Luigi Chiarelli

• Born: July 7, 1880
• Birthplace: Trani, Italy
• Died: December 20, 1947
• Place of death: Rome, Italy

Other Literary Forms

Although Luigi Chiarelli is best known for his work in the theater, he enjoyed a distinguished career as a journalist as well, later in life becoming a theater and film critic. He also published three volumes of short stories.

Achievements

Luigi Chiarelli is remembered today as the progenitor of an important concept of theater—teatro del grottesco, or Theater of the Grotesque —rather than for his individual plays themselves. Indeed, only one of his plays, The Mask and the Face, has attained longevity among theatergoers, critics, and historians of drama, enjoying worldwide acclaim soon after its first performance in May, 1916. Nevertheless, with this play Chiarelli inaugurated the Theater of the Grotesque (the term actually derives from a line in the play), a movement that heralded the twentieth century reaction against the traditional nineteenth century bourgeois drama and had a significant impact on such innovative playwrights as Luigi Pirandello. Along with other plays by Chiarelli that can be classified as “grotesque,” The Mask and the Face both questioned traditional bourgeois values and awakened anxiety over those values in those who were not yet conscious of their artificiality—hence opening the search in theater for new foundations on which to build a more genuine life, one that could be lived with one’s own face instead of a social mask. Chiarelli thus was instrumental in changing the conventional dramatic manifestations of the bourgeois worldview that had dominated the stage for decades, paving the way to a new attitude toward the purpose and practice of theater.

Biography

Born in Trani in the province of Bari in 1880, Luigi Chiarelli soon moved with his family to Rome, where he completed his secondary education. He could not afford to attend a university after his father died, and being the oldest of five children, he went to work in a government office. During this period (1895-1910), he began his youthful attempts at playwriting, composing eight plays that he later disavowed. He also contributed regularly to L’Alfieri and La patria.

In 1911, Chiarelli left his job to have more time for writing and to become a freelance reporter for the Milanese newspaper Il secolo, soon becoming its editor. In Milan, he became acquainted with some of the most prominent Italian dramatic companies, directors, and actors. He continued to write, and finally, in 1912, his two one-act plays Una notte d’amore (a night of love) and Er gendarme (the policeman) were performed in Bologna and Milan, respectively. They were well received, although not great successes.

In the summer of the next year, Chiarelli wrote in twenty days his masterpiece, The Mask and the Face, which was rejected more than once before its first performance. In 1914, he was editing Armi e politica in Turin when he was drafted. He continued to contribute to Italian newspapers during the war, and in May, 1916, he managed to get a pass to go to Rome, where The Mask and the Face was premiering with the Compagnia Drammatica di Roma. Three months later, Virgilio Talli, one of the most famous actor-directors of his time, who had previously refused to stage the play, produced it in Milan. The success of The Mask and the Face was instantaneous, both with theatergoers and with most critics. Still a soldier, Chiarelli married in the same year.

After the war, Chiarelli continued to write for the theater, but he also translated plays from Latin, Spanish, French, and English, in 1918 starting his own company, Ars Italica. In 1923, he became drama critic for the Rome paper Corriere italiano, and in 1924, he presented a project for a national theater at the First National Congress of the Theater. He was twice (in 1925 and in 1945) elected president of the Playwrights Guild and vice president (1929-1930) of the International Authors Association. He often traveled outside Italy to participate in congresses of the International Authors Association and to be present at various productions of The Mask and the Face.

In 1928, Chiarelli started painting small landscapes in oils, which he showed in Milan and Geneva in 1930 and in London in 1931. During the last years of his life, he wrote film criticism for the newspaper Il tempo, as well as continuing to write plays. He died in Rome, his home since 1937, on December 20, 1947.

Analysis

Among the forty-odd plays that Luigi Chiarelli wrote, there are farces, comedies, political satires, serious bourgeois dramas, melodramas, reworkings of ancient myths, symbolic pieces, and the grotesque plays for which he is best known. Although his efforts at straight comedy and straight drama were less than successful, one can find some dialogue, certain scenes, or entire acts written with flair, distinction, and engaging liveliness. On the whole, however, these works (some of them performed a few times, others unpublished or unperformed) do not succeed in communicating a universal truth or a new artistic vision, and are remembered primarily by students and historians of drama.

Chiarelli’s particular talent revealed itself in the plays he wrote at the beginning of his career and on which his reputation as a playwright therefore rests. These plays inaugurated and are an integral part of that Italian dramatic mode known as the Theater of the Grotesque.

