Machine and Magus in Pirandello's Tonight We Improvise

Machine and Magus in Pirandello's Tonight We Improvise BETTINA KNAPP You see, ladies and gentlemen, the theatre is the yawning mouth of a gigantic machine that is - hungry; a hunger, I should add, that these gentlemen the poets . .. profoundly err in not trying to satisfy. It is deplorable that the invention ofour poets, far behind everyone else, no longersucceeds in discovering adequate nourishment for this vast machine we caB the theatre that, like other machines, has in recent years enormously and wondrously grown and developed. I So spoke Dr. Hinkfuss, director of the play within the play in Luigi Pirandello's Tonight Weimprovise (1929). For Pirandello, then, the theatre is a machine, hungry for poetry, which is in insufficient supply in the early decades of the twentieth century. The poetry needed to nourish the hungry machine is, for Pirandello, a concoction of motility, imagination, fantasy, mystery, and illusion, which would invite spectators, protagonists, and readers alike to substitute for their staid and preconceived notions the unforseen (from the Latin, improvisus) - the improvised, the unknown, the world of imponderables . And thus the title expresses an aspiration: Tonight We Improvise. What is the significance of machines, that creators of works of art were so fascinated by these rhythmic/spatial constructs? How has Pirandello, like the Futurist and Metaphysical painters and sculptors, been able in this play to create an illusion of motility, even though the observer knows the object to be immobile? The machine may be looked upon as a positive force, a transformer ofenergy from kinetic to electric, whose uses are virtually unlimited. Machines may also distort vision and perspective, thereby dislocating former concepts of reality and encouraging further probings into nature's infinite secrets. The term machine is applicable not only to inanimate objects, but to the body and psyche as well. Inanimate machines use natural conditions to provide physical, energetic, and chemical needs. Animate machines convert or channel raw instincts or 406 BETTINA KNAPP libido (psychic energy), directing them away from their own unregenerate course toward purposeful goals. Like the machine, theatre and psyche plough through an uncharted time/space continuum, participating in a transformation ritual, which is the creation of the living work of art. Tonight We Improvise presents unresolved conflicting tensions that arise between actors and director during a dramatic performance. Both audiences and protagonists are compelled to make choices and force out solutions. For Pirandello, however, there are no final answers. Like Heraclitus, he believed that all is in a state offlux. To probe and question - whether on the religious, psychological or theatrical level - is to fragment and divide; and to open up new thoughts as one discards old, archaic modes and beliefs. Pain and suffering are important factors in the transformative process that brings about a renewal. The process is circular and cyclical: to recharge or innovate implies a destruction offormer ways, followed by the birth of fresh ideas and new polarities, but also ofdifferent antagonisms, which must then be balanced again, but only temporarily, since equilibrium is followed by fresh contradictions. A brief summary of Tonight We Improvise is in order. Dr. Hinkfuss, the theatrical director of a play within a play by Pirandello, begins by denigrating the dramatist's role in his creative production, and then proceeds to read the scenario which has been reduced and printed on a scroll, of a tragic play revolving around a Sicilian family. The actors, in commedia deltarte style, have been given only the bare essentials of the plot, the rest being left to improvisation. Hinkfuss finds himself in conflict with his actors, who demand more and more freedom in interpreting their characters. A continuous struggle rages between the actors, who are determined to gain their creative independence (the theme of Six Characters in Search ofan Author), and Dr. Hinkfuss, who pays them no heed. A large, buxom, domineering Mother, Donna Ignazia, also called "General," is full of life and spirit and has transmitted her joie de vivre to her four daughters - Mommina, Nene, Dorina, and Titina - who sing and dance for her and also for the entertainment of the officers from the local air-force base. Ignazia's husband, Sampognetta, is a weak, pusillanimous mining...