them. The implications for such an interpretation on Strehler’s work with both Brecht and Goldoni are myriad. On the most tangible level, it frees Strehler from being rebuked for bastardizing Epic Theatre or any other Brechtian conceits. Strehler gave himself similar license with his resurrection of commedia, so the melding of neo-Brechtian and neo-commedia elements shaped an emerging aesthetic that could be defined as uniquely Strehlerian. The very act of using these elements is in itself an act of alienation and estrangement. The elements of commedia and Brecht—the physical accoutrement, the performance—were not wholly unfamiliar. This is particularly true of commedia, which Strehler had spent the previous decade reintroducing to his audience. At the same time, their interpretation was unique to Strehler’s productions. As a result, the audience was watching the action of the productions and looking back on it. This is most readily apparent in Strehler’s employment of comic lazzi. One of the most striking things about viewing his various productions of Arlecchino servitore di due padroni in conjunction with each other is the recurrence of these lazzi, some of which appear in every production. While the production’s context may change, the lazzi remained part of the fabric of each production. As a result, the lazzi, like the text itself, became a constant. In some ways, they were difficult to separate from Goldoni’s words themselves. If we presume that at least a portion of Strehler’s audiences saw many of these productions, then the lazzi (both those that were retained, and those that were altered or eliminated) became a device for controlling the audience’s intellectual and emotional engagement. An example of a recurrent lazzo that was reframed by the Brechtian construct came early in the play. In the first act, when Florindo checked into Brighella’s inn and agreed to take on Arlecchino as his servant, there was a lazzo involving Arlecchino and a porter who has brought Florindo’s trunk to the inn. In this bit of comic business, the beleaguered porter, straining under the weight of the trunk, was replaced by Arlecchino when the latter deftly

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slid under the trunk, shouldered the weight himself, and booted the porter out of the way with a kick to his rear end. This lazzo had been performed in earlier productions of Arlecchino, but in this version, the audience could see the “actor” who played the porter readying for his entrance. A couple of the other “actors” easily mounted the trunk onto his back before he came on stage. In doing so, the illusion of the weight of the trunk was broken and the audience was alerted to the theatrical artifice of it. The comic centerpiece of Arlecchino’s attempts to serve dinner to both of his masters simultaneously was arguably the most famous sequence of lazzi in the production and had the potential to create a variety of responses for the returning audience member. If a particular lazzo was favored, then it created anticipation—the fulfillment of which would lead to sustained emotional engagement while the failure to meet expectations might accelerate some kind of disengagement. Conversely, if the lazzo was not favored, it had the potential to precipitate disengagement before the scene was actually presented. Even if the response to the device was not uniformly controlled by Strehler, it does not negate the Brechtian intent behind its employment. Instead, it supports Suvin’s notion of multiple, simultaneous responses. While the mechanics of Arlecchino serving both of his masters remained largely the same from the 1952 production to the 1956 one, the context was markedly different. The scene still had Marcello Moretti performing virtuoso juggling and plate-tossing, however, the play-within-a-play setting drew attention to it as a technical device. The audience could see the “actors” along the sides of the stage-within-a-stage passing and receiving the various and sundry items as Moretti lobbed them. Moretti’s agility and physical versatility were no less impressive, however, as with the trunk sequence, the audience could now see the set-up behind the action. As mentioned before, the line between the lazzi and the text of Goldoni’s plays often became blurred in performance. This obfuscation was reinforced by the repeated use of comic bits in multiple productions. The 1956 and 1963 productions, in breaking these illusions, redefined the borders between the play itself and the artifice of performing it. Strehler indirectly defined lazzi for his audience by divorcing them from the words with which he had previously worked so hard to conjoin them. Examining the alienating effect of lazzi in Strehler’s Goldoni productions brings forth some unique questions about interpreting Brecht’s theories. Suvin’s take on Verfremdungseffekt is dualistic: the play’s realistic elements and Brechtian elements occupy the same space, and sometimes occur in the same moment. Walter Benjamin’s reading of this notion is more jarring: The task of epic theatre, Brecht believes, is not so much to develop actions as to represent conditions. But ‘represent’ does not here signify ‘reproduce’ in the sense used by the theoreticians of Naturalism. Rather, the first point at issue is

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to uncover those conditions. (One could just as well say: to make them strange [verfremden].) This uncovering (making strange, or alienating) of conditions is brought about by processes being interrupted. 21

This notion of interruptions makes Verfremdungseffekt an electric moment wherein audience members are violently shaken out of the complacency engendered by the traditional theatrical experience to a state of keen political awareness. Applying this idea to the lazzi in Strehler’s Goldoni productions creates some structural parity. The strong disagreement about the organic nature of lazzi dates all the way back to Gozzi and Goldoni. If the position established earlier of lazzi being both innate to the text and superfluous to it is true, the Brechtian layers added to the 1956 and 1963 productions amplify the distinction further. In Arlecchino servitore di due padroni, the script establishes that Arlecchino/ Truffaldino must wait on two masters at the same time; in this sense, the comic business is arguably organic. In Strehler’s staging of this pivotal scene, the audience was in a vantage point to see the inner workings of the creation of this moment. As a result, the context made the lazzi a marked, deliberate departure from the text. What Strehler’s interpretation did was reconcile the seemingly disparate understandings of Brecht as posited by Suvin and Benjamin. This melding of ideas is crucial to understanding Strehler’s singular take on Brechtian theatrics. Whether it is named (or interpreted as) alienation, estrangement, Verfremdungseffekt (known as estraniamento or allontanamento in Italian) the concept succeeds or fails by its tenuous relationship with the familiar. In other words, alienation as an action requires some familiarity in order to create the sense of distancing. It is easy enough to make an audience feel removed from something unfamiliar, but it requires far more skill to estrange them from something that is familiar. If the audience simply feels totally outside the action and ideas of the play, there is little potential for either intellectual or emotional engagement; however, if they are pushed away from something familiar and made aware of the separation, the balancing act that includes both Suvin’s and Benjamin’s notions is possible. On this level, Strehler’s reinventions of the same production were ideal for creating this effect. The audience saw recognizable faces recreating well-known characters who enacted crowd-pleasing comic business. The alteration, elimination and refraction of these elements made the Verfremdungseffekt possible. Another crucial part of Strehler’s realization of Brechtian aesthetics was his use of music in his Goldoni productions. In both his own (translated) writings and those of scholars devoted to his study, music in Brecht’s theatre served two purposes. First and foremost, it created the kind of break from “reality” that Benjamin describes. At the same time, the music (or at the very least the convention of music in theatre) was familiar, so that any distancing

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or alienation was keenly felt. The result, as Brecht described, is the following: In such ways, the music, just because it took up a purely emotional attitude and spurned none of the stock narcotic attractions, became an active collaborator in the stripping bare of the middleclass corpus of ideas. It became, so to speak, a muck-raker, an informer, a nark. These songs found a very wide public; catchwords from them cropped up in leading articles and speeches. A lot of people sang them to piano accompaniment or from the records, as they were used to doing with musical comedy hits. 22

Music, then, effects a seduction of sorts as the audience is lulled in by its pleasantness and recognizable structure. Brecht speaks of music as means of embedding ideas in the public consciousness. Strehler’s notion of presenting and re-presenting a production to the public increased the potential for the realization of this idea. In practice, Strehler utilized this technique in ways that both concurred with and differed from Brecht’s statements above. Within the framework of a Brecht play like Strehler’s 1956 Threepenny Opera, the harsh rupture from the action of the play into the songs was written into the structure of the text. In Goldoni plays like Arlecchino servitore di due padroni, he negotiated these concepts in different ways. In the 1956 and 1963 productions, act and scene changes were often accompanied by musical interludes, voiced primarily by the actress/“actress” playing Smeraldina. Occasionally, these numbers incorporated other members of the company, but mostly they were staged as scene-change entertainment. Smeraldina ambled leisurely in front of the stage-within-a-stage, while other company members changed the scenery and set dressings. Affecting a nonchalant troubadour persona, she offered pleasant, folksy tunes about love that were simple and pleasing to the ear. On the surface, these song breaks had little to do with the Brechtian goals at hand. Indeed, they evoked the use of music in countless European theatrical forms from centuries past in that they merely served as a bridge between one scene and the next. The simplicity was deceptive, however, because it masked the very Brechtian examination of class structure that Strehler created through these interludes. This entertainment, pleasant though it may be, did not exist within the structure of Arlecchino servitore di due padroni, but rather within the context of the eighteenth-century “acting troupes” who were putting on the play on the stage-within-a-stage. Furthermore, the bulk of this musical divertissement was performed by Smeraldina, a lower class character played by a lower class “actress.” The performances were a break from the action of the play that allowed time for reflection. Within Arlecchino, Strehler used music differently than in The Threepenny Opera. Rather than adding songs into the middle of the action of the play, a la Threepenny, Strehler found music within the play itself and utilized it to

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Brechtian effect. In the analysis of commedia elements in the previous chapter, one of the key ideas cited was the notion of incorporating dance and acrobatics into the performances of the actors. This, coupled with musical vocalizations, added further interdisciplinary elements to the productions. As before, many of the characters “performed” during the course of the play. Arlecchino and Smeraldina enacted a comic love ballet, while Silvio and Clarice embodied artificial gestures and affected tableaux. In a sense, these stylized movements created a kind of physical music that helped shape the rhythm of the production. In order to amplify these physicalizations, Strehler augmented the musicality of the vocal component of the performances. One principal bit of vocal business was to have a character make an extended vocalization on a vowel sound as they exited a scene. Beatrice, in particular, frequently left a scene sighing/singing, “Ahhhhhhh” (once this bit had been established early on, Arlecchino mocked it during one of his exits later in the play). On a comic level, this feminine sound was ironic given that Beatrice was still in drag as a man. Similarly, Clarice (whose movements in this version were even more suffused with ballet) cried-sang to emphasize her character’s childish nature. The older characters, particularly Pantalone and Brighella, often saw their dialogue degenerate into sing-songy gibberish—a kind of befuddled scatting that poked fun at their age. On a Brechtian level, these musical moments were a pronounced departure from the world of the play. Admittedly, neither this interpretation of Arlecchino nor the eighteenth-century context that Strehler wrapped it in could be called strictly realistic in any modern sense of the word. Conversely, neither could be labeled deliberately antirealistic. Thus, the music in the play was unique because it represented a conscious effort to leave the world of the play as established by the production. The characters leave whatever human traits they might possess behind and take on a kind of cartoonish quality that creates the desired alienation and estrangement. Strehler did in fact create a kind of sociopolitical commentary through the structure of these performances by emphasizing ideas inherent to Goldoni’s play. Servants were tricky, old men were blustery and buffoonish, and young men were rife with varying degrees of bravado. Furthermore, the musicality reinforced differences not only along class lines, but on sexual lines as well. Beatrice’s formidable presence as a man was somewhat undercut by the uncertainty that characterized her feminine vocalizations. Music, in Strehler’s vision of Goldoni, evoked two main ideas: femininity and comedy. If the music made Clarice and Beatrice more feminine (even if it was at the expense of their character’s integrity), it made Arlecchino and Pantalone more ridiculous. In this way, the stock characters and comic lazzi of commedia intersected with the alienation and social commentary of Brecht.

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As with their induction into Strehler’s version of commedia, the actors similarly needed to adapt their performance styles to carry out the Brechtian stylistic components listed above: The most arduous difficulty that we came up against in our mise en scene for The Threepenny Opera was one of acting. From the beginning, we realized that in confronting Epic Theatre it is necessary that the actor approach it, first of all, with a clear mind about the things which surround him: the actor should know what he means to say and how he should say it. An epic character cannot be sustained by an actor if he does not clearly understand what his position is in relation to that character. Therefore, it was necessary “to prepare” the actors from an ideological point of view as well: that is to say, to make them a much broader, richer speech than that journey required by any other text. 23

In discussing his preparation for the inaugural production of Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera in 1956 that was soon followed by his revised Arlecchino servitore di due padroni, Strehler isolated the importance of changing the actors’ viewpoints about how they approached their characters. In rehearsal, Strehler would often employ the Brechtian technique of having “the actor to express himself in the third person.” 24 In this way, Strehler underscored the importance of the actors’ commentary on their characters through their performances, especially if that commentary was contrary. In doing so, Strehler added yet another dimension to our understanding of Verfremdungseffekt. In many ways, Suvin and Benjamin describe this phenomenon in terms of the audience and how it perceives the action of the play. The idea of an “effect” naturally puts the focus on the recipient more than the catalyst, yet Strehler’s work reminds us of the amount of effort required on behalf of the production team to create this effect, that it demands a near-constant effort from the actors to maintain this discourse between character and actor. When dealing with a non-Brechtian text, this effort is even more pronounced. In the above analysis of the Brechtian nature of music and musicality in the 1956 Arlecchino, it was clear that non-Brechtian texts required more interpretive effort in order to bring out these Brechtian elements. In The Threepenny Opera, the commentary was written into the text, most obviously in the songs. For Arlecchino, Strehler and his actors had to be very clear about their technical approach to Goldoni’s text in order to apply a Brechtian aesthetic. If the idea presented earlier that Strehler’s exploration of commedia also began to incorporate a Brechtian aesthetic, then why did the actors’ preparation rank as such an “arduous difficulty” for Strehler? Had he not broken them of their old habits in his commedia work with them during the previous Arlecchinos? Was the piece not already becoming increasingly self-referential from sheer repetition if nothing else? While there was harmony between these two aesthetics, their distinctions explain part of Strehler and company’s artistic exertions.

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The early Goldoni productions allowed Strehler and his actors to explore a new method of performing that eschewed the traditions of pre-World War II popular Italian theatre. Central to this performance style was a consistent breaking of the fourth wall. Lazzi, whether physical or verbal, were often performed with a wink to the audience. In addition, Goldoni’s asides and monologues also served to connect performer to audience. Though this technique began to approach a Brechtian notion of performance, it lacked the crucial commentary that categorized Strehler’s productions after 1956. While the audience was frequently addressed and acknowledged throughout the early Arlecchino and other Goldoni productions, this communication came from the characters and not the actors. Thus, while the world of the play was often left behind, the characters never were. The performances, for all of their in-joking and audience-nudging, lacked the truly Brechtian dialectic that characterized Strehler’s later productions. What made this application unique to Strehler was that it did not merely ape Brecht’s work. Instead, it adopted a Brechtian ideal and expanded upon it exponentially. In adopting a play-within-a-play format, Strehler compounded the dialectic. Not only were Strehler’s actors commenting on their characters, but the “actors” (the improvisatory offstage personas the actors adopted when not performing the action of Arlecchino on the stage-within-the-stage) were providing commentary of their own. In addition, Strehler’s actors could comment on the “actor” personas they created as well. For example, early in Act Two of the 1956/63 Arlecchino, as Dottore, Silvio and Pantalone tried to resolve the issue of who will marry Clarice, a visibly disgruntled “actor” attempted to rush the stage-within-a-stage in anger, only to be held back at the last minute by the “actress” playing Smeraldina. This moment highlighted the subtextual rivalry embedded in the story of the eighteenth-century “actors” created by Strehler and his company. The offstage story they created contains a multilayered dialectic. First, Strehler’s actors were commenting on their vision of the lives of “actors” in eighteenthcentury Italy. In doing so, they imbue a second level of commentary in the responses of the “actors” to the play they are performing and the other “actors” with whom they are working. Thirdly, Strehler’s company was ultimately commenting on Arlecchino itself, emphasizing the class issues inherent in the plot of the play. This multiplicity of identities did not end with Strehler’s actors, but extended to the audience as well. In creating an eighteenth-century environment to envelop the action of Arlecchino servitore di due padroni, Strehler omitted one key element: an audience. All of Strehler’s actors played “actors” in the company and characters in Arlecchino. The action of the play and the play-within-a-play were still presented to Strehler’s audience. In a sense this audience was both itself and its eighteenth-century counterpart. As an eighteenth-century audience, they were watching a traveling group of players

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perform Arlecchino servitore di due padroni. As a twentieth-century audience, they were watching the same production, but they were given the added vantage point of seeing the offstage lives of the “actors” from the late 1700s. This corroborates Suvin’s notion of dual perspectives, of looking at something in the present while simultaneously looking back on it in the past. In Strehler’s post-Threepenny Opera Goldoni productions, Verfremdungseffekt was not just about altering how the audience viewed the plays, the actors or the production itself. Rather, it asked the audiences to change how they viewed themselves in relation to these elements. This deceptively simple improvisational construct reinforced the very Brechtian idea of the audience being another character in the production, with its own multi-tiered series of dialectics with the actors, “actors” and characters. These ideas of performance in relation to Verfremdungseffekt all tied into the other key Brechtian ideal inherent in Strehler’s late 1950s/early 1960s Goldoni productions: Gestus. Like Verfremdungseffekt, Gestus has precipitated numerous interpretations and translations. Brecht, as translated by Willett, stated: ‘Gest’[Gestus] is not supposed to mean gesticulation: it is not a matter of explanatory or emphatic movements of the hands, but of overall attitudes. A language is gestic when it is grounded in a gest and conveys particular attitudes adopted by the speaker towards other men. 25

