Bait and Hook

By T.E.K.

NAKED

by Luigi Pirandello

Off-Broadway's Roundabout Theater is a place where neglected plays of classic playwrights come out of hiding. The current season, the Roundabout's twelfth, began with a stylish production of Shaw's You Never Can Tell, a playful skirmish between the sexes that is all jests and no scars. With Naked, the company shifts to the somber philosophical terrain of a 1922 work by Pirandello.

In Pirandello's plays, the bait of appearance masks the hook of reality, but the mysterious fish of life is never caught.

As Pirandello saw it, man is involved in the futile illusion and the obsessive quest of trying to catch and know his unknow able self. Dramatically, this quest takes the form of a secret to be ferreted out.

In Naked, the secret seems to lie with a disconsolate governess (Fran Brill). A child in her care has dropped to its death from a terrace. As a result she loses her job and her fiance, and attempts suicide.

A "human interest" newspaper account of her plight brings other characters scur rying. An aging writer (Larkin Ford) thinks the governess's story might make a good plot for his next novel. Her ex-fiance (Lucien Zabielski) throws himself at her feet in the belief that she tried to commit suicide out of love for him. Her former employer (Gordon Gould), the fa ther of the dead child, turns out to have been her adulterous lover. Yet, in seek ing the truth each character continues to live out a lie. Why? The governess offers an answer in a gently despairing voice:

"It's just that we all want to make a good impression. The more horrible we are, the more beautiful we want to be."

Brill is affecting as the governess, Gould radiates sensual magnetism as her employer lover, and Zabielski is ardent and elegant as the ex-fiance. But the dry winy brilliance of Pirandello dominates the evening. He carved out the themes of loneliness, absurdity and alienation, and in the 41 years since his death, serious modern drama has become a realm of metaphysical dread of which he felt the first tormented shudder.

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