Although The Mask and the Face is immediately associated with the Theater of the Grotesque—indeed, it has been labeled its manifesto—Chiarelli was neither the most famous nor the most talented among the group of playwrights employing this style in the years surrounding World War I: Pirandello, to name only the most illustrious of several, also wrote in the grotesque style; other dramatists commonly associated with the style Chiarelli inaugurated include Rosso di San Secondo, Luigi Antonelli, and Enrico Cavacchioli. While the giant Pirandello went beyond this style to challenge fundamental concepts of the theater, the others continued for the most part to work within the limits established by Chiarelli.

The circumstances that gave rise to the new dramatic expression in general and to Chiarelli’s expression in particular are to be found (as new trends in art often are) in a situation of crisis. This artistic phenomenon was both the response to that crisis and an attempt to overcome it. The crisis was twofold: spiritual and artistic. During World War I and the period immediately preceding it, thoughtful people in Italy and Europe as a whole were experiencing intellectual and moral disorientation. Old institutions remained in force, but they represented old ideals that had lost their authority; the human relationships permitted by the old mores did not fulfill the individual’s needs. Indeed, those relationships appeared mechanical and meaningless, and the individual often felt caught in a stagnant daily routine without challenge, growth, or sense. The artistic crisis consisted of the impasse at which the theater found itself at the beginning of the twentieth century. The dominant dramatic works were in the tradition of Romantic drama, a mimetic theater that for decades had mirrored and mimicked the life of the dominant class, the bourgeoisie. While the realistic theater in France challenged the Romantic tradition by deliberately representing the experience of the lower classes, the revolt in Italy was more extreme, challenging the mimetic element itself: The new playwrights continued to construct “traditional” plots centering on honor, love, and money, with the usual complications and subplots and the traditional characters—husband, wife, and lover—but portrayed these situations and characters with a new, contorted, bizarre twist, rendering plots that confounded theatergoers’ expectations. The new plays appeared strange, proportionless, unnatural, unreal—grotesque. This new use of traditional plot situations and characters to evoke unexpected reactions and outcomes was the essence of the new theater and its aim: to raise questions in the minds of theatergoers concerning accepted, but no longer valid, bourgeois values.

Another important influence on the new Italian drama was the centuries-old commedia dell’arte. The characters of the new dramatists are at times exaggerated to the point of parody and act in an unrealistic, puppetlike fashion reminiscent of the types of the commedia dell’arte. The new drama employed such caricatures to expose the barrenness and rigidity of bourgeois mores.

The Mask and the Face

Chiarelli’s appropriate description of The Mask and the Face as a “grotesque” drama gave the name to the new movement. He knew that his play was neither tragedy nor comedy and was aware of the originality of his experiment. His chosen label alludes to the definition of the grotesque in painting used as far back as the sixteenth century by the Renaissance art critic Giorgio Vasari: “monsters deformed by a freak of nature or by the whim and fancy of the workers, who . . . made things outside of any rule.” Chiarelli saw the deformation of the traditional play that his own play signified, and so did the critics and audiences in Italy and abroad. The play seemed a “small revolution at home.”

The Mask and the Face is a freakish, whimsical, and fanciful mixture: tragedy bordering on the comedic, tears on the brink of laughter. The characters (a count, a magistrate, a lawyer, an artist, and beautiful wives and women), the setting (a rich villa on Lake Como), the situation (a romantic triangle), and the fatuous conversation—all hark back to the traditional bourgeois drama at the play’s outset, but toward the end of the first act, the action takes on a less familiar form, one that is both familiar and a caricature of the familiar. The plot clearly shows the double distortion. Count Paolo Grazia discovers that his wife, Savina, has taken a lover on the same evening that he has vowed to his friends (in adherence to the traditional code of honor) that he would kill his wife were she ever to take a lover. Having made this discovery, he finds himself honor-bound to commit murder.

The melodrama requires a death. At this early point in the drama, the coordinates of duty and feeling, ideals and reality, beliefs and impulses, and reason and spontaneity are set at odds. Paolo seizes Savina by the throat but cannot bring himself to kill her. Savina, intuiting his feelings, responds: “Paolo, for heaven’s sake, drop this mask. Be sincere with yourself. Look into your heart. Don’t be a slave to your words and to your conventional ideas.” Paolo is confronted with the fact that he cannot act on his cruel (and stupid) words, which came not from his heart but from the common coin of his culture. Realizing that he has been living according to societal convention, that he has taken his mask at “face” value, he rebels against his acculturation and sends Savina abroad, telling everyone that he has shot her and dumped her in the lake. He then turns himself in to the police. The obvious irony consists of a situation that does not allow for authenticity: Paolo has unknowingly and unconsciously lied to himself and to his friends and neighbors through his mask. Now he is forced to lie to the others again, after he has taken it off.

