Pirandello Three Plays: The Rules of the Game; Six Characters in Search of an Author; Henry IV

Piandello ranks with Brecht and Beckett as one of the foremost dramatic innovators of this century. The three plays in this volume, considered his masterpieces, are products of his theatrical obsession with the colliding of illusion and reality. Here is the absurdity of human life and its conventions in The Rules of the Game (1918); the uncertain boundary between sanity and insanity in Henry IV (1922); and in Six Characters (1921), his best known play, there is a fascinating variation on the theme of Life versus Art.

Led by an introduction to Pirandello’s life and work by John Linstrum, all three plays appear in recent, eminently stageable translations.