Tonight We Improvise by Luigi Pirandello

First published:Questa sera si recita a soggetto, 1930 (English translation, 1932)

First produced: 1930, at the Neues Schauspielhaus, Koenigsberg, Germany

Type of plot: Surrealist

Time of work: The early twentieth century

Locale: Theater itself (framing play) and Sicily (inner play)

Principal Characters:

• Doctor Hinkfuss, the director-producer
• The old character Man, who plays Signor Palmiro La Croce in the inner play
• The character Woman, who plays Signora Ignazia, his wife
• The leading Lady, who plays Mommina, their daughter
• The leading Man, who plays Rico Verri, a Sicilian, a temporary officer in an aviation corps
• Three Actresses, who play Totina, Dorina, and Nenè, the other daughters of Signor and Signora La Croce
• Five Actors, who play young aviation officers attending the daughters

The Play

Tonight We Improvise begins with a lowering of the houselights, the sounds of a squabble behind the curtain, queries from actors planted in the audience, and at length the director’s entrance from the lobby. Doctor Hinkfuss, declaring that any play is its director’s scenic creation, which, with the help of the audience, brings life to the playwright’s art, explains that he will create tableaux in which the actors will enact impromptu Pirandello’s Sicilian story of “jealousy of the past.” The curtain, raised for the first act, reveals another curtain, from behind which the actors come, costumed, to oppose Hinkfuss’s introducing them as actors. Moving in and out of character, the actors provide the exposition: Signora Ignazia La Croce and her daughters, stuck in a traditional Sicilian town, shock the local people with their free, though innocent, pleasures of entertaining young aviation officers (one of whom, Verri, is himself a Sicilian) and of attending and singing melodramatic operas. The actors demand more script; the director demands more poses.

After a five-minute pause, Hinkfuss presents a religious procession of four monks, four young virgins, the Holy Family, and sundry rustics, who parade down the theater aisles into the church on the set of a Sicilian town. Religious music changes to jazz as the lights come up on the town’s cabaret, where customers surreptitiously put paper cuckold’s horns on Signor Palmiro La Croce’s hat as a joke upon the looseness of his household. They also taunt him because he is touched by the crying chanteuse, who reminds him of his daughter Mommina. Outside, the cabaret crowd meets “General Ignazia,” her daughters, and their officer beaux on the march to the theater. The cabaret tricksters tell Signora Ignazia that they respect her husband but have no respect for her; she calls them low-life ruffians, scoundrels, and wild beasts. Verri and the other officers defend the ladies. The director sends the Signora’s party offstage to reappear in a box in the theater audience. Meanwhile, he has a cinema screen and a phonograph set up on the stage. The film, accompanied by recorded music, is the end of the first act of an “old Italian melodrama.” The talkative entrance of the tardy La Croce party causes a disturbance, and the audience and the party exchange insults. When the acts of the melodrama and of Tonight We Improvise end simultaneously, Doctor Hinkfuss explains that the Signora’s party will take intermission in the lobby while he and the stage crew erect the set of an airfield on the open stage.

Act 2 consists of the conversations of the members of Signora Ignazia’s party staged synchronously in different parts of the lobby where the audience of Tonight We Improvise takes its intermission. Totina and Nenè urge their escorts to take them flying over the town so that they can spit on it. Nardi tells Dorina of her father’s foolish devotion to the drunken, weeping cabaret singer, and they tell Totina’s group the news. At one side of the lobby, Verri tells Mommina, the most serious sister, that her family’s notoriety, specifically her sisters’ permissive behavior with the other officers, distresses him. In the guise of protecting her reputation, Verri criticizes Mommina’s past behavior as well. Meanwhile, Signora Ignazia, flanked by officers Pometti and Mangini, teases them to give Sicilians lessons in mainland manners but ends by seriously stating that she fears the malicious intent underlying the townspeople’s insults. The several characters converge and leave the lobby.