While this is the merely the starting point for examining the complicated nature of Gestus and its many iterations, it does approach a central truth about Gestus: the notion of conveying an attitude or point of view. In creating a new temporal structure for Arlecchino servitore di due padroni, Strehler opened up avenues for commentary along with other avenues for examining and responding to that commentary. The idea of Gestus reinforces the duality posed in the above analysis. In this framework, commedia performance techniques could be vibrantly alive and wholly mechanical at the same time. The social politics of the play could be both superficially humorous and imbued with contemporary relevance. Most importantly, the action could be happening and have already happened. The audience was aware of theatrical artifice and was an active participant in alternately upholding it and tearing it down. A moment in the production that crystallized the notion of Gestus came at the end of the first act, following Beatrice’s revelation to Clarice that she is a woman. After the actresses made their final exits, all of the main “actors” suddenly popped their heads out from different parts of the set: two at each of the windows; two more sets at each wing; one in the slit in the backdrop upstage center that served as the primary exit and entrance for the scene; and one peering out underneath the bottom of the backdrop that served as the

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back wall. The actors looked directly at the audience and held the moment in tableau until the lighting and music signaled a scene change. On the most basic level, the moment hinted at the secret plotting and mistaken identities that would make up the remainder of the play. Beyond this, it was a quite literal breaking of the fourth wall, ostensibly for comic effect. Yet, under closer examination, the moment represented the most direct confrontation between the actors/“actors” and the audience. Both the class issues of the Brechtian framework and the metatheatrical construct came to the forefront as the actors seemed to silently question the audience, or perhaps, to invite their questions. While it passed quickly enough (in all, it took less than half a minute), it was a clear manifestation of Strehler and his company’s desire to arrest the audience in the midst of the performance. For underneath Gestus, Verfremdungseffekt and the various other parts of Strehler’s neo-Brechtian aesthetic lurked a deeper question. If the examples above explain how this aesthetic was applied, further detail is needed to explain why. Its sequential evolution from commedia makes a certain empirical sense, but it does not explain the sustained Brechtian overtures in Strehler’s subsequent productions of Goldoni, Shakespeare, and Chekhov, among others. Indeed, the shadow of Brecht that cast itself over some of Strehler’s most famous non-Brecht and non-Goldoni productions, most notably The Tempest in the late 1970s, had its roots in this transitional period. What unites plays as disparate as Arlecchino, The Threepenny Opera, and The Tempest is Strehler’s fascination with the theatrical event. The Tempest (1978), is arguably Strehler’s most famous production. At the very least, it is the production best known to the Western audience outside continental Europe. A large part of that acclaim was focused on Strehler’s spectacular, overtly theatrical mise en scene. In Strehler’s production, Prospero’s magic was not limited to the action onstage, but extended out into the audience as well. This Prospero was both inside and outside the action of The Tempest, controlling not only the lives of the characters, but the construction of the theatrical event itself. Never was this more apparent than in the final moments of the production, wherein Prospero snapped his magic wand and the entire surrounding set was destroyed. Following this, Prospero directed his final monologue directly to the audience and, with their inevitable applause, the set magically reassembled itself. 26 More than a simple happy ending, this finale was perhaps the most overt realization of an aesthetic element that had emerged two decades earlier. Strehler’s neo-Brechtian rendering of Arlecchino paved the way for the grandiose, operatically Brechtian theatrics of The Tempest. Both productions simultaneously use theatrical tactics for effect while drawing the audience’s attention to those tactics. Furthermore, both productions, and many that fall between them, highlight an ongoing theme of Strehler’s fixation on the theatrical event. Indeed,

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many of his most famous productions assiduously constructed elaborate theatrical artifices only to break them down later. Often, a deliberate blurring of the lines between overt theatricality and what might be called metatheatricality is created. The loaded concept of metatheatricality is inextricably linked to Brechtian notions of theatre and a crucial ingredient in Strehler’s neo-Brechtian aesthetic. Its elusive definition is attributable primarily to a question of borders. At what point does a production cross over into the realm of metatheatricality? If those borders can be defined, or at least approached, a working understanding of metatheatricality is possible. Though the concept could be applied to any period of drama from the Greeks to the present, the term “metatheatrical” dates back to the 1960s. One of the first scholars to write about this “new” term was Lionel Abel in his book Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form. In it, Abel based his concepts on two phrases associated with famous playwrights: one by Calderon (“Life is a dream”), the other by Shakespeare (“All the world is a stage”). 27 In these oft-repeated quotations, Abel found an existential question that was crucial to understanding metatheatricality: the blurring of the lines between “reality” and the action of a play. In forming his thesis, he cited both Beckett and Brecht as exemplifying the metatheatrical in their work (albeit in different ways). As a result, whether the intent was existential (Beckett) or sociopolitical (Brecht), both playwrights created works that stylized their theatricality to the point where the audience’s attention was repeatedly drawn to the construct of the theatrical event itself and thus, became metatheatrical. Strehler’s interest in the metatheatrical took a more cohesive form following his early Brecht productions and his neo-Brechtian work on plays by other playwrights. The construct he and his company created for the 1956 and 1963 productions explored social and historical issues through a metatheatrical device. The audience encountered the “actors” portrayed by Strehler’s company only in the context of a theatrical event. This context consistently drew attention to the production as a theatrical event. The only parts of their lives the audience saw are for the duration of the performance of Arlecchino servitore di due padroni. As a result, the productions marked an intersection of Brechtian notions of Gestus and Verfremdungseffekt with metatheatricality. In addition, this metatheatricality was not merely a directorial conceit; rather, it followed in the Aristotelian vein of being comprised by all of the different facets of production including script, acting, staging, and design, among others. The offstage lives of the “actors” in the production served to emphasize the metatheatrical approach. At the beginning of the play, before the action of Arlecchino servitore di due padroni began, the “actors” could be seen preparing for performance: putting on costumes, admiring themselves in the mirror, chatting, and applying makeup. The transition into performance was

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marked when a horn sounded, calling the “actors” to action. In the following moments, the masked “actors” slowly lowered the masks over their faces at a deliberate pace. Next, some festive, carnival-like music was played and the “actors” all ran to the stage to perform a jubilant dance before setting up for the first scene of the play proper. The entire sequence played out like a ritual, underscoring the metatheatricality of the “actors’” transformations into their roles. Strehler’s use of theatricality and metatheatricality reached a kind of apex in his 1970s productions of The Cherry Orchard and The Tempest. They rank among Strehler’s best known works and their renown is due in no small part to Strehler’s keenly developed understanding (and manipulation) of the medium. Yet, what sets Goldoni productions like Arlecchino servitore di due padroni apart was that they achieved a deeper level of metatheatricality. Like Arlecchino, The Tempest and The Cherry Orchard were directed by Strehler more than once; however, in many ways, their incarnations were radically different from one another. Strehler’s first production of The Tempest was at the end of the Piccolo’s inaugural season in 1948. Staged outside in giant garden/fountain, the florid, ebullient production was the antithesis of the much darker 1970s production. 28 In addition, the all-white, vividly theatrical 1970s version of The Cherry Orchard was preceded two decades earlier by a remarkably traditional (and less successful) production. 29 In both cases, the second productions were complete reboots, rather than continuations or modifications of an existing concept. With Arlecchino, Strehler made the play a metatheatrical template from which to experiment with elements that were new to the audience while balancing those novelties against more familiar territory: “Brecht and Goldoni represent two still points [touchstones] in the sphere of my theatrical pursuits.” 30 In his own words, Strehler noted the importance of both Brecht and Goldoni in his expansive repertory. The jointure of Goldoni, Brecht and Strehler’s neo-commedia work further distanced Strehler from eclecticism and cemented his own developing directorial aesthetic. Rather than just random experimentation, Strehler’s application of a neo-Brechtian aesthetic to his post-1956 Goldoni productions represented an effort to maintain an ongoing discourse with his Milanese audience. Whether or not this maturing aesthetic began to establish a wholly Italian theatrical aesthetic remains to be seen; however, in this mélange of elements both Italian and non-Italian, Strehler was establishing an aesthetic unique to himself and the Piccolo Teatro di Milano—an important stepping-stone in creating uniquely Milanese or Italian theatre forms. NOTES 1. Giorgio Strehler è addirittura andato al di là del semplice scrupolo. Ci ha dato un saggio altissimo della sua grande capacità registica, entrando nel senso del lavoro e impostan-

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dolo in una coerenza . . . che non ha lasciato spazio a lacune o a rimpianti. Nella musica, nella recitazione, nella figurazione, la concezione epica di Brecht s’è realizzata attraverso Strehler e, con lui, i suoi straordinari collaboratori. Luigi Pestalozza, Review of The Threepenny Opera, Il Ponte (Firenze: March 1956) Rptd. in Fabio Battistini, Giorgio Strehler (Gremese: Rome, 1980): 152. 2. David L. Hirst, Giorgio Strehler (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1993): 96. 3. Ibid., 95; This interview is reconstructed in great detail in Giorgio Strehler, Per un teatro umano (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1974): 101-125. 4. Richard Trousdell, “Giorgio Strehler in Rehearsal,” The Drama Review 30:4 (Winter 1986): 65. 5. Ruth Berlau, Bertolt Brecht, Claus Hubalek, Peter Palitzsch, and Kathe Rulicke, Theaterarbeit (Dusseldorf: Johann Fladung, 1952). 6. Giorgio Strehler, Per un teatro umano, 135-136. 7. David L. Hirst, Giorgio Strehler, 92-93. 8. Ibid. 9. Anna Piletti, “Giorgio Strehler and Bertolt Brecht: The Meeting of Two ‘Men of Poetry,’” Modern Drama 42:2 (Summer 1999): 235. 10. John Willett, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (Hill and Wang: New York, 1964): xiii. 11. Ibid., 46-47. 12. Bertolt Brecht, Introduction to The Dialectic on the Stage rptd. in Brecht: The Man and His Work by Martin Esselin. (Garden City: Anchor, 1960): 151-2. 13. Esselin, 151. 14. Peter Brooker, “Key words in Brecht’s theory and practice of theatre.” The Cambridge Companion to Brecht (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2006): 210. 15. Astrid Oesmann, Staging History: Brecht’s Social Concepts of Ideology (State University of New York: Albany, 2005): 25. 16. John Willett, Brecht on Theatre, 281. 17. David L. Hirst, Giorgio Strehler, 45-48. 18. Giorgio Strehler, Arlecchino servitore di due padrone 180 min (approx), Piccolo Teatro Archivio Storico, 1974, videocassette. This production was a recreation of the 1963 production for television. Unless otherwise indicated, all statements regarding physical action and performance refer to this video. This production was staged outdoors and represented the most expansive layout for the Brechtian construct. 19. David L. Hirst, Giorgio Strehler, 45-48. 20. Darko Suvin, To Brecht and Beyond (Harvester: Sussex, 1984): 123. 21. Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (Verso: London, 1966): 18. 22. John Willett, Brecht on Theatre, 85-86. 23. La difficoltà più ardua che incontrammo nella nostra messinscena dell’Opera da tre soldi fu quella della recitazione. Fin dall’inizio ci rendemmo conto che mai come nell’affrontare il teatro epico e necessario che l’attore si impegni a fondo, prima di tutto, con idée chiare sulle cose che lo circondano: l’attore deve sapere che cosa vuole dire e come deve dirlo. Un personaggio epico non puo essere sostenuto da un attore se questi non sa chiaramente quale e la sua posizione di fronte a questo personaggio. Fu dunque necessario “preparare” anche dal punto di vista ideologico gli attori: far loro, cioè un discorso ben più ampio di quello slittamenta richiesto da un altro qualsiasi testo. Giorgio Strehler and Paolo Grassi, Piccolo Teatro 1947-58, ed. Nicola Moneta (Milan: Moneta, 1958): 200. 24. Odette Aslan, “From Giorgio Strehler to Victor Garcia,” Modern Drama 25:1 (March 1982): 115. 25. John Willett, Brecht on Theatre, 104. 26. David L. Hirst, Giorgio Strehler, 88-89. 27. Lionel Abel, Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form (Hill and Wang: New York, 1963): 105.

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28. For more on that production see Gian Giacomo Colli, “Shakespeare in a Fountain: The First Italian Production of The Tempest Directed by Giorgio Strehler in 1948.” Theatre Research International 29:2 (July 2004). 29. David L. Hirst, Giorgio Strehler, 26. 30. Brecht e Goldoni rappresentano due punti fermi nell’ambito della mia ricerca teatrale. Giorgio Strehler, Intorno a Goldoni, ed. Flavia Foradini (Mursia: Milano, 2004): 24.

Chapter Four

Refractive Theatricality

In the first two decades of its existence, Strehler and the Piccolo Teatro di Milano incorporated numerous techniques into their productions in an attempt to fulfill the promises of the Piccolo’s founding manifesto. Strehler and the Piccolo’s desire to create theatre for the people that eschewed artiness and elitism while at the same time tried to cultivate the people’s taste for that theatre mirrored the sometimes oxymoronic relationship between socialism and communism in postwar Italy. Like much of postwar Europe, the Italian communist and socialist movements were characterized by increasingly divergent goals, despite shared ideological foundations. Since the Piccolo was a stabile theatre, Strehler found himself at a unique intersection of government and art that, like the rest of Italy, was characterized by multiple (and often conflicting) political points of view. Strehler (and co-founder Paolo Grassi) equated experimental theatres with artistic affect and sociopolitical bankruptcy, so their challenge was to retain meaning and relevance in spite of the familiarity that was necessary to maintain an audience. In short, the through-line provided by Arlecchino servitore di due padroni that constituted a significant part of the Piccolo’s early success could have failed and turned into the very type of theatre against which Strehler and his colleagues rebelled: formulaic museum theatre. Arlecchino helped define Strehler’s career, but its ongoing reinvention was a matter of necessity, not just novelty. By casting a self-referential glance with his late 1950s and early 1960s productions, Strehler could have potentially backed himself into an artistic corner. His predilection for examining, exploiting and redefining the theatrical experience automatically demanded an examination of what lay beneath the spectacle. Were these merely hollow exercises in directorial sleight-of-hand? Was Strehler’s command of the medium purely technical? Was he creating deliberately artificial worlds for his 69

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productions? In what ways (if any), could ideas like realism and naturalism fit into those worlds? The latter question was particularly precarious, because Italy’s versions of “realism” and “naturalism” were unique to themselves and did not fall neatly into larger paradigmatic understandings of the words. Like many other European countries, Italy had its own unique evolution in terms of how its theatre attempted to reflect “real life.” Therefore, it seems more apposite and feasible to focus on three movements whose approaches to the questions of representation were highly influential in Italy: verismo, neorealism, and socialist realism. To connect these movements more specifically to the Italian experience, political historical context will be crucial to reaching conclusions about Strehler’s approach to these ideas. As mentioned in chapter 1, the verismo movement was Italy’s answer to naturalism, reflecting the regionalized nature of the newly united Italy. Yet the Italian verist’s works were challenged by the proliferation of other movements that were either antirealistic or at least non-veristic. One such movement can be attributed to writer and political figure Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863-1938). D’Annunzio was a kind of Neo-Romantic, who abandoned his early verist approach in favor of embracing the poetic and the classic. 1 This distinction would not be notable were it not for his artistic collaboration and personal relationship with the great Italian stage actress Eleonora Duse. The international star invested a significant amount of time and money in D’Annunzio’s work, and his nationalistic ideological bent has been interpreted by some scholars as pre-Fascist and pre-symbolist. 2 As a result, his work with Duse provided at least one reason for the opposition to verismo in Italy. In the decades following D’Annunzio, it would be curtailed further by theatrical movements that opposed everything that verismo represented. As previously noted, the early twentieth century in Italian theatre was characterized largely by antirealistic movements. Not surprisingly, aesthetic concerns about real-life representation emerged from an entirely different medium: film. At the turn of the twentieth century, film, like theatre, consisted of two opposing strains: the verismo aesthetic and the overtly theatrical (even melodramatic) aesthetic typified by D’Annunzio (who made contributions to both screen and stage). 3 Like theatre, the film industry also suffered considerably during the rise of Fascism. The neorealist movement, which rose to prominence in the postwar period, was part of the same cultural Zeitgeist as the Piccolo Teatro. Although a primarily a cinematic and literary movement, neorealism had a significant relationship to theatre. For example, director Luchino Visconti directed for the stage and the screen, and some of his most notable stage efforts were concurrent with his neorealist films. Neorealism represented the nation’s desire for a fresh start politically, culturally, and artistically.

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A definition of neorealism requires an exploration of the origins of the movement: The impetus for the cinema identified as neorealism, largely associated with the postwar years, has been accounted for in a number of ways: It was a movement that aimed to make connections with the Risorgimento, the unification of Italy as a nation, and its unfinished “revolution.” It was a cinema of anti-Fascism, expressing the aspirations of the Left, focusing on social injustice and the arrogance of power, critical of the clichés and formulas of genre and with the spectacle and rhetoric of cinema under Fascism. 4

If defined exclusively in terms of its relationship to Fascism, the movement becomes entirely reactionary; a critical desire to give the movement greater autonomy has enlarged the breadth of interpretations beyond its reaction against Fascism. Key to this expansion is an erasure (or at least a blurring) of borders, particularly in terms of time frames. When precisely the movement began or ended becomes less important than exploring the ideas it espoused. Instead of being merely anti-Fascist, neorealistic cinema explored a multitude of issues, questioning set ideas and creating a world where “conventional notions of truth, virtue, heroism, good and evil, and above all, the real and the artifactual are put into crisis, and where the possibility of a more complex relation to the world is possible.” 5 The crucial notion of the “real” in opposition to the “artifactual” has multiple meanings. In one sense it could be interpreted as the dynamic between the real and the manufactured—that which reflects real life versus that which dramatizes it. Alternately, it also speaks to the notion of truth versus falsehood. The idea of the false was crucial to neorealism as it represented a means to uncovering truth. In presenting lies and hypocrisy, the neorealists brought greater attention to the truths that were being masked or distorted. 6 One of the best examples of neorealism is Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thief (released in 1948, just after the Piccolo finished its first season). If a fundamental aspect of the neorealism is that “all neorealist works directly engage history,” then Bicycle Thief can clarify the relationship between neorealism and other artistic movements. 7 The film follows Antonio, a poor Italian husband and father who attempts to find his stolen bicycle, without which he cannot keep the job he so desperately needs. Millicent Marcus’s analysis of the film points out “the filmmaker’s strategy of layering semantic meaning” by ensuring that the film “maintains its autonomy as a document of a concrete historical condition” while still providing “parallel meanings.” 8 Marcus goes on to call neorealism “self-concealing art” in that it deflects its complex construction by a deceptively simple surface. 9 Marcus notes that the film had more financial resources than earlier neorealist films and thus had to recreate the aesthetic of its lower-budgeted predecessors.