Act 2 begins when Paolo returns home from his trial, where he has been acquitted owing to a clever defense by his lawyer friend Luciano Spina, who, unknown to him, is Savina’s lover. A crowd of friends (including those who were present on the fatal evening) enthusiastically congratulate him for having avenged the besmirchment of his honor. Some of their wives offer themselves to him. There are also flowers and letters from distant, unknown women who offer him virginal and faithful love and marriage. Paolo is disgusted by the grotesque buffoonery and ridiculousness of it all. The situation becomes even more grotesque when a decomposed body is found in the lake; everyone assumes it is Savina’s, and it is brought into the house. Paolo has to acknowledge the corpse and go through the masquerade of his wife’s funeral. To this coup de théâtre another is added, intensifying the grotesquerie: Savina arrives all the way from London. She has returned to her husband, whom she loves and without whom, she confesses to him, she cannot go on living—it would be better to die. Paolo tries to reject her, but, by the end of act 2, he asks her to wait for him in their former bedroom while he attends to her “funeral.” Although Paolo loves his wife and, at the beginning of the act, declares that “men should have more courage, they should cast off the conventionalities which in their pride and vanity they have erected. They should forget all the lies they have uttered, so that finally they can be honest and sincere with themselves,” he is not prepared to renounce entirely the role of the implacable husband.

In act 3, on the day after the funeral, Paolo still resists: “The situation is always the same.” Savina goads him: “It is only for us to change it. . . . What do all those people matter to you? Why do you still think of subordinating your feelings, your life, your happiness to them?” He is not convinced: “But our life is not made up of ourselves alone.” Savina counters by suggesting that in order to become his authentic self, he must throw away his mask and be willing to risk the ridicule of the others: “Above all, we must be ourselves.”

Later, while insincere and ceremonious friends are pretending sorrow for the presumedly dead Savina, the live Savina is recognized by Luciano, her former lover, for whom she now feels only contempt. In order to avoid jail for the simulation of a crime, Paolo must run away; he does not want to pay the price for reentering a society in which he does not believe: “I have no longer the slightest desire to render an account of my life to anyone, neither to society, nor to my friends, nor to the law, nor to anyone; I have had enough of it, I want to become. . . .” Here, at the end of the play, Chiarelli adds a last macabre touch: Paolo cannot finish his sentence; he is silenced by “the solemn and measured notes of Chopin’s Funeral March” accompanying the funeral procession as it slowly passes by. Is Chiarelli suggesting that Paolo will be able to reenter society only as corpse? Or that only corpses—masks—belong to it? Or that the only thing in life that is worthwhile is the fleeting moment of a kiss, the kiss Paolo gives Savina after the interrupted sentence and just before the curtain falls?

Although some critics claim that the play ends optimistically, it ends neither optimistically nor pessimistically; it ends grotesquely. Seriousness and comedy are so densely and tensely intertwined that the reader and spectator are not able to react in a simple and clear way. Chiarelli himself, who like many authors annotated his own text, stated through Cirillo, his mouthpiece character: “In life next to the most grotesque buffoonery burns the most terrible tragedy; the grin of the most obscene mask covers the most searing passions!”

The mixture of the tragic and the comic in The Mask and the Face is well balanced; nowhere does one cancel the other. The audience’s interest is always sustained at that thin line that divides tears and laughter. For this reason, the play is difficult to perform, requiring the actors not to identify with the characters; the recitation should be stylized in both the serious and comic lines. That the audience is to identify with neither the serious nor the comic is emphasized by the device of inserting into the play a character who functions as the author’s mouthpiece, a device used by all the playwrights of the Theater of the Grotesque. This technique has the effect of continually distancing the audience, preventing it from becoming involved in the emotional content of the action. It was the forerunner of Bertolt Brecht’s alienation effect in his epic theater.

