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Pirandello’s Search for Truth is Timeless

by Kelly Monaghan

IWhether by design or happenstance, the National Actors Theatre, in residence at Pace University, has been picking plays that resonate uncannily with issues in the national zeitgeist. The latest example is Luigi Pirandello’s “Right You Are,” whose full title, “Right You Are, If You Think You Are,” neatly encapsulates the playwright’s philosophical point.

The play asks the intriguing question: Can you really believe that a person is telling you the truth, even when the person might happen to be a well-respected public official? And just what is “truth” anyway? Can it ever be ascertained? And does it really matter?

In Pirandello’s version, written in 1917 set in provinical Italy, the issue is nothing so grand as reasons for going to war, but the more mundane concerns of small town gossip. Signor Ponza has come to town, from a city wiped out by an earthquake, and has gotten a job as a government functionary. The ladies of the town are all abuzz because he has ensconced his mother-in-law, Signora Frola, in a nice apartment in the center of town, while he lives on the outskirts in a fifth-floor walkup that his mother-in-law never enters and from which his wife never emerges.

All this strikes the ever so well-meaning ladies as a trifle odd and they soon get the menfolk to agree. The truth, everyone agrees, must be uncovered. Everyone, that is, except the curmudgeonly Signor Laudisi (Tony Randall), a wise elder statesman of sorts, who predicts from the get go that they will never figure it out.

Right You Are has long since lost its claim to intellectual innovation. The notion of relativism, even if under attack from some quarters, is so well ingrained in our popular culture that it takes something of an act of the imagination to remind ourselves how fresh and intriguing the play must have seemed back in the 1920s when, along with Six Characters in Search of an Author, it helped make Pirandello’s international reputation. Still, it remains an enjoyable epistemological parlor game of a play, albeit one that needs a deft production to help it rise above the level of an interesting period piece.

Director Fabrizio Melano mounts opera at the Met and he brings an operatic sensibility to the production. Designer James Noone has contributed a lavishly scaled black and white marble modernist flat with mock-heroic Fascist overtones. Against this opulent backdrop Melano arranges his cast rather stiffly, as if they were opera stars not used to moving about much. It’s an approach that tends to emphasize the talkiness of the play and the formality of the translation. But Melano keeps the pacing lively and brings the play in breezily at something under two hours.

As for the acting, it’s the old pros in this cast who make a visit to Right You Are so rewarding. Maria Tucci is terrific as Signora Frola. One of the characters says she believes Signora Frola’s version of events because she’s “such a nice old lady,” and Tucci’s performance makes you understand why.

Tony Randall, who spends much of the play sitting silently on the sidelines, earns his star’s curtain call with a deftly droll performance that turns even the occasional flubbed line to his advantage. You can see here echoes of Randall’s sardonic organization man persona that added zing to so many facile films of the 1950s and 1960s. Muted by age and experience, today it bespeaks the gentle wisdom of a man who has paused along life’s journey to take his own measure and learned to live with it.

“Right You Are” at the Schimmel Center for the Arts, Spruce St., bet. Park Row and Gold. 12/7–21. 212-239-6200. Tue–Sat, 8 pm; Sat–Sun, 3 pm. $55; students, $15.