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Bicycle Thief sought to capture a certain reality of the postwar moment. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith connects such neorealistic efforts to earlier representations, noting that “it [neorealism] was part of a general climate of cultural regeneration which sought to sweep away the residues of Fascism and reaffirms alternative cultural traditions such as that of turn-of-the-century realism, or verismo.” 10 Scholar David Hirst also places Strehler’s realistic explorations in terms of neorealism and verismo. Hirst proposes that Strehler inverts some approaches of neorealism; instead of using real people and locations to create a kind of theatrical poetry, Strehler uses actors and theatrical artifice to create the illusion of reality. 11 As the above example of Bicycle Thief demonstrates, sometimes the neorealists employed methods similar to those that Strehler used. In terms of Strehler’s aesthetic, neorealism (like verismo) created the possibility for asking questions not just about the deep issues represented in art but how those representations were created, structured, and altered—specifically that both the neorealistic conventions and their inverted ones could be employed. While the power of its influence was extensive, the neorealistic movement is commonly believed to have declined in the mid-1950s. If some of its ideas were tied to a postwar mentality, then it makes sense that as the end of the war receded into the past, the desire for new forms and approaches may have shifted the focus away from neorealism. Some attribute this decline to a shift in perspective: As neorealism moved on from the Resistance film to the social film, its audience dwindled. In Italy it was equally unpopular with the upper classes and the Church, whose peace of mind it disturbed, and with the lower and middle classes, who had little desire to see their problems and sufferings displayed on the screen. 12

Neorealism’s decline was thus closely linked with its fixation on the present. In many ways, Fascism’s influence over art sought to tie its ideals to historical glory. As a result, neorealism, despite reaching back to the ideas of the verists from decades earlier, focused more on the contemporary lives of everyday people. Once some distance from Fascism had been established, artists found a renewed interest in using history as a way of interrogating Italian identity. A nationalism freed from Fascism could now be explored as Italy sought to redefine itself in the second half of the twentieth century. The decline of neorealism also reflects the political culture of postwar Italy, wherein anti-Fascist movements struggled to find their identity and maintain a constituency. In 1948, Italy established itself as a Republic, and the multiple political parties that emerged during this time reflected the diversity of viewpoints and subcultures within the country. The communists and socialists who played important roles (to varying degrees of success) in

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the Resistance during the late World War II years seemed poised to ride the wave of anti-Fascism to a place of prominence, and the new constitution seemed to espouse some of their ideals in its focus on the exploited masses: The constitution declared Italy a democratic republic “founded on the labor,” gave sovereignty to the people, promised social equality, and proclaimed that citizens and groups possessed inviolable rights. In accordance with the evolution of Western political thought, it pledged to demolish economic and social obstacles that hindered workers from effectively participating in the country’s political and economic order, that blocked personal development, and prevented the attainment of true equality. 13

This description highlights the unique and often uneasy balance of ideals sought by postwar Italy. Unfortunately and perhaps inevitably, this political mélange failed to integrate into a unified whole and the inequality of its parts became even more pronounced. Despite their allied anti-Fascist stance during the war, Italian socialists and communists had very different agendas, which became even more evident in the postwar Republic. Short-lived splinter parties only further diffused their constituencies, and as a result the Christian Democrats won the majority in the Italian Parliament in 1948 and maintained it for nearly three decades. 14 The different paths of the socialist and communist parties in Italy had a tremendous impact on the social, political, and artistic culture of Italy. Despite not winning the majority, the Communist (PCI) and Socialist Parties (PSI) were the second and third largest representations under the Christian Democrats (or DC) in the early postwar years, putting the latter in a difficult position if it attempted to stray too far to the right. 15 Within a decade, the DC had moved towards the center, and it was this centrism that helped it maintain its majority. 16 Coupled with this was an increasing alliance between leftist DC members and centrist PSI ones. Rather than bolstering the PSI, this Center-Left convergence only weakened them further. Radical socialists defected and in approaching the already-dominant DC, the PSI rendered itself increasingly less relevant. Ironically, while the PSI declined steadily, the more leftist PCI saw a steady increase in its constituency during the same period. 17 In light of these changes, the decline of neorealism a decade into the postwar Republic period makes sense. Leftist ideals of varying degrees were still an integral part of Italian culture, but the political landscape in which they existed had shifted. The centering of the sociopolitical climate rendered certain ideas (both political and artistic) less radical, obsolete, or at least unpopular: The events of the late forties left a strong sense of disappointment in the minds of many of those Italians who had fought in the Resistance. . . . In the artistic

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Noting both the import of neorealism’s influence and its lack of popular support is not as contradictory as it first appears, in light of the divisive nature of Italian culture. Geographically, Italy was still divided into two primary regions: the largely lower class, more agrarian and underrepresented south; and the richer, more industrialized and politically influential north. As a result, the smaller circles of artists (whether their intentions were elitist or not) could influence each other without necessarily attaining widespread popularity among the masses. Furthermore, that the north (particularly Milan) was the cultural locus of the country made the connections in this circle of influence easier. As in other cultures, the shared artists of the film and stage communities only deepened these connections. Neorealism’s influence on both film and theatre was significant in its examination of questions of representation. In many ways, its recession (or appropriation by other movements) left the door open for the entrance of other artists (Strehler included) to take these questions of representation in new directions. The decline of neorealism coincided with Strehler’s early Brechtian explorations and their applications to Goldoni. That aesthetic remained a defining force that, like the elements previously analyzed, did not preclude Strehler from pursuing other approaches. Strehler’s own politics provide some connectivity between his explorations of both Brechtian and realistic aesthetics: Myself, I’m a socialist, with a materialistic view of history: I’m a Marxist; so I believe personally in developing the dialectic in a positive sense. But the dialectic itself is neither positive nor negative. Dialectic is dialectic, it’s thesis and antithesis, that which is balanced in the movement of history. I happen to believe in a positive development in the movement of human thought. 19

Strehler’s use of the term “dialectic” is notable in its relationship to Brecht (as analyzed in chapter 3). Strehler’s politics also puts his approach to representing reality closer to that of socialist realism, and helps explain his unique approach to theatricality. In fact, Mikhail Parkhomenko and Alexander Myasniknov’s explanation of one of the fundamental aspects of socialist realism mirrors Strehler’s assertion of his own Marxist point of view: “The sense of historical optimism is inherent in the best characters of the art and literature of socialist realism.” 20

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A survey of Strehler’s early directorial efforts at the Piccolo reveals precious few titles that would be considered either realistic or naturalistic (in any sense of the words), further underscoring the notion that these ideas were not really part of the Italian theatrical representation of real life. The outside force that did influence Italian theatre in these questions of representation was socialist realism: From 1934 onwards, official literary theory in the USSR had as its cornerstone the doctrine of ‘socialist realism.’. . . Socialist realism contains several of the elements of classical Marxist literary criticism, but with some additions and with a significant change of emphasis. Engels had said that he had no objection to a ‘tendentious’, i.e. a didactic, novel, provided that the opinions of the novelist are not paraded. In Socialist realism, there is a greater emphasis on didacticism. 21

Socialist realism was not limited purely to Russian literature and in fact the direct contact (and conflict) of cultures created by the Second World War doubtlessly helped the movement spread to the rest of Europe. While the origins of socialist realism are inextricably bound to Gorky (often viewed as the “father” of the movement), one of the most influential thinkers to shape and develop its ideals was Hungarian critic Georg Lukacs, who wrote extensively about the nature of socialist realism. His theories were ideas that were important not just to art, but to culture and politics as well. One of Lukacs’ foundational concepts was the idea of an objective reality. While literature could reflect and evoke the individual and his/her response to the objective reality, the text should remain true to that objective reality. Lukacs did not promote a neutral perspective; rather, he felt that objective reality could be attacked simultaneously from two different angles: By the ‘outside’ method a writer obtains a typology based on the individual and his personal conflicts; and from this base he works towards wider social significance. The ‘inside’ method seeks to discover an Archimedian point in the midst of social contradictions, and then bases its typology on an analysis of these contradictions. Many realistic writers use both methods; and both methods may coexist in the same work of art. 22

Unsurprisingly, an inherent focus of socialist realism was the proletariat and its lack of artistic representation. By the very act of excluding the exploited, underprivileged masses, these works concealed and rejected the “truth” inherent in socialist realism. 23 In this light, some of the works traditionally heralded as early realistic dramas (e.g., certain plays by Ibsen and Shaw), would be rejected by socialist realists because of class concerns. Similarly, Lukacs dismissed Zola, often considered one of the progenitors of naturalism, in favor of writers like Balzac and, later, Thomas Mann.

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Given the strong socialist and communist constituency of Italy, particularly in its artistic community, the influence of socialist realism is relevant to any analysis of art and literature in postwar Italy. More specifically, its Marxist influence can be tied to Strehler’s own agenda and his early work at the Piccolo Teatro di Milano. Tellingly, the inaugural production of the Piccolo’s first season was Gorky’s The Lower Depths. Coupled with their manifestos and early dramatic critical writings, The Lower Depths allowed Strehler and Grassi to present a work that reflected their desire to create theatre for the people while simultaneously raising their audiences’ awareness of social concerns. Yet, socialist realism courted the same dangers as neorealism in eschewing entertainment in favor of education and social consciousness. To balance this, Strehler applied the socialist realistic aesthetic to works that were not a part of that movement. In 1955, Strehler directed two back-toback productions that exemplified the socialist realistic aesthetic in his work (an aesthetic he would later completely re-imagine). The two productions that Strehler used to explore these ideas were Goldoni’s Villeggiatura trilogy and Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. The three Villeggiatura plays—Le smanie per la villeggiatura, Le avventure della villeggiatura, and Il ritorno dalla villeggiatura—can be translated as Off to the Country, Adventures in the Country, and Back from the Country. 24 The first title could be translated more literally as Excitement about the Vacation. The vacation in question is in the country and first play deals with its characters’ attempts head off to their country retreats, yet the semantics of the title are crucial to its content. The simpler Off to the Country parallels the translation of the other two titles yet fails to convey the restlessness of the characters and the idea that the play is not simply about a family vacation. Written more than twenty years after Arlecchino servitore di due padroni, the Villeggiatura plays are remarkably different in character and tone. The action follows two middle-class families preparing for their annual excursion to the country. At the center of the action is a love quadrangle centered on Leonardo, who is in love with his neighbor Giacinta. Giacinta is in love with Guglielmo, yet agrees to marry Leonardo on principle. As a result, Guglielmo becomes betrothed to Leonardo’s younger sister, Vittoria. Over the course of the three plays, the lovers attempt to free themselves from their romantic entanglements with the help and hindrances of family, friends, and servants. While traditional socialist realists might balk at the focus on bourgeois characters (none of Gorky’s thieves and prostitutes are to be found in Villeggiatura), the play is evocative of many of the concerns of socialist realism. Perhaps more important than the more traditional love story is the social commentary that runs throughout all three plays. Both Leonardo and Giacinta’s families are living beyond their means—overextending themselves by continually hosting their friends and family during their annual holiday re-

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treats, yet sinking hopelessly in debt in doing so. Furthermore, it is the servants who often bear the brunt of their masters’ selfishness. One of the key comic scenes in the first Villeggiatura involves Leonardo and Vittoria’s inability to decide if they are going to the country or not. As a result, their servants must pack, unpack, and re-pack their carriages according to Leonardo and Vittoria’s capricious oscillations. Throughout, these bourgeois characters lament and are rebuked for their profligate spending but do nothing to save themselves. Though intended as comedies, the tone of the Villeggiatura plays in Strehler’s hands was decidedly darker and more serious than the lighthearted antics of Arlecchino servitore di due padroni. The pairing of the Villeggiatura trilogy and The Cherry Orchard in Strehler’s initial interpretations of them highlights commonalities between the works. Despite being written in different cultures more than one hundred years apart from one another, they both reflect cultures at a crossroads: they are elegiac comedies about people unwilling to let go of a bygone way of life. Furthermore, both plays are populated by characters who live beyond their means and remain apathetic about fixing the problems incurred by their debts. The characters (particularly in Villeggiatura) are living examples of a failed socioeconomic system. Family friend Fulgenzio repeatedly chastises Leonardo as well as Giacinta’s father, Filippo, for overextending themselves in order to keep up appearances and entertain their guests in the country. Similarly, Ranevskaya and Gaev’s affection for the titular orchard prevents them from selling it to pay off their debts. Like Villeggiatura, The Cherry Orchard is infused with commentary about poor management of money. Underneath these issues is a critique of class and social standing. Despite their different roles, the servants often have stories that mirror those of their masters. In The Cherry Orchard, a subplot involving the housemaid Dunyasha’s unrequited affections for the insouciant Yasha parallels (and perhaps parodies) the incomplete romance of Trofimov and Anya (as well as other romantic entanglements in the play). Along the same lines, the Villeggiatura plays have Giacinta’s maid, Brigida, in a courtship with Leonardo’s servant, Paolo. Tellingly, it is the mercurial demands of their respective bourgeois masters that often thwart Paolo and Brigida’s relationship. In many ways, the servants are the characters who take action, while the bourgeois characters’ recalcitrance undermines all of them. The parallels between these plays are further illuminated in Strehler’s interpretation of them, and his reinterpretations two decades later. Produced less than two months apart from each other (Villeggiatura premiered in November of 1954; The Cherry Orchard in January of 1955), the initial productions utilized many of the same set pieces. The inevitable technical similarities, while undoubtedly based partially upon financial considerations, demonstrated a similar aesthetic bent on Strehler’s part. Strehler’s muted approach to theatricality may have prevented him from a more didactic take on

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socialist realism; however, this more conservative approach did dovetail with Lukacs-ian socialist realism, which had stricter definitions of realistic representation. If the previous quotation is correct and Italian artists remained “held back” in the 1950s (particularly in view of the political climate), then this clarifies Strehler’s more muted approach to the texts. Furthermore, this aesthetic was de rigueur for the period, as exemplified by film and stage director Luchino Visconti’s own take on The Cherry Orchard during the same period. 25 A subtler approach may also explain why Strehler used two productions to probe such similar questions. Strehler himself noted the relationship between the two plays, but stated that he was creating a parallel, not a historic argument for any kind of cause-and-effect relationship between the two different periods/cultures: It is not by chance the production following The Villeggiatura Trilogy was Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. I would not want to fall into dangerous analogies and the theory of history repeating itself: the story does not repeat itself, but the stories resemble each other. 26

Strehler seemed to reject a metaphoric interpretation that would emphasize the cultural parallels between eighteenth- and twentieth-century Italy too overtly. Conversely, he did not want either play to remain too self-contained in its own context. In order to achieve this tricky balance in the first production of Villeggiatura, Strehler had to find a way to theatrically realize its socialist realistic didacticism. One of the great challenges for Strehler in producing the Villeggiatura plays was how to condense them into a single night of theatre because, sans edits, the plays would run at least six hours. Strehler pared down the plays to a running time of roughly four hours (the equivalent of eliminating one of the three plays). Key to Strehler’s editing was his recognition of the differences between the theatrical norms of Goldoni’s Venice and those of his contemporary audience. The plays favor conversation over action and needed to be streamlined not just to make them shorter, but also to make the relationships and class issues more accessible. Goldoni’s audience would have been accustomed to long, talky scenes in which characters often repeat their ideas several different ways. They also would have accepted the device of asides, wherein characters could let the audience know their inner thoughts and anxieties. For Strehler and his audiences, such devices would not suit his socialist realistic approach to the text. As a result, Strehler cut most of the long speeches and omitted all of the asides, replacing them with physical choices that he felt would convey the emotional content of the speech. 27 The more staid approach to political content left Strehler dissatisfied with his initial productions of The Villeggiatura Trilogy and especially The Cher-

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ry Orchard. 28 His collaboration with Brecht could not have come at a more crucial time in Strehler’s artistic evolution. The socialist realist hues of the first Villeggiatura and Orchard indicated a desire to explore context and in this way, his Brechtian efforts were a continuation of that pursuit. Strehler delved more deeply into Brechtian techniques with The Threepenny Opera, almost immediately followed by his radically reinterpreted Arlecchino servitore di due padroni. What made this version of Arlecchino so different was the contextual, historical structure Strehler built around it; however, there was a direct correlation between his Brechtian and socialist realist endeavors. Just as Ranevskaya’s family and Goldoni’s unlucky lovers were in many ways shaped by their context, so too were the “actors” in Strehler’s imagining of an eighteenth-century Italian acting troupe in his new version of Arlecchino. The exploited servants, poor actors, and disillusioned bourgeois who occupied these productions were in many ways portrayed as the victims of socioeconomic and sociopolitical failure. Strehler’s alignment with Brecht following his socialist realist work is indicative of Brecht’s ideological differences with Lukacs. Lukacs and Brecht had very different ideas about how theatre should reflect both politics and “real life”: Brecht’s main contention with Lukacs is that he “sterilizes” . . . realism into one specific formal method, which actually turns him into a representative of the formalism he himself likes to scold for its ultimately banal monotony. In a direct attack on Lukacs, Brecht even calls him “out of touch” because of his idealist order to replicate the classical nineteenth-century realism. 29