Luigi Pirandello

It is perhaps too daring, if not simply wrong, to call Chiarelli, as some critics do, Pirandello ’s spiritual father; nevertheless, it is almost obligatory, when speaking of the Theater of the Grotesque, to consider as well the theater of the great Sicilian, who judged Chiarelli’s play a “transcendental farce.” In the same year in which The Mask and the Face premiered, Pirandello wrote Pensaci, Giacomino! (pr. 1916), and in the following year Il berretto a sonagli (pr. 1917; Caps and Bells, 1957) and Il piacere dell’onestà (pr. 1917; The Pleasure of Honesty, 1923) were premiered. These plays share some concerns and some devices of the Theater of the Grotesque: All three deal with the conflict between the individual and deadening social duties; the point of reference of the plays is the triangle of husband-wife-lover, and the author inserts himself in the lines of the play; the characters must shed their imposed or self-imposed masks in order to discover their faces. Although Chiarelli and the other playwrights of the new mode always dealt with a struggle against society in the belief that a face—a real self—did, after all, exist, Pirandello took a different route, his interests not aimed at the confrontation between the individual and society but at the division in the individual himself. In Pirandello’s mature vision, there are not necessarily faces under the masks but simply “naked masks”—the title he gave to his entire theatrical œuvre. In fact, he suggests that there is no self. In the works of Chiarelli and the other new Italian dramatists, humankind confronts human emptiness and social disorder; in Pirandello, humankind confronts sheer chaos and void.

Chimere and La morte degli amanti

Chiarelli composed four other plays which follow closely the spirit of the new Theater of the Grotesque, but he never again achieved that felicitous moment of inspiration, that equilibrium of opposites that enlivened his original and successful drama. These also deal with the interplay of mask and face. Chimere (chimeras) and La morte degli amanti (the lovers’ death) present the usual triangle, but while Paolo and Savina, in their epiphany, come to know a self nobler than a mask, the protagonists of these two plays undergo degradation. Claudio and Marina, the couple in Chimere, discover that the ideals of virtue and honor by which they thought they were living are only chimeras. La morte degli amanti is a caricature of romantic love and death. The lovers, whose operatic names are Alfredo and Eleonora, want to kill themselves to give a grandiose ending to their grand passion, now that her husband knows. When the husband arrives at the suicide scene, all ends in ridicule: The wife goes back to him and the lover finds someone else to love.

La scala di seta

La scala di seta (the silken ladder) depicts moral corruption. The mask is represented by the superficial and silly Désiré, a dancer who climbs the “silken ladder” of success. He marries the wealthy daughter of a minister of the government and, entering politics himself, also becomes a minister. His gentle and honest antagonist Roberto is a failure.

Money, Money!

Money, Money! is a better comedy, second only to The Mask and the Face. Count Gerardo, back from the United States without an American fortune, confides to his friend Scaramanzia, who is accompanying him, that he is thinking of suicide. Scaramanzia is able to make people believe the count is a millionaire and, by means of clever trickery, makes a real fortune for him. Thus, appearance becomes reality.

Scaramanzia

Chiarelli wrote in other dramatic modes, from farcical to symbolic. Perhaps reminded of past success, he entitled a one-act play Scaramanzia, but the former trickster is now a pathetic hunchback who secretly and hopelessly writes love letters to beautiful Nuccia, signing them with the name of her handsome fiancé. She does not know that her beloved is in jail—he has told her that he is at the university. The ugly hunchback, who cannot bear to see Nuccia ruin her life for a criminal, kills him when he comes out of jail, then writes her a farewell letter, signing it, as he has signed the others, with her lover’s name.

Essere

Chiarelli’s last play, Essere, seems vaguely and strangely to recall Pirandello’s Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (pr., pb. 1921; Six Characters in Search of an Author, 1922). Six travelers at a station are eager and anxious to take a train for the capital; they are not human beings but ghostlike creatures—instincts, subconscious impulses—and they want to live. The stationmaster is the father of them all. Trains pass in vain—they cannot embark. Only a foolish common man was once able to escape. When he now comes back and tells the other six he is disillusioned by the experience of his life, they nevertheless retain their desire “to be.”

Bibliography

Berghaus, Günter. Italian Futurist Theatre, 1909-1944. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1998. A look at Italian theater during the time in which Chiarelli was active. Bibliography and index.

Vena, Michael. Italian Grotesque Theater. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 2001. Contains an introduction to and translation of Chiarelli’s The Mask and the Face, along with two other plays from the Italian grotesque theater. Bibliography and index.

Vena, Michael. “Luigi Chiarelli (1880-1947): Profile of a Playwright.” Connecticut Review 7 (1974): 59-63. A concise presentation of Chiarelli’s life and works.