The theatrical roles: Students are separated in three groups, and each group is instructed to identify with one of these three roles: the director, the actors, the audience. At first, they have to consider their role as it relates to theatre in general, not to Questa Sera in particular: what are the expectations of the director/actor/audience member? What are their responsibilities? What makes them nervous? What makes them happy? What are they striving towards? What do they want to happen? What would they never want to happen? In the second part of the activity, students are asked to reflect on these questions in relation to Pirandello’s play specifically, imagining an actual staging of the play: are the expectations met? Are the responsibilities clear and fair? How do the events affect each role?
The theater within the theater: While engaging in the second part of the previous activity, students should start questioning the definition of the roles they were given, and therefore unfolding the complicated structure of the theater within the theater. The purpose of the activity is precisely to have them reflect on the implications of the meta-theatrical construction: by focusing on the task they are given, they should be able to start teasing out they hows and whys this play is so fascinatingly problematic to stage. The following discussion prompt will be: To what point can/should Hinkfuss and the real-life director conflate? The activity from the previous session on the meaning of authorship should help them discuss the issue. And to what point can/should the real-life actors and the character-actors conflate?
Characters’ portraits: After students have started exploring the above question about characters, the instructor might want to provide them with an excerpt from Sei personaggi in order to deepen the discussion on characters’ agency and on the theatrical “revolution” initiated by Pirandello’s trilogy. In the following activity, each group of students works on a specific (hyphenated) character: Leading Actress-Mommina, Lead Actor-Verri, and so forth. Students are asked to choose the most important lines for that character from the text they have read so far, the lines that best identify their personality, their desires, their evolution. They then craft a performance around those lines and present it to the class.
Creating original monologues: As a final activity or an assignment for the following session, students have to create a monologue for one of the characters of their choice for the beginning of act III, which portrays what the character thinks and feels at the end of act II. The purpose of the exercise is to encourage students to verbalize their personal interpretation of a character, and to have them engage in predictions to foster their interest in the following portion of the text. (The monologues can be edited together and incorporated in a final production of the play, which could constitute a final group project for the class – see below)
by Anna Santucci (PhD Candidate, Brown University)