The Brecht-Lukacs war over realism was lengthy and often very bitter. For Brecht, it was not merely a matter of artistic ideals, but of social and political ones as well: In his eyes [Lukacs and his comrades] were ideological opportunists, members of criminal cliques. The false champions of realism and the people’s entity, whose criticism he saw as threats, were only too familiar to him from Berlin, where in the name of the Communist Party they had pursued a critical policy on the legislative level which art was then forced to carry out on the executive level. 30

Although there were moments when this debate would briefly subside, overall the dialogue between them (both private and very public) was characterized by harsh rhetoric over the idea of “reality” and how it should be represented onstage. Lukacs even went so far as to claim that Brecht had come around to his way of thinking in his later years. When “eulogizing” him, Lukacs praised Brecht as a great writer, but did so in reference to his later

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plays, which Lukacs claimed had moved away from “alienation” and other Epic ideals. 31 Strehler’s leftist politics, particularly amidst the uneasy centrism of the 1950s, aligned him much more clearly with Brecht. Lukacsian socialist realism, while invested in political concerns to a certain extent, was ultimately too safe and idealistic for Strehler (as it had been for Brecht), lacking the satiric bite and activist overtones of Brecht’s work. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Strehler wanted to use every theatrical tool imaginable to explore questions of both politics and representation. While not abandoning the sociopolitical issues important to socialist realism, he chose to stage those ideas using the more arresting (and theatrically flexible) techniques of Brecht. Since directors do not exist in an artistic or cultural vacuum, it is important to align this development in Strehler’s style with the changes in Italian culture and politics. That the three subsequent productions of The Villeggiatura Trilogy, The Cherry Orchard, and Arlecchino Servitore di Due Padroni in the 1970s differed radically from their predecessors was evidence not just of an artistic shift, but a cultural and political one as well. The decline of neorealism and socialist realism in the 1950s was perhaps artistic evidence of a centrist culture trying to find its identity after the turbulent World War II years of the early 1940s and the complicated transition to a republic at the end of that decade. Part of the challenge in creating that identity was distancing itself from Soviet models (a particular necessity for the PCI and PSI). The centrism of the 1950s indicated an uneasy balance between leftist and conservative factions. While the economic prosperity of this period may have temporarily abated these imbalances, the tumult that characterized the late 1960s and 1970s evinced dissatisfaction in reconciling that national identity. As in other countries, by the late 1960s there was a proliferation of student protests, not only over Vietnam, but also of the government itself (in Italy, the movement was referred to as the Contestazione). On the heels of the increasingly violent student protests came the period known as Autunno Caldo (“Hot Autumn”), a year-long period of labor strikes. The laborers in questions were largely dissatisfied southern transplants who felt that their northern employers were providing unsatisfactory wages and working conditions. 32 This period of unrest reflected the increasingly hostile political climate in Italy and presaged the terrorism that plagued the country in the 1970s. Strehler was not immune to these upheavals and he notably left the Piccolo Teatro di Milano for a period of four years, from 1968 to 1972. The reasons for his departure are debatable: Strehler’s critics would label it an artistic snit, but he characterized it as a direct response to the student protests (one of which was directed at the Piccolo and Strehler himself, dubbing him the “Tyrant of the Piccolo” and the “Baron of the Stage”): 33 Strehler was

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surprised by the disparity between his own view of himself as a liberal and the view of the younger generation—which included him in the establishment against which they rebelled. 34 During this period, Strehler formed the Gruppo Teatro e Azione as a way of rediscovering his artistic and political ideals. As might be expected, this rediscovery involved Brecht, whose St. Joan of the Stockyards Strehler directed in 1970, and Gorky’s naturalist piece, The Lower Depths (also 1970). He returned to the Piccolo in 1972 in a position of greater artistic control and armed with a rejuvenated dedication to political theatre. 35 Strehler was less prolific in the 1970s, but arguably more artistically focused, and a key part of that focus was returning to plays he had previously directed and radically reinterpreting them. In addition to the revamped versions of The Cherry Orchard, The Villeggiatura Trilogy, and Arlecchino servitore di due padroni, Strehler also remounted The Lower Depths, The Threepenny Opera, The Love of Three Oranges, The Good Person of Setzuan, El Nost Milan, Power Games, and The Tempest. The plays’ disparate origins and content demonstrate the breadth of Strehler’s artistic repertory, yet his new aesthetic explorations provided links between them. To define this aesthetic development, it is important to go beyond mere theatricality, because at this point in his career, Strehler already had. In his work with Brecht, Strehler had already surpassed theatricality for metatheatrical inquiry, which placed him in an artistic conundrum. On one hand, how does a director go further than the self-reference of metatheatricality? Conversely, a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn back towards traditional theatricality and socialist realism invariably would have been dismissed as regression. Rather than viewing this as an impasse, Strehler took this opportunity to make a lateral shift so that he could take his work in a new direction without forsaking what came before it. This new aesthetic pursuit, for all its divergent parts, can be unified under one idea: refraction. The idea of refraction in Strehler’s work allows his visually magnificent Tempest (1978) to be discussed in the same breath as the much simpler Il Campiello (1975). What makes Strehler’s work in the 1970s arguably the best of his entire career is the variety of ways in which he wielded theatricality. The distinction that needs to be made is that these were not mere technical flourishes. If anything, Strehler emerged from his self-imposed exile more politically emboldened. Whether his use of theatricality waxed (into metatheatrical or Brechtian territory) or waned, its calibration was often directly linked to political or social issues that Strehler wanted to explore. If neorealism had taught him anything, it was the expansive array of methods for representing reality. Furthermore, the ideals of socialist realism were not lost, but were realized in a variety of different ways. Thus, the term “refractive theatricality” best describes Strehler’s aesthetic in his 1970s productions; however, before analyzing its application, the key

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components of this aesthetic need to be defined. On the surface, the term might seem applicable to the role of all directors, since by definition their job is to theatricalize a text. What specifies it more to Strehler’s work is the notion of refraction. Much of Strehler’s work during this period is distinguished by its treatment of context. In these productions, the context of a given play is refracted in one of two ways: either the world of the play is altered, or the way that world is represented onstage is altered. An example of the former would be the late twentieth-century phenomenon of setting Shakespearean plays in non-Elizabethan periods and cultures while retaining the Elizabethan language. The latter, which was the more common type of refraction in Strehler’s work, was exemplified by his 1970s productions of The Tempest and The Cherry Orchard. These productions did not alter the worlds of these plays, but rather represented these worlds using a highly stylized theatricality. Therefore, “refractive theatricality” placed Strehler as director on equal footing with the playwright. Throughout this period, Strehler directed plays utilizing a wide variety of theatrical means, but what unified these seemingly divergent productions was that the extremity of the stylizations or abstractions was always tied to the needs of the play itself. Regardless of the contemporary parallels Strehler sought to evoke in these productions, they were connected to the playwright’s ideas. As a result, his Tempest could be described as equally Strehlerian and Shakespearean. The final component that differentiated Strehler’s refractive theatricality from other directors’ work was that his wielding of theatricality was closely tied to social and political concerns. It is important to note that Strehler’s renewed interest in political and social issues never subsumed the needs of the plays themselves. Instead, the sociopolitical content of the plays dictated how theatrically stylized or abstracted the productions were; in other words, how refracted they were. A play whose social concerns were more readily evident and applicable to contemporary Italian life required less stylization in production. In these plays, “real life” was represented on stage with little artifice or stylization. Plays whose social parallels were more elliptical naturally lent themselves to productions that refracted their worlds on stage. In a stylized production like Strehler’s 1974 The Cherry Orchard, the director created a neutral space for the audience to encounter the ideas of the play. If the production looked little like turn-of-the-century Russia, it also bore little resemblance to 1970s Italy. Refractive theatricality, then, is a socio-politically motivated wielding of theatrical artifice. It spans a wide spectrum of both literal and abstract representations of reality. What makes it unique (and, thus, refractive) is that the theatricality not only highlights the world of the play, but creates parallels (whether literal or abstract) to Italy’s contemporary climate.

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The spectrum of Strehler’s theatrical refraction could be book-ended with his second productions of The Villeggiatura Trilogy and The Cherry Orchard and helps explain the differences between them and the 1950s versions. In many ways, what the latter productions refracted were the socialist realist concerns of the original productions, albeit in very different ways. In their initial productions, The Villeggiatura Trilogy was presented first, followed two months later by The Cherry Orchard. Their sequence allowed for the assertion that The Cherry Orchard’s interpretation was shaped significantly by the conception of The Villeggiatura Trilogy. For their 1974 counterparts, the order was reversed and the highly stylized Cherry Orchard debuted six months prior to the updated Villeggiatura, which received a decidedly less outré interpretation. That both were preceded a year before by Strehler’s 1973 remounting of The Threepenny Opera supports the relationship between Strehler’s Brechtian work and his refractive theatricality. The dialectic among them created in the 1950s versions was reversed in the 1970s productions. In a sense, socialist realism informed Strehler’s Brechtian take on Goldoni, while two decades later, Brecht informed his refraction of socialist realist issues in Goldoni (and Chekhov). The results were the divergent theatrical interpretations of the second Cherry Orchard and Villeggiatura. With the possible exception of The Tempest (1978), the 1974 version of The Cherry Orchard represents the pinnacle of Strehler’s refractive theatricality. In this version, Strehler created an aesthetic so stylized that it flirted with antirealistic and even expressionistic overtones without losing sight of the very real social and political issues in the play: A masterpiece on the scale of King Lear, The Tempest and The Magic Flute, like them The Cherry Orchard existed outside any historic period. To bring out this element, Chekhov had to be disengaged from literary, naturalistic and folkloric accretions. Stanislavsky had to be discarded in favor of a more universal, symbolic and fantastical perspective, but without falling into abstraction and a loss of reality. 36

That universal and fantastical perspective created a dialectic between Chekhov’s world and Strehler’s. The design for the 1974 Cherry Orchard was a visual manifestation of this take on the play. The sparsely furnished stage had no walls or doors and only a few key set pieces. Moreover, everything was white including the backdrop and the minimal furnishings. Even the stage itself was draped in a white cloth that spilled out over the edge of the stage covering two ramps that ran along the front of the stage into the audience area. The characters were mostly dressed in off-white, their costumes tinged with enough color to sully the purity of the whiteness. Most striking of all was the canopy of transparent white fabric that extended from the stage out over the ceiling covering the audience. Caught in this gauzy net were hun-

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dreds of leaves that periodically moved in wavelike motion and eventually littered the stage. What Strehler accomplished with this design was creating a highly theatrical environment to emphasize social issues within the play. The cherry orchard of 1955 was largely offstage, removed from the audience. In the 1974 production, the audience was placed squarely in the cherry orchard, with the ever-shifting leaves a constant reminder of their presence. By removing almost all color, Strehler melded the characters with their environment. In this aesthetic, they became inseparable from the outside forces that acted upon them, particularly the orchard itself. The leaves, so dark in contrast, created a sense of foreboding and maintained the focus on and importance of the orchard throughout the production. In this Cherry Orchard, the characters were part of the same socioeconomic machine that eventually snuffs out their way of life. Not as overtly theatrical as The Cherry Orchard, the second production of The Villeggiatura Trilogy instead adopted a much subtler theatrical refraction to communicate its ideas. As in the initial production, the 1974 rendering was highly streamlined, presenting all three plays as one. Where it differed from the original was in the execution of its story. 37 The world of the second Villeggiatura production was decidedly starker and drabber. The set for the scenes at the Livorno homes of Giacinta and Leonardo’s families made up the bulk of the design as most of the first and third plays take place in sitting rooms in these two locations. In Strehler’s more refractive interpretation, these two houses were mirror images of each other. As the scene shifted back and forth between the two locations, one set moved off into the wings as the other one moved onstage. What made the arrangement of these spaces unique was that Strehler added a new contextual element to the set. In the Leonardo setup, at the downstage left corner of the stage was a flat approximately eight feet wide that ran parallel to the audience. The flat had a window in it and through this window the audience could glimpse what was presumably a hallway in Leonardo’s house. As a result, any time the action took place at Leonardo’s home, the audience could essentially see two rooms: first, the sitting room which took up ninety percent of the stage and was set up like a traditional box set with the fourth wall removed; secondly, the hallway space in which the fourth wall was not removed, so that the only glimpses the audience had of it were through the window. When the scene changed to Giacinta’s house, Leonardo’s set moved off into the stage right wing. The “hallway” unit was now located stage right with Giacinta’s set taking up the remaining stage area. This simple set arrangement served several purposes in Strehler’s refractive aesthetic. The dividing hallway unit that appeared as part of both Leonardo’s and Giacinta’s set accentuated the mirror-image layout of the set

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design. In many ways, these two homes could have been the same house. The hallway space was occupied exclusively by servants and during many of the scenes (particularly those in the first play), one or more servants could be glimpsed in the window washing or drying clothes. The effect of this echoed the framework device employed in Strehler’s Arlecchino productions. While the actors did not break character or observe and comment on the action of the play, this new playing space did provide an additional context for the play. Strehler showed that there was a world outside the drawing-room pettiness of these pretentious middle-class characters. Furthermore, it underscored Strehler’s Brechtian focus on servants as a means for exploring class issues. While not as blatant as some of the design elements in The Cherry Orchard, this scenic addition did represent a mildly refractive theatricalization of the text. In both cases, Strehler invited comparison to the poor and working classes of the 1970s using less theatrically stylized means. While the 1950s productions of The Cherry Orchard and The Villeggiatura Trilogy were grouped more by necessity, the second productions in the 1970s can be paired by how differently they evoked a similar aesthetic. In a sense the second productions were more successful at avoiding the trap of “history repeating itself” that so concerned Strehler. The later productions allowed for two distinct interpretations of Strehler’s opened-up theatricality, and those interpretations were based upon the unique needs of the text. Despite the evident parallels, The Villeggiatura Trilogy was not from the same period as The Cherry Orchard and the less overtly theatrical second production acknowledged its differences. Thus, Strehler’s second productions created the balance of similarity and autonomy that the initial productions did not. If these plays were the poles for Strehler’s refractive theatricality, then his seminal Arlecchino servitore di due padroni (remounted in 1977) balanced the ideas embodied in them. Armed with all of these elements, Strehler once again was able to reinvent the Goldoni production that had been the touchstone of his career. In doing so, Strehler repeated a pattern established with his earlier aesthetic elements: exploring them in other productions before applying them to Arlecchino. Just as The Threepenny Opera helped Strehler re-envisage Arlecchino in 1956, the second productions of The Cherry Orchard and The Villeggiatura Trilogy paved the way for the next incarnation of Arlecchino. The 1977 production of Arlecchino servitore di due padroni was produced at the Theatre Odeon in Paris (where, roughly a year later, Strehler’s second Villeggiatura would be remounted). Once again, rather than starting from scratch, Strehler found a way to work from the inside out, taking elements from his previous versions and reworking them in light of his recent forays into refractive theatricality. This production marked another turning point in Strehler’s career, particularly in view of his Brechtian work. In the two decades between his first

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Threepenny Opera (1956) and his 1977 Arlecchino, Strehler’s oeuvre included ample productions of Brecht’s work. In the subsequent two decades (between the 1977 Arlecchino and Strehler’s death in 1997), he directed nearly half as many Brecht plays as the previous period. As discussed earlier, Strehler’s Brechtian work was not restricted exclusively to plays by Brecht himself. Furthermore, Strehler by no means abandoned the Brechtian aesthetic in his later years; however, the decrease in Brecht productions does give credence to the notion that Brecht occupied a less focal point in his work in the last two decades of his life—it was simply one of many parts to his newly galvanized directorial aesthetic. What was remarkable about the 1977 Arlecchino was that this shift was in many ways the basis for the production. The play-within-the-play format, developed in the 1956 production and augmented in 1963, remained a part of the repertoire for nearly fifteen years, but grew progressively darker, particularly by the early 1970s. By the late 1970s, the acting troupe conceit remained intact, but the tone and execution of it were remarkably different: These Italian strolling players, whose repertory included Servitore di due padroni, were making the same journey as the author, but the other way around. Driven out of the capital, they come to an abandoned castle, with broken walls. In a corner, in the dark rooms, stands a stone horse, the remains of an ancient equestrian statue. 38

This notes the contextual grafting of a reversed version of Goldoni’s own experiences onto the Arlecchino framework story (he was exiled to Paris in his later years). The setting suggested a darker and less jubilant version of the traveling company trope. This darker vision was clearly reflected in the lighting and scenographic choices. The lighting was dark and shadowy, and what little light was used was harsh, an effect enhanced by the use of footlights. The broken-down castle backdrop, which made its way into the Arlecchino in the early 1970s eventually evolved into an abandoned hall in the 1977 production. The location of the production was no longer in the open air, but in a stifling, barren room of a long-neglected building. Since “darkness” (and other variations) has been previously used to describe not only Arlecchino, but Villeggiatura and The Cherry Orchard as well, its relationship to Strehler’s refractive theatricality bears clarification. In order for these interpretations to be truly successful, they had to act in service of larger ideas. If the 1977 Arlecchino lay somewhere between Villeggiatura and The Cherry Orchard in terms of technical employment of theatricality, the balance achieved gives it the most cogent use of refraction to evoke social and political concerns. The “actors” in the 1977 Arlecchino could easily be the disgruntled workers of the Autunno Caldo or the disillu-

