The Self Is Not for Knowing

To Clothe the Naked. In Luigi Pirandello's plays, the bait of appearance masks the hook of reality, but the mysterious fish of life is never caught. As Pirandello saw it, man is involved in the futile illusion and the obsessive quest of trying to catch and know his unknowable self.

Dramatically, this quest almost always takes the form of a secret to be ferreted out. In Naked, the secret seems to lie with a disconsolate governess. A child in her care has dropped to its death from a terrace. As a result, she loses her job, her fiance, and attempts suicide. A "human interest" newspaper account of her plight brings other characters scurrying to pry out their share of the secret. An aging writer thinks the governess' story might make a good plot for his next novel. Her ex-fiance throws himself at her feet, in the belief that she tried to commit suicide out of love for him. Her former employer, the father of the dead child, turns out to have been her adulterous lover. In this play, more nearly than in any other dramatic work of Pirandello's, the naked truth is exposed, but it destroys the heroine since mankind lacks the strength to bear it.

While the current off-Broadway production is dimmed by a few too many pregnant pauses, it is graced with the poignantly melancholy gravity of Kathleen Widdoes' performance as the governess. Italian garb makes the characters seem oddly distant as if they had been translated along with the text. Naked attests to a quickening theatrical interest in Pirandello, marked notably by the Hartford Stage Company's Enrico IV and the APA Repertory Company's Right You Are If You Think You Are. The themes of loneliness, isolation and alienation were all carved out by Pirandello with consummate craft. In the 31 years since his death, serious modern drama has become a domain of metaphysical dread of which he felt the first tormented shudder.

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