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watching italian comedy The Milwaukee Rep has yet to impress me this season and I am hoping that that will change soon. I'm not saying that I completely disliked the play that I saw tonight, but it was a comedy and I didn't laugh. At most I may have smirked here and there. For me what caused the humor failure was that fact that the playwright Luigi Pirandello tried to wrap a comedy around a philosophical idea and that is a hard pill to swallow. The lead character starts off the play by offering the thought that reality is merely how a person perceives it and that no two people see something in exactly the same way. He then goes on to say that everything is subjective and no one can truly prove what they see as being the absolute truth. Now this makes for some interesting pondering, but not a lot of laughs. What I did like about the play was the set. A backdrop of mirrors was very interesting and tied into the ida of reality not being something entirely clear and or fixed. It can and does take on a new appearance with a change in location or a mere tilt of the head. I also thought that the dress that the Dina character wore was very elegant. I would loved to have been able to hold her in my arms. She looked like a woman who needed to be swept across a dance floor or escorted into a carriage. Finally I have to say that Torrey Hanson did the best that he could with the material he had at hand. |