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sioned youth of the Contestazione. Unlike previous Arlecchino productions, the 1977 version placed the characters at a similar (and perhaps bleaker) crossroads as those of Villeggiatura and The Cherry Orchard. The contextual element now created an environmental element that exerted a sociopolitical force over the “players,” a neglected proletariat barely surviving on the furthest margins of society. Socialist realism may have been too artistically limiting, but the leftist concerns it addressed were still important to Strehler, and more than any other play in his oeuvre, Arlecchino servitore di due padroni was the vehicle he used to communicate ideas to his audience, both artistic and political ones. The timing of the 1977 Arlecchino helps explain why this production was more sociopolitically motivated than earlier incarnations. The early versions largely fell into what might be called a “honeymoon” period of the Italian Republic, wherein the diverse constituency (artists like Strehler included) was trying to find some kind of postwar stability. The lapse of time between his last staging of Arlecchino (1963) and the one at hand represents the longest of Strehler’s entire career. While Strehler was far from apolitical in the early years, the weight of nearly fifteen years of difficult history was most cogently realized in the 1977 production, and with good reason. The production reflected the bleak political climate of late 1970s Italy. As discussed earlier, the Socialists saw their electoral representation slowly erode in the first three decades of the Republic, while PCI’s share tripled. 39 The culmination of the Communist Party’s growth came in the 1976 elections, when it received 34.4 percent of the vote, nearly besting the Christian Democrats, who had 38.7 percent. 40 This victory was due in part to the “Historic Compromise” proposed in 1972, a highly controversial alliance between the PCI and the Christian Democrats. The goal of this much-debated alliance was to reconcile communist goals within the democratic framework. For many on all sides, it represented a kind of selling out, reneging on party goals set during the early Republic years. As a result, 1970s Italy was plagued by terrorist violence from both the right and the left, most notably in the period at the end of the decade known as gli anni di pombo, or “years of the bullet.” 41 It was in this period, approximately 1976 to 1980, that Strehler’s darkest Arlecchino premiered. The new setting of Arlecchino also evoked the end-of-an-era feeling that echoed the prevailing sentiment of disillusionment: The atmosphere of desolation created by the setting in the fifth version . . . suffused the whole piece with a feeling that here was a company that was tired, struggling bravely at the end of a tradition. ‘An air of melancholy, of decadence almost . . . the noble inhabitants of the palace are not to be seen, nor their presence felt; yet their absence is both tangible and significant, the sign that something has changed or is changing.’ 42

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This dystopian Arlecchino provided self-commentary in a more clandestine way. In earlier productions, the construct of the play-within-a-play allowed the “actors” to provide a more traditionally Brechtian commentary on the proceedings. As the quotation above suggests, this Arlecchino provided commentary more elliptically, letting the milieu and its theatrical realization create the sociopolitical parallels. The bleakness of this Arlecchino extended to the actors and their interpretations of both the “actors” and their characters. The actors and the “actors” they play had both aged, and the production was shrouded in a kind of depressed exhaustion. 43 The context had changed so that “There is despondency and discouragement among the actors. But here come the peasants— an audience then—and in the dim light of candles, these poor and hungry actors meet their own characters again.” 44 The performance of Arlecchino servitore di due padroni by these “actors” was no longer a theatrical lark, but an act of desperation. What prevented this Arlecchino from becoming merely a polemic against the government was Strehler’s inclusion of himself in the critique. As his run-in with students of the Contestazione suggests, Strehler recognized his own position within the establishment. The layered realities of Arlecchino servitore di due padroni were no longer novel, and both the actors and the “actors” did not treat them as such. Strehler understood that the original metatheatricality, sapped of its freshness, no longer arrested the audience in the ways that it could in earlier productions. As a result, it was not just the play that has exhausted the “actors” and actors, but the Brechtian construct itself. In a brilliant and ironic move, Strehler used Brechtian techniques to criticize his own use of those very techniques. In some ways, this version of Arlecchino was “a journey in the dark and a pessimistic self-representation (it is the Theater that exiles itself from the World).” 45 The production was a kind of funeral dirge for the “players,” but more importantly for the twentyyear-old conceit of Arlecchino itself. Neither socialist realism nor refractive theatricality “killed” Strehler’s Brechtian aesthetic; rather, they arrived fortuitously as that aesthetic was waning. In fact, it actually preserved Strehler’s Brechtian aesthetic by allowing him the flexibility to wield it as explicitly or as implicitly as he desired. Perhaps Strehler’s most dexterous wielding of refractive theatricality was in his handling of the theme of death. On numerous levels, this Arlecchino was all about death: the end of an era; the actors’/“actors’” advanced age; the crumbling environment the players occupied; the expiration of the theatrical conceit of a play about a play; even the death of Arlecchino servitore di due padroni. Culturally, these ideas could be tied to the death of political ideals and the missed potential inherent in the establishment of the Republic. Yet, this Arlecchino was neither a pessimistic social critique nor a nihilistic farewell to a piece of theatre.

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Instead, Strehler presented these dark truths as a way of setting up his riskiest directorial sleight of hand. This fifth production, however bleak, was ultimately a necessary step in Arlecchino’s evolution. In a metaphysical sense, it had to die so that it could be reborn (which it would be in the next production ten years later). This idea of rebirth was most tangibly evident in the finale of the 1977 production. As before, the entire company chased after Arlecchino, but rather than climbing up a ladder or into a balcony (as in previous productions), he instead climbed onto a giant cloud and rose into the heavens. That Strehler could attach such a sunny ending to an otherwise dark production demonstrated the duality of his intentions. Strehler needed to stage, either directly or metaphorically, all of the disillusionment, unrest, and dissatisfaction that characterized Italy at that time so that he could respond to it. His response was one of optimism, embodied by Arlecchino’s ascent into the heavens. In the character of Arlecchino, Strehler found an individual from the lowest rank of the proletariat who remained witty, humorous, and even naively optimistic in the face of dire straits. In doing so, he staged the potential for the Italian people. Rather than submitting to his dire surroundings, Arlecchino survived and ultimately achieved a kind of transcendence. The surprise ending makes sense in terms of audience manipulation. If critics and audiences truly believed that the production had grown “too dark,” then the ending was the perfect way to set up a reinvention of the entire production. 46 It functioned as a kind of cliffhanger, letting the audience know that Strehler was not finished with Arlecchino nor was he putting to rest his explorations of Brecht, commedia, refractive theatricality, or sociopolitical issues. Instead, this deus ex machina opened the door to a newer, stronger, and revitalized Arlecchino. NOTES 1. Marvin Carlson, The Italian Stage From Goldoni to D’Annunzio (Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 1981): 192. 2. Marvin Carlson, The Italian Stage From Goldoni to D’Annunzio (Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 1981): 192. 3. Marcia Landy, Italian Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 4. 4. Ibid., 13. 5. Landy, Italian Film, 15. 6. Ibid. 7. Brand, Peter and Lino Pertile, eds. The Cambridge Hisotyr of Italian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1996): 535. 8. Marcus, Millicent Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (Princeton: Princeton, 1986): 55. 9. Ibid., 56. 10. Nowell, Smith, Geoffrey, with James Hay and Gianni Volpi. The Companion to Italian Cinema (London: Cassell, 1996): 5. 11. Hirst, 28.

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12. Pierre Leprohon, The Italian Cinema (New York: Praeger, 1972), quoted in Marcia Landy, Italian Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 16. 13. Spencer M. Di Scala, Italy: From Revolution to Republic, 1700 to the Present (Boulder: Westview, 2004): 308. 14. Paolo Farneti, The Italian Party System (1945-1980) (New York: St. Martin’s, 1985): 24. 15. Ibid., 13-20. 16. Di Scala, Italy: From Revolution to Republic, 1700 to the Present, 322. 17. Ibid., 13-20. 18. Jonathan Dunnage, Twentieth Century Italy: A Social History (London: Longman, 2002): 144. 19. Strehler, Giorgio. Interviewed in On Directing Shakespeare Ralph Berry, ed. (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989): 126. 20. Parkhomenko, Mikhail, and Alexander Myasniknov. Introduction to Socialist Realism in Literature and Arts C. V. James, trans. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971): 12. 21. G.H.R. Parkinson, Georg Lukacs (London: Routledge, 1977): 86. 22. Georg Lukacs, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, John and Necke Mander, trans. (London: Merlin, 1963): 94. 23. Parkinson, Georg Lukac, 87. 24. These translations are drawn from the compendium The Holiday Trilogy, Anthony Oldcorn, trans. (New York: Marsilio, 1992). 25. Elaine Mancini, Luchino Visconti: A Guide to References and Resources (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1986): 327. 26. Non a caso lo spettacolo successivo alla Trilogia della villeggiatura fu Il giardino dei ciliegi di Cechov. Non vorrei cadere nelle pericolosissime analogie e nella teoria dei corsi e ricorsi storici: la storia non si ripete, ma la storia si assomiglia. Giorgio Strehler, Intorno a Goldoni, Flavia Foradini, ed. (Mursia: Milano, 2004): 146. 27. David L. Hirst, Giorgio Strehler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993): 5657. 28. Ibid., 26. 29. Luc Herman, Concepts of Realism (Columbia: Camden House, 1996): 101. 30. Klaus Volker, Brecht: A Biography (New York: Seabury, 1978): 239. 31. Ibid., 240-241. 32. Massimo Salvadori, Foreword to Ideological Profile of Twentieth Century Italy, by Norberto Bobbio. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995): xvi – xvii. 33. Hirst, Giorgio Strehler, 14. 34. Giorgio Strehler, Per un teatro umano (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1974): 52, quoted in David Hirst, Giorgio Strehler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993): 14. 35. Hirst, Giorgio Strehler, 15. 36. Laurence Senelick, The Chekhov Theatre, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997): 267. 37. Giorgio Strehler, La trilogia della villeggiatura, 240 min (approx), Piccolo Teatro Archivio Storico, 1978, videocassette. Unless otherwise indicated, all statements regarding physical action and performance refer to this video of the French production. The revival of The Villeggiatura Trilogy was initially performed at the Burgtheater in Vienna in November of 1974. Four years later, the production was remounted by Strehler at the Theatre Odeon in Paris. 38. Maria Grazia Gregori, Goldoni e il Piccolo Teatro 1947–1993. (Milan: Electa, 1993): 84. The text is provided in both Italian and English (used here), but the name of the translator is not indicated. 39. Farneti, The Italian Party System, 2-4. 40. Robert Dombroski, “Socialism, Communism and other ‘isms,’” in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture, ed. Zygmunt G. Baranski and Rebecca J. West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001): 128. 41. Ibid., 128-129.

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42. Hirst, Giorgio Strehler, 49. In this selection, Hirst quotes the introduction to Carlo Goldoni’s Arlecchino Servitore di Due Padroni by Luigi Lunari with a note by Giorgio Strehler; chronology, bibliography and notes by Carlo Pedretti (Rizzoli: Milan, 1979), 40-41. 43. Hirst, Giorgio Strehler, 41-42. 44. Gregori, Goldoni e il Piccolo Teatro 1947–1993, 84. 45. Gregori, Goldoni e il Piccolo Teatro 1947–1993, 84. 46. Hirst, Giorgio Strehler, 48. Hirst suggests the idea of critical dissatisfaction.

Chapter Five

Copeau, Inversion, and Integration

By 1987, Giorgio Strehler was in the autumn of his career as a director. The sixty-six-year-old director had been working at the Piccolo off and on for forty years and had only ten years remaining in his career and life. With his 1977 production of Arlecchino servitore di due padroni, he had achieved a unique combination of expertly wielded refractive theatricality and sociopolitical commentary. He also had taken Arlecchino down its darkest road, but surprised the audience with an upbeat ending that left the door open for yet another reinvention. The question left unanswered by the 1977 finale was in what new direction, if any, could Strehler take the production? By this point, Strehler had made Arlecchino the touchstone for exploring various types of theatricality (commedia-inspired, Brechtian, and refractive), so the challenge for the 1987 production was to bring something new to the play that would honor its tradition at the Piccolo without descending into pure nostalgia. Ironically, the 1977 Arlecchino seemed much more like the work of an older man than the vibrantly energetic 1987 version. Dubbed l’edizione dell’addio or “Farewell Edition,” the 1987 production represented the ultimate integration of Strehler’s various aesthetics. 1 Rather than attempt to graft new theatrical approaches onto the production, Strehler synthesized the practices he had been exploring in the production over the years and inverted them. The result was a multidimensional yet deceptively simple production that had its roots in one of Strehler’s most important influences: Jacques Copeau. The director Jacques Copeau was one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century French theatre, despite the relative brevity of his work at the Theatre du Vieux-Colombier, whose seasons ran from 1913 to 1914 and from 1919 to 1924 (towards the end of World War I, Copeau and his VieuxColombier troupe performed for two seasons in New York, from 1917 to 93

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1919). 2 Included in Copeau’s team of collaborators were such notable theatrical figures as Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet, and Copeau’s nephew Michel St. Denis. These men, among others, helped preserve Copeau’s legacy in France and took his ideas to other parts of the world as well. The parallels between their early careers help elucidate why Strehler was so strongly influenced by Copeau. Like Strehler and his collaborator Grassi, Copeau made his entrée into theatrical directing via criticism, writing in such publications as The Hermitage, La Revue d’Art Dramatique, Grande Revue, and his own Nouvelle Revue Francaise, which he founded in 1909. 3 Just as Strehler would later decry the ossification of Italian theatre and its outmoded performance style, Copeau lambasted the French boulevard theatres for similar artistic shortcomings. Likewise, Copeau introduced the Vieux-Colombier with a bristling manifesto that purposefully cast off any excessively artsy notions about theatre: Whatever may be our avowed preferences as critics and men of the theatre or our personal bent as writers, we do not represent a school whose entire prestige risks being called into question when the first blush of its novelty wears off. We do not bring a formula, nor are we convinced that the theatre of tomorrow will arise and develop from these beginnings. . . . We do not know what the theatre of tomorrow will be. We proclaim nothing. But we pledge ourselves to react against all the worst features of the contemporary theatre. 4

Copeau’s incendiary remarks embraced the same paradox as the Piccolo’s founding notions: a desire to hold theatre to certain standards without becoming elitist and insular. What also tied the work of the Vieux-Colombier to that of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano was a shared desire to rediscover, reclaim, and reinterpret classics. Like the Piccolo, the Vieux-Colombier populated its seasons with works from the past. As has been well documented, the prominent centerpiece in the Vieux-Colombier lobby was a bust of Moliere. 5 Although Moliere was not the touchstone of Copeau’s work in the way that Goldoni was in Strehler’s oeuvre, the symbolic import of the bust highlights a common goal between the two directors. Just as Strehler sought to redefine (or perhaps define clearly for the first time) what Italian theatre was, so too did Copeau seek to reframe perceptions of French theatre. Although certain Moliere works (such as Le Misanthrope and Le Fourberies de Scapin) recurred in subsequent seasons at the Vieux-Colombier, their returns were more similar to the repertory model of old than Strehler’s reconceptualizations. For Copeau, Moliere represented the larger question of what constituted French theatre. In addition to his Moliere productions, Copeau also staged other important French writers such as Corneille and Beaumarchais. 6 The discipline with which Copeau approached these texts was ultimately more influential than his directorial conceptualizing of them.

