{"product_id":"9781575252315","title":"Luigi Pirandello: Three Major Plays","description":"  Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936), Sicilian by birth, said of himself \"I am the  son of Chaos,\" a pun on the name of the town of his birth, to be sure, but  not a far cry from the reality of his life and work. An essayist, novelist,  and short-story writer, he eventually took up playwriting and quite simply  became the founder of modern drama as we know it, a fact that brought him  the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934. His dramatic work greatly  influenced such movements as surrealism and the absurdist theater of the  post-war period. Pirandello's chief concern as a dramatist is the nature of  truth and delusion and the importance of dreams. Fact for him was  unverifiable because each character, like each living individual, has a  unique, supjective, vision of truth. His major obsession is the battle  between illusion and reality and the inability to distinguish between them.  The three plays in this volume are considered his masterpieces and they are  seen constantly on the stages of the world. Six Characters in Search of an  Author deals with a family of six who show up at a theater rehearsal asking  that someone validate them by utilizing their lives in a play. Right You  Are (If You Think So) is about the morbid curiosity of a town's population  to discover the \"truth\" about the Ponza family, a task they find to be  frustratingly impossible. Henry IV concerns the nature of reality and  delusion in the mind of a man who may be a king, but then again, maybe not.  Pirandello is as current and topical today as he was when he wrote, and  almost every theater innovation in playwriting that has come after him owes  its existence to his vision of the impossibility of knowing anything for  certain. These distinguished new translations by Carl R. Mueller are lucid  and performable and renew Pirandello's legacy in English for a new  generation.   ","brand":"Smith \u0026 Kraus, Inc.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47053723762928,"sku":"9781575252315","price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781575252315_p0.jpg?v=1763797293","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781575252315","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}