Back in the auditorium, the director has set up the scenery for the aviation field. After giving directions for its lighting, he then decides to cut the scene to have been played there. In an argument with a poet from the orchestra chairs, Hinkfuss insists that poets cannot supply adequate nourishment for the theater, for theater is not merely art, it is life, a momentary “miracle of form in motion.” To illustrate, he drops the curtain, brings the houselights up, and asks the returning audience for reports on the conversations in the lobby. The leading man sticks his head out from the curtain to protest a spectator’s account of Verri, piano music is heard behind the curtain, and Hinkfuss calls for act 3.

Onstage, in the La Croce drawing room after the melodrama, the couples dance. Signora Ignazia, suffering a toothache, prays before the Madonna. Interrupted by the entrance of Totina masquerading in an officer’s uniform, the Signora abandons her ritual to direct an impromptu performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Il trovatore (1853). Verri orders the revelers out of the house and, as the leading man, criticizes the leading lady for improvising a defense of the revelry. Amid an altercation among the actors and Hinkfuss, the character man protests that no one has given the cue for his entrance and death. Asserting that he cannot perform the death scene, he nevertheless dies as Signor Palmiro, stabbed at the cabaret. Hinkfuss praises the scene, orders a scene of mourning, explains that the stabbing was his idea, not the playwright’s, and contrasts his conception of the characters and action with those of the actors, who at this point refuse to go on with the play unless the spectacle-making director leaves them alone. They force him out of the theater and take up the action some ten years after the father’s death, by which time Totina has become a successful opera singer and Mommina has married the jealous Verri, who has virtually imprisoned her.

While the actresses dress and make up the leading lady in center stage, the stagehands put up three walls around her to indicate Mommina’s confinement. As the character woman narrates, the leading lady and man move into their parts. Verri the husband abuses Mommina for even having memories of her past life. She protests that she never approved of her family’s ways. From the dark side of the walls Signora Ignazia and the sisters defend themselves. Learning that Totina is singing Il trovatore that night in town, Mommina calls her children, tells them for the first time of her early life, and dies while singing for them the Il trovatore gypsy scene that she was singing when her father died. Verri and the family enter to find Mommina, and perhaps the leading lady as well, dead. Hinkfuss breaks the tension by announcing that he has been managing the lights.

Dramatic Devices

Tonight We Improvise is a paradigmatic theatricalist play. Even before the audience buys its tickets, Pirandello instructed, the first theatricalist device should have begun its work on them: The comedy was to be advertised as an evening of pure improvisation by the actual actors, listed by name, under the management of Doctor Hinkfuss. No author was to be identified. However, every line, every ad-lib, every setting, every lighting effect, every pageant, every tableau is carefully scripted by the author to present the theatricalist vision of multifaceted reality.

A theatricalist playwright can present this vision of all the world as stage by means of any and all manner of stagecraft as long as the level of reality is occasionally jarred. In this play Pirandello does use all. On the naked stage, Hinkfuss constructs a set; the realism of the La Croces’ middle-class drawing room is broken both by impressionistic lighting and by the actors’ occasionally appearing as themselves; the perspective painting of the Sicilian village is backlighted to show the interior of the cabaret; a film represents the live play that the La Croces attend; the religious procession to the village church reenacts pageantry in everyday life and counterpoints the La Croces’ procession to the theater; a symbolist setting implies Mommina’s confinement. Whatever the stagecraft, the milieu is always the stage.

As with stagecraft, so also with plot: The theatricalist can use any sort of plot, and Pirandello does so. The La Croce story can be analyzed according to the traditional exposition-complication-resolution. The conflict between the actors and the director is, in the manner of “cerebral theater” and the thesis play, a passionate series of debates, which also includes the director’s lengthy lecture on the nature of art. The positions in the debate are illustrated both by the La Croces’ story and the actors’ and the director’s participation in the presentation of it. The leitmotif of Italian opera and Sicilian melodrama, and particularly of Il trovatore, creates musical organization: statement-counterstatement-restatement. Also, there is a continuous interweaving of plays within the play.