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Strehler ranked Copeau (who died in 1949 just as Strehler was beginning his work at the Piccolo) among the most important theatrical “teachers” or “masters” to influence his work: The first is Jacques Copeau. Copeau, whom I never personally met. Still, he is my “teacher.” I owe him much, I owe something fundamental to my formation as a man of the theatre, and it is not easy to define what I owe him. I’ll attempt: Copeau’s strict, Jansenist, moral vision of the theatre. Copeau’s feeling of the unity of theatre, the unity among written word and representation, actors and set designers and musicians and writers, a unified whole, down to the last stagehand. 7

The religious and ascetic strain in Strehler’s portrayal of Copeau is most apposite to the French director’s later years. Scholars debate the extent to which Copeau’s embrace of Catholicism led to a kind of metaphysical ideal of the theatre. Eric Bentley in particular suggested this notion, and Strehler’s own thoughts seem to concur with his, yet the latter’s take was more broadly spiritual rather than specifically Catholic: 8 Copeau believed, firmly, not in a comfortable dogma or ritual, but in a kind of almost cruel fight, with himself and with the Other. Much has been said of his renunciation of the theatre, as to why [he made] this renunciation. I believe, today, beyond that which some of his closest students have recounted to me, that Copeau left the theatre simply because “in order to do that theatre in which he believed, he would have had to ask what only God can ask of his people.” 9

Strehler’s take on Copeau characterizes the high standards the French director held for his work. Regardless of whether those standards were spiritual, artistic, or a combination of the two, they speak of a level of artistry to which Strehler aspired. While Copeau’s influence is evident in earlier Strehler productions, it was crystallized in the “Farewell Edition” of Arlecchino—relatively late in Strehler’s career given his reverence for Copeau. Yet, this late adoption of Copeau’s approaches can be explained from several perspectives. On the simplest level, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Strehler began to direct productions more regularly in France. Initially his work was comprised primarily of remounted versions of his successes from the Piccolo (The Villeggiatura Trilogy and The Threepenny Opera, among others). As Strehler began to work more regularly in France, he staged productions specifically for the French audience (such as his 1984 L’Illusion comique). These pursuits were not mere Francophilia, but were rather part of a larger international push in Strehler’s career. In 1983, Strehler founded the Theatre de l’Europe in Paris, which led to the foundation of the Union des Theatres de l’Europe in 1990. 10 The goal of the Theatre and the Union was to

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bring great theatres (and artists) of many different cultures together for increased collaboration and dialogue. With more than twenty member theatres, the Union’s constituency today includes theatres from England, Germany, Portugal, and Israel, among others. 11 This movement, like the European Union’s push for the single currency in the mid-1990s, increased the interconnectedness among the European nations on both commercial and artistic levels. The “Farewell Edition” also arrived at the high point of a period of economic prosperity for Italy. The early period of the Republic had been characterized as an “economic miracle,” which meant that, despite the diverse and often oppositional nature of the government, Italy’s economy had thrived. When the economy boomed again in the mid-1980s (following a recession at the beginning of the decade), it was dubbed a kind of “second economic miracle.” 12 The expansive economy had a direct impact on the country. Workers fled the poor South in search of industrial jobs in Italy’s urban centers. Agricultural employment plummeted while the service industry saw tremendous growth. 13 The “Farewell Edition,” then, reflected this kind of carefree prosperity in Italy, before inflation, debt, organized crime, and political scandal would shake the entire country in the subsequent decade. Strehler’s return to Copeau at this point was in some ways a return to an ideal. The Piccolo and the Italian Republic were founded within a year of each other, and by the 1970s both had been confronted with the failure (or at least incompleteness) of their pursuits of their founding goals. The growth and prosperity of the 1980s opened up new avenues for the achievement of those goals, both for Italy and for the Piccolo. If the 1977 Arlecchino was shrouded in death, the “Farewell Edition” was characterized by rebirth. This rebirth was achieved by applying a Copeauian aesthetic to three key areas: scenography, acting, and a renewed focus on the text itself. The 1987 Arlecchino bore evidence of Copeau’s influence in a number of ways, most prominently in Strehler’s use of space. Copeau’s view of the physical trappings of the stage was decidedly minimalist. In the Vieux-Colombier’s initial productions, the stage was virtually bare save for a few key set pieces used intermittently. 14 As his work progressed, Copeau followed the model of Appia and Jaques-Dalcroze and adopted a kind of fixed unit set that could be altered and embellished slightly to suit each production: What [Copeau] learned from Appia and Jacqes-Dalcroze, whom he visited in 1915, was that the body in motion requires obstacles to meet for its selfexpression and that the beauty of bodily movement depends on the variety of points of contact with the floor and objects on it. The dispositif scenique fixe, or permanent stage setting, which Jouvet designed for him, was intended to provide exactly that: a three-dimensional acting area based on blocks, platforms and steps. It was a permanent concrete structure with a wide bay up-

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stage, flights of steps at either side leading to a balcony, and a number of practicable openings down the wings. 15

In this pared-down environment, Copeau felt he could put greater focus on the text and the actors. Upon the company’s return to the Vieux-Colombier following the end of the War, Jouvet once again redesigned the Vieux-Colombier’s layout. The new design represented a less stringently austere scenographic approach and offered Copeau greater flexibility in his staging, while still adhering to the idea of a dispositif scenique fixe. Perhaps as important as the theatre’s renovation was the installation of new lighting equipment. Like the scenic innovations, the new lighting represented a less austere, though still simplified, visual aesthetic. The new installations did away with footlights in favor of a more complex overhead system that could wash the stage with a variety of lighting effects. 16 As a result of these innovations, Copeau could achieve a kind of spectacle that did not interfere with his aims of highlighting the text and the actors. This type of simplified lighting and staging was the basis for the design of Strehler’s “Farewell Edition” of Arlecchino. The stage was composed of simple wooden planks, in keeping with Copeau’s notion of treteau nu or “bare boards.” 17 For Copeau (and later for Strehler), this idea of treteau nu was to provide the actors with a blank slate upon which to create their work. At the back of Strehler’s stage was a cyclorama, which allowed for the use of a full range of colors. On one end of the spectrum was a cool palette of blues and grays, used primarily for outdoor scenes. At the opposite end, warm brown and orange hues were used to enhance the other primary lighting effect used onstage: candles. Throughout the production, Strehler used candelabras to create the illusion that the production was candlelit. In actuality, there were very few moments when the candles provided the sole source of light on stage. More importantly, the candelabras became a primary component of the scenery. Actors dressed as servants would frequently reposition the candelabras on stage to help indicate scene changes. They would be placed on the floor of the stage or held by the servants to help “illuminate” the room. 18 The final lighting devices used were footlights at the edge of the stage (also candles), which enhanced the use of shadow in the production. Beyond the candelabras, the other major pieces of scenery (aside from the occasional chair) were two screens. The screens were wooden frames covered with fabric and Strehler periodically accentuated their translucency by having candelabras placed directly behind them. Despite the limited resources, Strehler managed to create striking stage effects in the production, most notably at the beginning and end. At the start of the play, the actors could be seen in silhouette against a stark blue wash on the cyclorama. As an actor lit each candle on each candelabra and footlight, the blue receded and a warm glow washed over the cyclorama and the stage.

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At the end of the production, this process was reversed. As Arlecchino gave his final monologue to the audience, he extinguished each candelabra and footlight candle by candle. The stage grew progressively darker and at the end of his last line, he blew out the last candle and the stage went completely black. The minimal set pieces allowed for smooth and quick transitions. Though quick transitions had been hallmarks of all of the Arlecchino productions, the “Farewell Edition” was the fleetest. The relatively empty space facilitated more expansive dancing and acrobatic-like movement. The sets, in conjunction with the lighting, also allowed Strehler to restrict or expand the playing area according to the needs of the scenes. The love scenes between Clarice and Silvio became more intimate not only from the romantic candle lighting, but also from the smaller playing area provided by that lighting. In contrast, Arlecchino’s famous plate-tossing scene was given the full expanse of the stage. Perhaps the most innovative use of the pared-down visuals was Strehler’s manipulation of the audience’s perspective. At the beginning of the first act, in conjunction with the aforementioned transition from cool to warm hues, the company (including the attendants bearing the candelabras) effected a tableau before beginning the first scene. In doing so, they established the relative dimension of the room in Pantalone’s house in which the first scene takes place. Then, just before Arlecchino’s first entrance, the entire company (attendants included) rotated one hundred and eighty degrees. The audience was now looking into the same room at a different angle. When Arlecchino then made his first entrance through the audience, it situated the viewers inside Pantalone’s house. In this moment, Strehler demonstrated the complex potential of the theatrical space, even when stripped of many of its basic accoutrements. Copeau’s desire to reduce scenery to its basest elements was not an isolated aesthetic bent, but instead supported his desire to maintain the focus on the actors and the text. Since Copeau himself performed in several VieuxColombier productions, he had a direct understanding of what tools an actor needed to succeed. Fundamental to this success was actor training, and Copeau used children as the models of ideal actors. 19 In children, Copeau saw a natural purity that adult actors could only approach through rigorous training. Copeau’s goal in training was to remove cabotinage, a term he used to denote the excess and affect of boulevard acting. 20 In order to achieve this goal, Copeau’s actor training consisted of a variety of areas: voice, movement, fencing, acrobatics, dance, mime, and improvisation, among others. 21 By training his actors in the country (as he did before the Vieux-Colombier’s inaugural season), he could insulate them from the distractions of city life.

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A crucial part of Copeau’s work with actors was finding a core group of artists with his shared artistic values, a sentiment echoed by Strehler: “I expect the collaboration of everyone.” 22 For both Copeau and Strehler, the company model was crucial to the successful execution of their aesthetics. Alongside their desire to work with likeminded artists was a very practical need to work with actors who spoke the same language as their directors. More specifically, working with the same actors on the same play (albeit in newly mounted productions) further strengthened that artistic bond. For Strehler, familiarity with the actors was not just important for him, but for his audience as well. Part of the metacommentary of the dark 1977 Arlecchino was that the audience was seeing actors whom they had seen play their parts for decades. The somber weariness that enveloped the production then belonged not just to the characters or the “actors,” but also the actors who were playing them. This familiarity was used for an entirely different effect in the “Farewell Edition.” Assembled from this production were newer, younger actors and veterans who had been with the production in various capacities for decades. For example, Giulia Lazzarini and Giulio Chazzalettes, who played the young lovers Clarice and Silvio, respectively, as far back as the 1950s (and who were featured in the television film cited earlier), reprised their roles in the “Farewell Edition.” By utilizing these familiar faces, Strehler was able to rebuild and capitalize on their rapport with the audience—a rapport that had been neglected in the previous version. One of best examples of the use of this involved Ginafranco Mauri, who had long held the role of hotelier Brighella in Arlecchino: It was Mauri who in an inspired improvisation during the last production (now, of course, a permanent feature of the show) came out of character and offstage [the stage-within-the-stage] in the scene when Beatrice is explaining to him how she expects to receive letters both under her real name and her assumed one—a particularly convoluted turn of the plot—to announce that he had been playing the role for thirty-two years and he still couldn’t understand this twist of the story. 23

If Strehler sought to follow Copeau’s emphasis on the actor, then an integral part of reestablishing that emphasis was strengthening the actors’ connection to the audience. What crystallized these notions of acting for Strehler—the company model, the rapport among the company, the rapport with the audience—was commedia. While Strehler had been working with commedia for nearly four decades by the time of the “Farewell Edition,” the simplified spatial aesthetic of Copeau brought new dimension to its execution. Decades before Strehler began his own unearthing of commedia, Copeau experimented with it with the Vieux-Colombier company. Despite his reverence for the text itself, Co-

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peau rationalized why his actors tended to “textualize”—a term he used for the tendency to approximate or improvise scripted dialogue. In this act, Copeau saw his actors trying to fulfill a creative impulse. The exactness of the script could be viewed as a confine, so the actor’s improvisation was fulfilling a need to create. 24 In order to allow his actors to feel like creators, Copeau began to pursue commedia-based improvisation. The short improvisations his actors created served as the preliminary entertainments before scripted pieces (often Moliere). That Copeau restricted these explorations to short preludes indicates the difference between his and Strehler’s notions of textual fidelity. While they may have differed on the use of commedia (and improvisation specifically) in performance, both Strehler and Copeau recognized it as invaluable in the training of actors. Copeau saw the mask as the key to developing the actor’s commedia performance techniques. As analyzed in chapter 2, Strehler’s work with masks evoked an almost spiritual aesthetic: the idea that the actor would have to surrender to the mask and achieve some kind of union with it. In Copeau scholarship, there is a tendency to downplay the shamanistic approach to mask work because it seems to conflict with Copeau’s religious convictions; however, Copeau clearly acknowledged the power of the mask: For Copeau, the “noble” or “neutral” mask marked the “point of departure” for the actor. The neutral mask operated on a number of levels: • • • • •

purifying and simplifying gesture and movement; giving gesture and movement “density” and significance; creating the need for physical, rather than facial, expression; embodying the relationship between immobility and action; focusing the performance of simple physical actions—walking, sitting, standing and simple tasks; • allowing silent improvisations to develop beyond the everyday and explore atmospheres, places, times of year. 25 Whether or not Copeau saw anything spiritual in the breaking down and building up process of actors’ mask work, he certainly acknowledged the performative benefits. Yet, the ideas of purity and neutrality evoked above echo Copeau’s ideas about scenery and staging. In Strehler’s work, utilizing the masks in every production changed the way the audience perceived Strehler’s actors, their “actor” personas, and their characters in Arlecchino. The masks, which had been a novelty in the early productions, had become a given by the time of the “Farewell” edition. In a sense, the entrenchment of the mask over four decades of production made it inseparable from the actor, “actor,” or character. Thus, though commedia had long been a part of Strehler’s Arlecchino, the Copeauian milieu of

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the “Farewell Edition” reframed how the audience viewed the actors. In paring down the production, a la Copeau, the mask became a kind of treteau nu; it was the baseline for commedia and the actor’s characterizations, just as the bare stage represented the starting point for the scenic elements. Thus, the challenge for Strehler was to reinvigorate the commedia convention. Like Copeau’s productions, Strehler’s “Farewell Edition” refocused the attention on the actor. In doing so, it also reemphasized questions of identity and performance within the production. One scene in which Strehler addressed these questions came late in the play, when Arlecchino had to mediate Florindo and Beatrice’s reconciliation while still protecting the secret of his dual identities. In previous productions, the comedy of this moment was achieved through very simple staging: Arlecchino ran back and forth between Florindo and Beatrice, tweaking each version of the story to lay the blame on his fictitious alter ego, Pasquale. In the “Farewell Edition,” Strehler altered the context by having Arlecchino adopt a disguise during this exchange. In this version, Arlecchino entered in a kind of drag, wearing a large black dress replete with a black veil. In the background, flamencoesque music played, and Arlecchino occasionally stomped and posed in mock of the dance for comic effect. The purpose of this disguise was manifold. At its simplest level, it served to prevent Florindo and Beatrice from recognizing him in front of the other. Furthermore, it reversed the crossdressing device employed by Beatrice earlier in the play. Yet, what made the moment ironic was that neither Florindo nor Beatrice reacted to the disguise. They conversed with Arlecchino in the same manner they had throughout the rest of the play because both fully recognized him as Arlecchino. Most importantly, however, the moment represented a kind of re-masking, a new level of artifice incorporated into the performance. By having Arlecchino cover his “face,” it underscored the notion that the commedia mask was not a disguise, but merely an extension of the actor and his performance. In the “Farewell Edition” the commedia elements were revitalized by the fluid simplicity of the staging and playing area that allowed the actors to have greater freedom. Unsurprisingly, one of the best examples of this newfound freedom came in the staging of the famous table-waiting scene. Favorite lazzi such as the plate tossing, Arlecchino’s somersault while holding a tray of food, and his jiggling while holding a plateful of gelatin all returned for the “Farewell Edition.” The machinelike precision of the waiters’ entrances and exits also remained intact, and the audience dutifully clapped at the successful execution of these signature bits. Using the larger space to enhance the actors’ playing of the scene, Strehler added some new lazzi to the now-famous scene. At the peak of Arlecchino’s frenetic efforts to wait on both of his masters, he exited the stage only to reenter via a grand cartwheel. After planting himself, he delivered the final kick that sent the waiters tumbling offstage. An even more prominent comic bit was added at the end of

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the scene, immediately following the cartwheel-kick. With the dinner now officially a disaster, several of the actors came chasing after Arlecchino. He in turn dumped a box of red and white balls onto the stage that tripped his pursuers and grounded them while the wily servant made his escape. The effect created was a kind of slapstick ballet, with the actors hitting the floor in a canonical rhythm, one after the other. For Copeau, improvisation was a tool to energize his actors and augment their abilities to play as an ensemble. Yet, despite his extensive experimentation with commedia, Copeau placed the play itself at the apex of his theatrical hierarchy. Aside from his critical writing, Copeau had also worked as a playwright. In 1910, he co-wrote a highly successful stage adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, which he would revive twice during his Vieux-Colombier years. 26 This perspective may have contributed to the primacy of the playwright in his theatrical aesthetic. Rather than impose his own concept upon a production, Copeau sought to train his actors in such a way that in a stripped-down space they could bring out the merits and truths of the script itself: Copeau’s staging process can be described as reductive. Instead of adorning a play with a style, effects etc., it aimed to subtract all the polluting accretions until one arrived at the residual essence of drama: a text, some actors and a treteau nu. 27

The hierarchy implied in the above quotation is stated more directly by Copeau in his own words: If I have brought anything to the theatre, if I have at least indicated what could be brought to it, it pleases me to think that it is [. . .] a releasing of the human spirit on to the stage by means of a profound and well-assimilated technique which has, as its consequence, the direct domination by the poet of the dramatic instrument. 28

For Strehler, the most cogent example of his emphasis on text is the reduced use of the Brechtian construct that had defined Arlecchino for the past thirty years. In the “Farewell Edition,” the play-within-a-play structure was greatly simplified, thereby refocusing the audience’s attention on the play itself. The most prominent remnant of the Brechtian construct was the character of the Prompter. Although still a presence throughout the production, the Prompter interrupted the action much less frequently than in previous iterations. Still characterized as temperamental (a trait that manifested itself in previous productions), the Prompter occasionally drew attention to himself by storming offstage in the middle of a scene (usually due to a disagreement with one of the “actors”). Mostly, he served to introduce each scene. With prompting script in one hand and a staff in the other, he began each new scene by

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striking the stage with his staff (a motif that echoed Prospero in The Tempest). Beyond these moments, the Prompter was either unobtrusively positioned at the corner or wings of the stage (silent and moving little) or offstage completely. Ironically, this improvisatory departure from the text served to reinforce the Copeauian ideal of refocusing on the text. Throughout the production, the most prominent character in the Brechtian artifice was constantly reminding the actors to remain faithful to the script. The other recurring element from the Brechtian construct was that the “actors” were visible throughout much of the production. What differentiated the “Farewell Edition” was that their offstage lives were given much less attention. Often, the actors simply lingered at the back of the stage or the wings to watch the action of Arlecchino servitore di due padroni. During the aforementioned transition from cool blue light to warm candle glow at the beginning of the play, the actors could be seen getting ready for the production (e.g., putting the finishing touches on their makeup and costumes). Before the play proper began, the company did a short dance to music. The actors also sang later on during the production (most notably in a love duet for Silvio and Clarice, and a solo for Smeraldina). The overall effect Strehler created was to acknowledge the construct not by doing away with it completely, but making it a less focal element of the production. In this reduction, Strehler aligned his goals with those of both Copeau and Goldoni. Using a Copeauian mise en scene, Strehler created a clearer distinction between lazzi and the improvisational construct. Gone from this production were the offstage shenanigans from previous productions that often had lazzi-esque overtones. Conversely, the “actors,” when performing Arlecchino rarely broke from the action of the play to interact with the “actors” offstage. As a result, the lazzi within Arlecchino fit more clearly within the Goldonian ideal of hewing closely to the text. In a sense, they were largely inseparable from Goldoni’s text because many of these pieces of comic business had been performed (albeit with some modifications) since the first production in 1947. This also aligns Strehler’s use of commedia more closely to Copeau’s employment of it. For Copeau, commedia was most useful as a means of actor training and, in performance, it was kept separate from scripted work. In Strehler’s “Farewell Edition,” improvisation (with the exception of the more organic lazzi) was kept separate from the performing of Arlecchino servitore di due padroni. To distinguish Strehler’s work from mere artistic mimicry, it is equally important to establish how it differed from Copeau’s aesthetic. Strehler, despite noting the import of Copeau’s influence upon him, admitted that he differed from his maestro. In terms of the high spiritual bar Strehler believed Copeau had set for his type of ideal theatre, Strehler said:

