Pirandello and Other Plays (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780573709425)

This collection of seven darkly funny and mysterious plays includes the long one act Pirandello, in which the great Italian playwright, writing alone on the stage of his theatre late at night, is interrupted by the Italian dictator Mussolini, who wants him to write the authorized biographical play of the dictator's life, Pirandello's jealous wife, who believes Pirandello is sleeping with every woman in sight, including his daughter, and an increasingly disturbing group of characters who may or may not be real, leading Pirandello to question the relationship between his theories about the malleable nature of reality to the rise of Fascism and Fascist propaganda; The Recollection Of Green Rain, which tells the mostly true story of two green children found wandering near an English village, who spoke an unknown language and insisted they were from a mysterious green underground kingdom; Pinocchio, in which Gloria's blind date turns out to be an angry puppet with a rather unsettling story to tell; Rusalka, in which a police officer investigating the disappearance of a young girl tries to make sense out of the increasingly odd stories her best friend tells about her; Humpty Dumpty, in which an enormous egg with very bad hair sits on top of a wall and talks about making Wonderland great again; Brimstone Run, in which a family legacy of betrayal and tragedy is played out at the town dump; and Nictzin Dyalhis, in which a legendary, reclusive writer of weird tales is haunted by a sea goddess he may or may not have invented. In each of these plays, in one way or another, compelling characters find themselves lost in a labyrinthine twilight zone of dream variations which combine the Gothic, the surreal and the absurd.

Don Nigro is among the most frequently published and widely produced playwrights in the world and has continued to build a deeply interrelated and diverse body of dramatic literature, employing a wide variety of dramatic conventions and styles of presentation. He has written monologues and epics, spare realistic dramas and surreal homicidal puppet farces, plays with music and verse plays. He continues to build the long cycle of Pendragon County plays, which traces the history of America through the lives of several related east Ohio families from the eighteenth century to the present, and features many characters whose lives are traced from youth through middle age to old age in a number of plays that may be presented in a variety of combinations.