At least three planes of actuality are apparent in the characters in Tonight We Improvise: the characters in the story of the La Croces, the actors as enactments of these characters, and the actors as actors and director. In addition, there are the spectator-characters in the audience. The spectator-characters are stereotypes. All the actors and the characters in the La Croce story, in fact, are based on stock types. The leading man and leading lady, for instance, are opinionated, competitive, and “dramatic”; Verri becomes the macho domineering husband of a Griselda-like Mommina. Doctor Hinkfuss is described in individualizing detail: a big-headed “Tom Thumb of a man” with tiny fingers “as white and as fuzzy as little caterpillars.” Hinkfuss is undoubtedly Pirandello’s raisonneur in his lecture about the relationship of art and life; nevertheless, his appearance might well be an allegorical expression of the playwright’s criticism of some directors’ egotistic, artificial, and excessive staging practices. However, Pirandello declared that he abjured abstract allegory. Though he conveys many of his messages symbolically in Tonight We Improvise, he does it through characters and actors made real by their thought and passion.

Critical Context

Every play of Pirandello, even the folk plays first performed in 1913 and 1916, is about the paradoxical nature of reality and about living as acting. These themes and the suffering and compassion that are both their cause and result he presented perhaps most movingly in Così è (se vi pare) (pr. 1917; It Is So! [If You Think So], 1952). Art as an imperfect reflection of life, the values of art, the relationships of the artist to art and life, and the need for synthesis of the two were also lifelong subjects of Pirandello’s thought and his plays.

In the period from 1921 to 1928, Pirandello wrote three plays particularly concerned with the relationship of theater to life; these plays made use of the theater itself as setting and of characters in the roles of real-life people and of actors. The first of these, Pirandello’s most widely known play, Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (pr., pb. 1921; Six Characters in Search of an Author, 1922), treats the impossibility of capturing spontaneous life in art and also the reality and independence of life created by the imagination. Produced in 1922, Enrico IV (Henry IV, 1923), considered by many Pirandello’s finest play, shows both the beauty and the tragedy of real life confined in the repeatable eternity of art.

In the second of his three theater plays, Ciascuno a suo modo (pr., pb. 1924; Each in His Own Way, 1924), Pirandello presents a drame à clef surrounded by a critical audience that includes the people whose personal tragedy the playwright has made into his play. The themes of this play are that art ought to inspire argument, that art can be a “mirror that has somehow gone crazy,” and that both art and role-playing can idealize or degrade life.

In Tonight We Improvise, written in 1928, the actors, and hence Pirandello, seem to achieve a synthesis of life and art. Nevertheless, in 1930, when it was produced in Germany, where Pirandello had had considerable success, the audience protested its confusion and theatricality. One critic observed with pleasure that the play had at last brought an end to the Pirandello manner. Others have said, however, that Tonight We Improvise rounds out what Pirandello began in Six Characters in Search of an Author, that in the three theater plays Pirandello pushed drama outside its limits and treated reality on its various fragmentary levels as did other major twentieth century artists from Franz Kafka to Edward Albee. Indeed, Pirandello has been one of the most influential modern dramatists.

Sources for Further Study

Bassanese, Fiora A. Understanding Luigi Pirandello. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997.

Biasin, Gian-Paolo, and Manuela Gieri, eds. Luigi Pirandello: Contemporary Perspectives. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.

Brustein, Robert. “Pirandello’s Drama of Revolt.” In The Theatre of Revolt. Boston: Little, Brown, 1962.

Caesar, Ann H. Characters and Authors in Luigi Pirandello. Hyattsville, Md.: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Giudice, Gaspare. Pirandello: A Biography. Translated by Alastair Hamilton. London: Oxford University Press, 1975.

Matthaei, Renate. Luigi Pirandello. Translated by Simon and Erika Young. New York: F. Ungar, 1973.

Oliver, Roger W. Dreams of Passion: The Theater of Luigi Pirandello. New York: New York University Press, 1979.

Paolucci, Anne. Pirandello’s Theater: The Recovery of the Modern Stage for Dramatic Art. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974.

Sinicropi, Giovanni. “The Later Phase: Toward Myth.” In Pirandello: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Glauco Cambon. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967.