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What Strehler shared with Copeau was a belief in the severe demands of the artistic process. The “rending” of which Strehler speaks was based on the notion that creating great theatre pushes all involved to their absolute limits, and, as evidenced by his Brechtian work, it even pushes the art form itself to its limits. While Strehler adhered to Copeau’s disciplined approach to his art, he differed from him about what the particulars of that discipline were. Amidst some parallels lay crucial distinctions that separated Strehler’s ideology from that of Copeau, and the most significant one dealt with their differing views of the role of the director. Copeau’s need for a relatively bare space ensured that the production would highlight first the text, then the actor. His role as director was to make sure that hierarchy was maintained and that no member of the ensemble polluted the production with any kind of excessive display. Copeau believed, “When a director finds himself in front of a dramatic work, his role is not to say: ‘What am I going to do with it?’—his role is to say: ‘What is it going to do with me?’” 30 Strehler, despite his belief in the ensemble model for his actors, was much more of an auteur. If Copeau was the type of director who wanted the audience to forget the production even had a director, Strehler was one who marked his productions indelibly with signature directorial flourishes. Strehler’s vivid productions of The Cherry Orchard and The Tempest in the 1970s were testaments to his desire to leave his own unique imprint upon each production. This drive was evident in the way he rehearsed: Strehler has his own trusted collective at his disposal full time. Although authority is quietly and expertly exercised by a full range of stage managers, assistants, and technicians, it is perfectly clear that Strehler himself runs the rehearsal. Everyone else waits to anticipate and fulfill his intentions. In a very real sense, Strehler is the rehearsal. Its energy, its ideas, its rhythm, its constant voice are his. 31

Copeau was no less exacting on his troupe; indeed, his severity may have hastened the demise of Les Copiaus, the troupe he managed in his initial retreat to Burgundy, from 1924 to 1929. 32 Ultimately, his goals were different from those of Strehler, who was not content to be a silent partner in his own production. Indeed, perhaps more than any other moment of the play, the finale of Arlecchino clearly bore the mark of Strehler’s directorial imprint. As had been established in earlier productions, the finale of the “Farewell Edition” featured the entire company chasing after Arlecchino. To escape them, he ran

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down the very same stairs into center of the audience from which he made his first entrance at the beginning of the play. He then pulled the entire staircase unit away from the stage so that the other characters could not follow him; however, they found other stairs and made their way into the audience to continue their pursuit. Arlecchino then leaped dexterously back onto the stage, delivered his final monologue and, as mentioned earlier, extinguished all of the candles onstage. The last moments of the production featured Arlecchino, silhouetted by a very faint orange light trying to find his way in the darkness. The other actors made their way back onstage, still pursuing him, but the wily servant eventually crawled off stage and escaped them. The theatricality of this sequence immediately drew attention to the Brechtian concerns which occupied much of Strehler’s work; by metatheatrically making the audience aware of Strehler’s own wielding of theatricality, he highlighted his role as director in constructing these proceedings. Furthermore, the finale unified the seemingly divergent elements of Strehler’s aesthetic. Despite the highly metatheatrical nature of the finale, it is important to note that Strehler ended his production within the world of Arlecchino servitore di due padroni. The curtain call immediately followed Arlecchino’s final escape and, thus, the offstage lives of the “actors” were never revisited. That the moment was both Copeauian and anti-Copeauian firmly established it as uniquely Strehlerian. The other key differences between the two directors were the motivations behind their artistic pursuits. Copeau’s artistic ideals where based on a notion of purity. His retreat to the country in his later years, coupled with Jansenist views of the theatre, speak to a kind of ascetic quality that was diametrically opposed to Strehler’s approach. Strehler’s cosmopolitan, highly politicized works could not be further from Copeauian simplicity. Strehler’s work, as proven by the analysis thus far, was based on integration. For him, notions of politics, art, and theatricality were inseparable from each other. Copeau’s severity was rooted in a desire to reach a kind of pure source, while Strehler’s strictness was based on a desire to adhere to his unique personal vision. Strehler’s application of Copeauian aesthetic elements in his “Farewell Edition” was rooted in his integrative desires to balance the various approaches he had employed over the years. It is a credit to Strehler that in the “Farewell Edition” of Arlecchino, he wielded his directorial power in a less overt fashion. Aside from a few key Strehlerian flourishes, he relied on the audience’s knowledge of his past productions and allowed the play itself to be the star of the production. Strehler’s relative restraint in the production did not indicate a more passive approach to directing. Rather, it was a subtler execution of his role that was perhaps even more demanding of his talents than his more flamboyantly theatrical productions. To achieve his newly revitalized Arlecchino, Strehler inverted his refractive theatricality to integrate it more fully with his comme-

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dia and Brechtian aesthetics. If the spectrum of Strehler’s theatricality could be defined as how literally or abstractly he attempted to represent real life, then placing the “Farewell Edition” of Arlecchino requires a different approach to looking at his refractive theatricality. The conception of this Arlecchino was hardly intended to be realistic, so the production must be defined as leaning more towards the abstract in its conception. Yet, Arlecchino lacked the sumptuous, visual spectacle of Strehler’s 1978 The Tempest, so aligning the two requires an inversion of our notion of theatricality and its refractive relationship to contemporary Italy. As previously mentioned, the lighting and staging in the “Farewell Edition” of Arlecchino were used vibrantly in the production to create a potent, minimalist theatricality; the difference was how Strehler achieved this theatricality. For his Tempest, he utilized every apparatus imaginable to create breathtaking and ornate visuals. For Arlecchino, his technical challenge was to create moments of great visual power using simpler means. In other words, the theatricality was still an important element, but it achieved its spectacle in a different way. In addition, while the 1977 version refracted Italy’s sociopolitical unrest, the “Farewell Edition” refracted the audience’s long, evolving relationship with Arlecchino itself. Perhaps the best way to clarify this reinvention and how it fits into Strehler’s aesthetic is to use the director’s own terminology. For his landmark 1974 production of The Cherry Orchard, Strehler invented his well-known Chinese Box Theory to explain the many layers of the play: In the first box we approach the play on the level of reality: that is to say through the story of a family, its life at a particular moment; in the second we shift to a historical level and in the conflict and struggles of the individual we see reflected the social and political conflicts of the period; in the third we are operating in the context of universal—let us call them abstract—values. 33

Strehler further explained that there was a fourth box that contained all three. This fourth box, rather elusively defined, seems not to indicate an additional layer to Strehler’s theory. Rather, it represents the intersections, overlaps, and integrations among the first three. Strehler astutely mentions the fourth box to underscore the elliptical and oxymoronic nature of his theory. At first glance, Strehler seems to insinuate that we as an audience approach the reality of the story first. Once that has been adequately achieved, the broader historical context comes into focus. From there, we as an audience can recognize the universal truths inherent in the play. Yet the very use of Chinese Boxes implies the reverse of this hierarchy. It suggests that, in approaching the play, the audience latches onto the outermost box first: the universal human element. Once an investment in that has been achieved, a path has been cleared towards the historical and political context that the

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director and playwright want to address. The audience’s growing understanding and engagement of these historical concerns then invests them in the “reality” of the story. The reversibility of this structure necessitates the elliptical fourth box—a place where both hierarchies can exist simultaneously, where the play’s commonalities and contradictions are inseparable from each other. Strehler’s fourth box acknowledges that each audience member perceives these elements differently. While Strehler might focus on them separately in rehearsal, the audience will receive all of them at once and the weight of each element will depend largely on their own unique perspectives. The Chinese Box Theory was the cornerstone to his 1974 Cherry Orchard and the way his theatricality realized all of the different layers of the play is why the production ranks among his most important. Yet, the significance of the Chinese Box Theory extended far beyond one production. The renewed vigor and sociopolitical thrust of Strehler’s work in the 1970s bore witness to the perspective espoused in his theory. His Copeauian approach to the “Farewell Edition” of Arlecchino servitore di due padroni was a further manifestation of this approach. The sparer, leaner theatricality created the ideal environment to integrate his work from the previous forty years. Taken one step further, the Chinese Box Theory could be applied to the “Farewell Edition” to explain the crystallized, aesthetic integration the production achieved. The innermost box of Arlecchino servitore di due padroni was commedia because it represented the reality of the play itself. Arlecchino is not a realistic play by any means, so the innermost box does not represent realism. Instead, the “reality” to which Strehler referred was the world of the play. That particular world, as created by Goldoni, was populated by commedia characters. Their personalities and actions may have been writ large, but they were true to the world Goldoni created. Thus it makes sense that this was the starting point for Strehler’s work with Arlecchino because he first had to familiarize his audience with the world of Goldoni’s play. The nesting of the boxes was clearly evoked by Strehler’s work with Brecht. If the second box represents a broader political or historical context, then for Strehler, the second box was his Brechtian aesthetic. Brecht’s approach to theatre was rooted in historical and political context; indeed, it was one of the driving forces behind his work. By creating an offstage company of “actors,” Strehler created a social and historical context for the play. Despite this, the first box (commedia) was retained in the production in the play-within-a-play format. The audience could see the commedia-esque elements of Arlecchino servitore di due padroni encased inside the broader milieu of the improvised story of the acting company. Underscoring this distinction, the commedia elements became increasingly restricted to the play-within-the-play to more clearly define the two worlds.

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Refractive theatricality provided Strehler with his third box—the universal. This refractive theatricality achieved its universal aims in many different ways. On one end of the spectrum, the more extreme theatricality of his 1970s productions of The Cherry Orchard and The Tempest served to both abstract the worlds of the plays while highlighting comparisons to 1970s Italy. The refraction of their context allowed the audience to see the universal human issues in both plays. Arlecchino servitore di due padroni was pitched towards the other end of the spectrum. In this production, the more subtle use of theatricality achieved its goal through the opposite means. Rather than dilute the harsh world he was attempting to create with visual flourishes, Strehler allowed the dark, grittiness to highlight the production’s parallels to Italy’s social and political tumult. In doing so, universal truths about class injustice shone through without neglecting the other two boxes. The commedia elements and the Brechtian construct were still in place, but they existed within a larger framework that approached more universal concerns. It is therefore unsurprising that Copeau should provide Strehler with the seemingly cryptic fourth box in which to assimilate the other three aesthetic elements. In order to achieve full integration, Strehler needed an aesthetic that would not favor any of the three boxes, but rather would allow them to commingle imperceptibly. A complete lack of scenery or costumes would have negated his theatricality (refractive or otherwise) while a Tempest-ian mega-production would have allowed that element to dominate the other two. Likewise, he had taken his Brechtian play-within-a-play structure to its extreme in the previous version of Arlecchino and would need to find a different approach to it in order for it to remain relevant to the production. Finally, if the commedia elements became too garish or subtle, either extreme would further obfuscate the relationship among the three elements. Ironically, despite Strehler’s ideological differences from Copeau, he achieved a kind of ideal synthesis in his “Farewell Edition” that was the very root of Copeau’s ideas about what theatre should be. In this fourth box, he had created a truly collaborative production that eschewed any of the hierarchies implied by his Chinese Box Theory. With this version of Arlecchino, a space was created where the contributions of Strehler, his company and production team, Copeau, Brecht, Goldoni, and even Arlecchino himself were equal and indistinguishable from one another. NOTES 1. David L. Hirst, Giorgio Strehler (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1993): 42. 2. David Whitton, Stage Directors in Modern France (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987): 57. 3. Bettina L. Knapp, The Reign of the Theatrical Director, French Theatre: 1887–1924 (Troy: Whitson, 1988): 173. 4. Ibid., 180.

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5. Ibid., 176. 6. Ibid., 245-52. 7. Il primo è Jacques Copeau. Copeau che io non ho conosciuto personalmente. Pure è un mio “maestro.” A lui devo molto, devo qualcosa di fondamentale nella mia formazione di uomo di teatro e non è facile definire oggi ciò che gli devo. Tento: Copeau o della visione severa, giansenistica, morale del teatro. Copeau o il sentimento dell’unità del teatro, unità tra parola scritta e rappresentazione, attori e scenografi e musicisti e autori, un tutto unico, fino all’ultimo macchinista. Giorgio Strehler, Per un teatro umano (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1974): 13334. 8. John Rudlin and Norman H. Paul, ed., trans. Copeau: Texts on Theatre (London: Routledge, 1990): 196-197. Rudlin and Paul reprint an oft-quoted passage by Bentley in which he unites the communal nature of the Catholic liturgy with the theatrical experience, citing this alignment as a goal of Copeau’s in his later years. The editors refute this interpretation in favor of the idea that Copeau was speaking metaphorically about the need for new forms and new approaches to theatre. 9. Copeau credeva, fermamente, non in un comodo dogma o rituale, ma in una specie di lotta quasi crudele con se stesso e con l’Altro. Tanto si è parlato della rinuncia al teatro, al perche di questa rinuncia. Io credo, oggi, al di la di cio che alcuni suoi allievi piu intimi mi hano raccontato, che Copeau lascio il teatro semplicemente perché “avrebbe dovuto, per fare quel teatro in cui credeva, chiedere ciò che solo Dio puo chiedere a degli uomini.” Giorgio Strehler, Per un teatro umano, 134. 10. David L. Hirst, Giorgio Strehler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993): 21. 11. The Union des Theatres de l’Europe Members Page, www.ute-net.org (2 Feb 2007). 12. Spencer M. Di Scala, Italy: From Revolution to Republic, 1700 to the Present (Boulder: Westview, 2004): 345. 13. Ibid., 340; 345. 14. Whitton, Stage Directors in Modern France, 63. 15. Whitton, Stage Directors in Modern France, 63. 16. Mark Evans, Jacques Copeau (London: Routledge, 2006): 96. 17. Whitton, Stage Directors in Modern France, 63. 18. Giorgio Strehler, Arlecchino servitore di due padroni, 160 min (approx), Piccolo Teatro Archivio Storico, 1992, videocassette. This production was a revival of the 1987 “Farewell Edition” that remained in repertoire at the Piccolo for much of the 1990s. Unless otherwise indicated, all statements regarding physical action and performance refer to this video. 19. Mark Evans, Jacques Copeau, 57. 20. Ibid., 11. 21. Bettina L. Knapp, The Reign of the Theatrical Director, French Theatre: 1887–1924, 178. 22. Mi aspetto la collaborazione di tutti. Proprio pochi giorni fa, il critico Paul Blaha a Vienna al termine di una intervista-dialogo con me ha scritto: “Tu non sei capace di lavorare se non in mezzo a degli amici.” Ho pensato: come diceva Copeau. Ma—fatte le debite proporzioni—non e giusto? Giorgio Strehler, Per un teatro umano, 80. 23. David L. Hirst, Giorgio Strehler, 48. 24. John Rudlin and Norman H. Paul, ed., trans. Copeau: Texts on Theatre (London: Routledge, 1990): 152-53. 25. Mark Evans, Jacques Copeau, 135-36. 26. Bettina L. Knapp, The Reign of the Theatrical Director, French Theatre: 1887–1924, 174; 245-52. 27. Whitton, Stage Directors in Modern France, 62-63. 28. Jacques Copeau, “Confidences d’auteurs: au Vieux Colombier,” (lecture given to Societe des Annales, 3 February 1933) published in Conferencia (1 April 1933), quoted in Copeau: Texts on Theatre, eds., trans. John Rudlin and Norman H. Paul, 102. 29. Io non sono credente. Ma credo in questo severo “impegno” verso la vita e verso gli altri, credo in questo teatro unitario, in questo teatro che e lacerazione di se e dedicazione assoluta. Credo in questa parola teatro che si fa “sulla scena” per gli altri attraverso altri. E anche la mia visione del terro non e “gioiosa” ma attenta, dura, esclusiva, dolorosa nella sua

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ricerca di ordine, di onesta, di chiarezza, di verita. Anche del riso. Giorgio Strehler, Per un teatro umano (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1974): 134. 30. Jacques Copeau, “Le Theatre du Vieux Colombier,” (speech given in Lyon, 21 December 1920) published in part in Forces Vives IV (1953), quoted in Copeau: Texts on Theatre, eds., trans. John Rudlin and Norman H. Paul, 124. 31. Richard Trousdell, “Giorgio Strehler in Rehearsal,” The Drama Review 30, no. 4 (Winter 1986): 67-68. 32. Mark Evans, Jacques Copeau, 30-37. 33. Corriere della Sera (14 May 1974), quoted and translated in David Hirst, Giorgio Strehler, 28.

Conclusion

More than fifteen years after Strehler’s death on Christmas 1997, the Piccolo Teatro is now celebrating more than sixty-five seasons of work. It has grown from one small theatre on Milan’s via Rovello to a complex network whose comprehensive seasons play out on three stages: the original theatre; the experimental Studio theatre, which opened in 1986; and the Teatro Strehler, a performing arts center that opened in the late 1990s and which boasts the Piccolo’s largest stage, along with its archives and administrative offices. In addition, the Piccolo Teatro retains strong ties to the Union des Theatres de l’Europe. Finally, the Piccolo’s touring company takes productions throughout Europe, the United States, and beyond. 1 Arlecchino servitore di due padroni remains an integral part of the Piccolo’s repertoire. The production is rarely absent from its regular or touring seasons and its reach extends beyond Europe. In 2005, the production came to the United States still headlined by Ferruccio Soleri, who has performed the role of Arlecchino for nearly four and a half decades—more than tripling the tenure of his predecessor, Marcello Moretti. Soleri also redirected the production in the vein of the late Strehler, as noted by New York Times critic, Charles Isherwood in his review of the production, in which he noted “the production’s stature as an ambassador for Italian culture across the decades.” 2 Isherwood also observes signature Strehler elements, such as “the use of masks for the comic male characters and the presence of an actual slapstick.” 3 It also includes the Brechtian touches, including the “now familiar meta-theatrical frame: Ezio Frigerio’s set, recreating the feel of an old village square, allows us to watch the actors chat and idle when they jump off the cramped wooden platform that supplies the playing space.” 4 Nearly a decade later, the production of Arlecchino remains in the Piccolo repertory and continues to tour throughout Europe to this day. 111

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In the wake of these influential tours, new productions of the play have appeared throughout Europe, including a 2001 London production co-produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Young Vic. In North America, the play has graced numerous regional and academic stages in areas such as Washington, D.C., and Toronto, among others. Furthermore, in the years since the founding of the Piccolo, the play has been translated and adapted numerous times, with notable English-language versions by writers such as Constance Congdon, Edward J. Dent, Lee Hall, Jeffrey Hatcher, Shelley Barc, and Andre Belgrader (the latter two collaborated on a production at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1992). In 2011, Richard Bean adapted Arlecchino into the commercially and critically successful One Man, Two Guvnors, which places Goldoni’s story to 1960s England. The proliferation of translations, adaptations, and productions is indicative of the crucial role Strehler played in bringing Goldoni and Arlecchino servitore di due padroni into a place of prominence in the international theatrical canon. Yet beyond the endurance of the Piccolo, the play, and Strehler’s production, a few specific questions remain: in light of his multifaceted career, how do we define Strehler’s aesthetic? Why was Arlecchino servitore di due padroni the touchstone of his career? How does his aesthetic change our notions of directorial concept? Does his work approach an identity for “Italian Theatre?” Strehler’s employment of commedia, Brechtian, and refractive theatrical aesthetics speaks to his diversity as a director. His late-career, Copeauian overtures prevented that diversity from being labeled eclecticism. Perhaps what unifies and defines Strehler’s career is that he never believed the ideas of Stanislavsky, Brecht, Goldoni, Pirandello, Beckett, and many other important theatrical figures to be in opposition to each other. In his pan-theatrical approach, he saw opportunities for these different ideologies to create new paths in theatre. In his fifty years at the Piccolo, Strehler sought to reinforce and reinvigorate the Italian repertory, while at the same time placing that repertory within a larger, international canon. This was not a simplistic, utopian approach to theatre. If nothing else, Strehler’s work was a living, breathing, three-dimensional example of the “cruel struggle” he saw in Copeau’s ideals. In this regard, Arlecchino servitore di due padroni was the ideal vehicle for Strehler to work through that struggle. The play is built on a foundation of contradictions and conflicting identities. First, it is a scripted piece based on a semi-improvisational form; yet, despite Goldoni’s desire to bring structure and form to the potential excesses of commedia, the text leaves the door open for comic improvisations. Furthermore, the play attempts to place the outlandish commedia characters in a real-world framework. Most significantly, it is a play populated by characters that cross borders of identity. Beatrice is a

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woman who spends much of the play living as a man; Clarice and Silvio willfully disobey their parents; and Florindo, in killing Beatrice’s brother and then marrying his sister, calls into question the true nature of honor. Beyond them, the character with the most contradictions is Arlecchino himself. He is a servant with little respect for his station or his superiors. He is a buffoon one minute, and a clever trickster the next. He is a grumbling, put-upon laborer with an inexplicable font of optimism. While it would be inaccurate to call Arlecchino an Everyman (or even an Every Italian), he does embody the conflicting nature of the Italian identity. This issue of Italian identity underscores the question of Italian theatre. To approach an identity for Italian theatre means approaching an identity for Italy. Strehler succeeded in helping bring playwrights such as Goldoni and Pirandello to greater international prominence both inside and outside of Italy. From a global standpoint, he succeeded in creating an “Italian theatre” for the rest of the world inasmuch as these playwrights now occupy a more prominent position in the international canon (as evidenced by the productions mentioned above): The Piccolo has succeeded, through the presentation of its finest work at important international theatre festivals throughout the world, in giving to Italy a reputation as a center of significant theatrical activity. In conjunction with this program the Piccolo has attempted to develop the image of a National Italian Theatre committed to the development of a theatre program which is Italian, not only because it produces Italian playwrights, but also in the degree to which it addresses itself to the sentiments and concerns of the entire nation. 5

Internally, these notions of an Italian theatrical program and an Italian nation are more complex and harder to define. Within Italy, “Italian theatre” is still characterized more by regionalism than a unified, national theatrical identity, and the international push of the past two decades has only further diversified its theatrical constituency. Nearly thirty years ago, Strehler’s longtime collaborator (and Piccolo Teatro di Milano co-founder) Paolo Grassi addressed this very issue: Italy is not a nationalistic country—absolutely not. Not on the political and military, and even less on the cultural level. Whereas so many countries are proud of their culture, Italy lives its culture but doesn’t exalt it. If there is one country that has wide open curiosity about foreign cultures, if there is one country where priority of the national product does not exist—it’s Italy. If we had a large contemporary repertory, we would present it. But which country in the whole world has one today? 6

Nearly three decades later, these comments seem less like a response to politically frenzied and violent 1970s than an accurate prognostication of Italy’s future. Often, Italy has been characterized by revolutions that never

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happened: during the height of the Resistance movement in World War II; during the formative years of the republic; during the reactionary years following the Autunno Caldo; in the Great Compromise and the surge of the PCI in the mid-1970s; and in the wake of the massive political scandals that rocked the government in 1992. Yet, it would be a mistake to characterize these non-revolutions as failures. Instead, they reflect a culture for which nationalism simply is not a priority. Following the corruption controversies of 1992, there was talk of a “Second Republic,” a chance to revamp the entire Italian governmental structure and start afresh. When that did not happen, citizens began to seek nongovernment venues to effect change in Italian culture, and met with greater success. 7 In this light, it makes sense that the cultural, political, and economic movement of the past two decades has been outward instead of inward. Social change has been effected through connections made along shared ideological lines, rather than political and geographic ones. Strehler, like Grassi, was at the forefront of that movement. As an Italian of Austrian descent who spoke at least three languages, Strehler was already an International as much as he was an Italian. Although he helped build, establish, or further the reputations of Italian playwrights such as Goldoni, Gozzi, Bertolazzi, and Pirandello, he gave equal attention to the works of playwrights from France, England, Germany, Russia, and the United States. Strehler represents Italian theatre insofar as he represents Italy itself—the elements of his work that might be labeled most purely “Italian” are inextricably bound to elements of foreign influence. His Arlecchino servitore di due padroni brings that Italian mosaic to the stage and to the very notion of directorial concept. Strehler’s work with Arlecchino servitore di due padroni is also significant because of the unique relationship among the director, play, and audience. Strehler’s reinterpretations of the play ultimately changed the audience’s relationship with the production. In his Arlecchinos, the actors and their comic lazzi became inseparable from the text itself. Strehler keenly used the audience’s knowledge and expectations to surprise them as he blended new aesthetic elements into the productions. If Strehler’s directorial style was defined by mélange, and the notion of an Italian Theatre exits more outside of Italy than within it, who are the heirs to Strehler’s legacy? Since little time has passed (historically speaking) since Strehler’s death, it remains to be seen what directions the Piccolo Teatro di Milano will take. The artistic director appointed after Strehler’s passing, Luca Ronconi, has theatrical tastes that lean more towards the experimental and the antirealistic, particularly in the area of “linguistic experimentation.” 8 While Ronconi’s direction of the Piccolo may be less autocratic, his perpetuation of the Arlecchino tradition is more of a testament to Strehler’s legacy and the production’s popularity than a continuation of Strehler’s theatrical

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exploration of the play. Furthermore, since he is only a decade younger than Strehler, the extent of his potential influence will be limited. Where the Piccolo does clearly follow in Strehler’s footsteps is in the diverse array of international programs overseen by Administrative Director Sergio Escobar. 9 In terms of contemporary directors who bear the mark of Strehler’s influence, a few possibilities emerge. Stage and film director Patrice Chereau worked with Strehler in the 1970s and his later opera productions were heavily influenced by Strehler’s own opera work. Peter Wood, whose directing career has been closely tied to Harold Pinter, staged two productions (a la Strehler) of Congreve’s Love for Love. The first version was a successful production in the 1960s that featured Sir Laurence Olivier. The cool reception of Wood’s restaging of it nearly twenty years later (with Tim Curry taking over Olivier’s role) indicated that an English equivalent of Strehler’s Arlecchino cycle was not to be. Perhaps the director with the most Strehlerian potential is Polish director Krzysztof Warlikowski. In the early 1990s, Warlikowski had the opportunity to work with Strehler and other theatrical luminaries such as Peter Brook and Ingmar Bergmann. 10 Like Strehler, Warlikowski’s perspective is international: in addition to staging Polish works, he also directs plays from a variety of countries and periods. Particularly noted for his numerous interpretations of Greek tragedies and Shakespeare, Warlikowski has interpreted several plays, such as Hamlet, multiple times. Like Strehler, Warlikowski mixes his classical explorations with edgier, more contemporary (and often more political) works; his productions of works by British In-Yer-Face playwrights Mark Ravenhill and the late Sarah Kane are indicative of this. Perhaps most importantly, the social, political, and cultural environment of Poland after the fall of the Berlin wall parallels that of Strehler in the early Piccolo years. In this climate of both increased freedom and a still-forming national identity, Warlikowski has the potential to continue in Strehler’s vein of theatre that is both theatrically diverse and politically aware. For Strehler, the desire to return to plays repeatedly reflected a mindset of unfinished business: the idea that no one concept could completely capture all that was important about a given play. The pure essence of a play, much like the notion of an Italian identity, was something to be approached but never achieved. Strehler’s unique contribution to directing was to realize plays like a visual artist who paints the same vista from different vantage points. Despite numerous similarities, each version revealed something striking that did not appear in the others. Instead of creating discordance, these differences coexisted and created greater clarity. Strehler’s Arlecchino servitore di due padroni was simultaneously one production and many—and, in that respect, it was truly Italian.

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NOTES 1. The Piccolo Teatro di Milano Home Page http://www.piccoloteatro.org (16 February 2007). 2. Isherwood, Charles. “Before Homer Simpson, There Was Commedi dell’Arte.” New York Times (June 22, 2005). 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. James F. Franklin, “The Emergence of Government Supported Resident Theatres in Italy,” Educational Theatre Journal 29:3 (October 1977): 394. 6. Alba Amoia, ed., trans., The Italian Theatre Today: Twelve Interviews (Troy: Whitston, 1977): 9. 7. Jonathan Dunnage, Twentieth Century Italy: A Social History (London: Longman, 2002): 235-39. 8. Ron Jenkins, “A Troupe Endures, Always in Good Company,” New York Times, 9 December 2001, late edition. sec. 2, col. 1, p. 7. Jenkins quotes Anna Bandettini of La Repubblica in differentiating between Strehler and Ronconi’s managerial styles. 9. Ibid. 10. Helen Kaye, “An Ancient Curse That Still Rings True,” Jerusalem Post, 3 August 1998, p. 7.

Bibliography

BOOKS AND ARTICLES Abel, Lionel. Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form. Hill and Wang: New York, 1963. Ajmar, Laura. Strehler in Europa: La Trilogia. Milan: Amici del Piccolo Teatro/Archinto, 2001. Amoia, Alba. The Italian Theatre Today: Twelve Interviews. Troy: Whitston, 1977. Antonucci, Giovanni. Storia del teatro italiano. Rome: Edizioni Studium, 1986. Apollonio, Mario. Storia del teatro Italiano. Vol. 2. Florence: G.C. Sansoni, 1954. Aslan, Odette. “From Giorgio Strehler to Victor Garcia.” Modern Drama. 25:1 (March 1982): 113-126. Bajma Griga, Stefano. La Tempesta di Shakespeare per Giorgio Strehler. Pisa: ETS, 2003. Baranski, Zygmunt G., and Rebecca J. West, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture. New York: Cambridge, 2001. Battistini, Fabio. Giorgio Strehler. Rome: Gremese, 1980. ———. Gli Spazi dell’incanto: Bozetti e Figurini del Piccolo Teatro, 1947-1987. Italy: Silvana, 1987. Benjamin, Walter. Understanding Brecht. Anna Bostock, trans.Verso: London, 1966. Bentoglio, Alberto. Invito al Teatro di Giorgio Strehler. Milan: Mursia, 2002. Berghaus, Gunter. Italian Futurist Theatre, 1909-1944. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998). Berlau, Ruth, Bertolt Brecht, Claus Hubalek, Peter Palitzsch, and Kathe Rulicke. Theaterarbeit. Dusseldorf: Johann Fladung, 1952. Berry, Ralph, ed. On Directing Shakespeare London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989. Bisicchia, Andrea. “Giorgio Strehler’s Production of I Giganti Della Montagna [The Mountain Giants] in the Context of its Performance History: An Examination of the Aesthetic Potential of the Stage.” Felicity Firth, trans. The Yearbook of the British Peirandello Society. 11 (1991): 1-25. Bobbio, Norberto. Ideological Profile of Twentieth Century Italy. Foreword by Massimo Salvadori. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Bohme-Kuby, Susanna. “Brecht in Italy: Aspects of Reception.” Modern Drama. 42:2 (Summer 1999): 223-33. Boscolo Fiore, Giuseppe, and Piergiorgio Tiozzo. Piccolo Teatro Citta di Chioggia. Venice: Fiessod’Artico, 1981. Bossisio, Paolo. “A Clapping of Hands as Big as the World.” Program for Arlecchino servitore di due padroni program for 2005 United States Tour.

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VIDEOS Strehler, Giorgio. Arlecchino servitore di due padroni. 150 min (approx). Piccolo Teatro di Milano Archivio Storico, 1955. Videocassette. ———. Arlecchino servitore di due padroni. 180 min (approx). Piccolo Teatro di Milano Archivio Storico, 1974. Videocassette. ———. Arlecchino servitore di due padroni. 160 min (approx). Piccolo Teatro di Milano Archivio Storico, 1992. Videocassette. ———. La trilogia dell villeggiatura. 240 min (approx). Piccolo Teatro di Milano Archivio Storico, 1978. Videocassette. ———. La direction d’acteurs: Giorgio Strehler repete “la Trilogie de la Villegiature” de Goldoni avec les comediens Francais. Produced by Aslan Odette and Giorgio Strehler. 54 min. Meudon, 1979. Videocassette.

WEBSITES The Union des Theatres de l’Europe Members Page. www.ute-net.org The Piccolo Teatro di Milano Home Page. http://www.piccoloteatro.org

ARCHIVES Archivio storico and Archivio fotografico (also available online). Piccolo Teatro di Milano. Contains over 10,000 images that are available online. Physical archive contains videos of many of the pertinent productions.

Index

Alfieri, Vittorio, 4, 8, 22, 25–26 AutunnoCaldo, 80, 86, 114 The Bicycle Thief, 71–72 Brecht, Bertolt, viii, xi, 43, 47–49; The Threepenny Opera , 47–50, 52, 58–48 Catholic Church, 6–7, 72 The Cherry Orchard , 76, 77–78, 80, 81, 81–86, 106 Chiari, Pietro, 4, 5, 6, 8 Commedia dell’arte, 28–30 Copeau, Jacques, 93–95

Gozzi, Carlo, 2, 3–6, 8, 10, 22; The Love of Three Oranges , 6, 81 Grassi, Paolo, 21, 22, 69, 76, 94, 113, 114 Grotesque Theatre, 14–15, 34–36, 42 Mocalvo, Giuseppe, 9 Moretti, Marcello, 32, 36–37, 41–42, 43, 56 neorealism, 20, 70, 72, 73, 74, 76, 80, 81 opera, 7–8 One Man, Two Guvnors , 112

Dialect Theatre Movement, 10–12

Risorgimento, 6, 8, 9, 16, 71

Fascism, 15–17, 19, 20, 25, 35, 43, 70–73 Futurism, 14

Settecento, 1–4, 7 socialist realism, 70, 71, 74–76, 76, 78–79, 80, 81–83, 87 Soleri, Ferruccio, 111 Strehler, Giorgio: Chinese Box Theory, 106, 107, 108; Gruppo Teatro e Azione, 81; heritage, 48; Piccolo Teatre di Milano, 20; Refractive Theatricality, 81–83

Goldoni, Carlo: Biography, 4; Arlecchino servitore di due padroni , 28; Il Campiello, vii, 22, 34, 81; Le BaruffeChiozzotte, vii, 6, 7, 22, 26, 34; L’AmanteMilitare, 30, 41–42; La VedovaScaltra, 5, 22, 30, 42–43; The Villeggiatura Trilogy, 22, 26, 76, 79, 80, 81, 83, 84, 86

Venice (Republic), 1–3 verismo, 12–13, 70–72

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About the Author

Scott Malia is assistant professor of theatre at College of the Holy Cross, specializing in Italian and GLBTQIA theatre. His work has appeared in Theatre Journal and New England Theatre Journal, and his play, The Interview, was published by Samuel French. He has also translated Carlo Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters into metered verse.

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