A group of curious members of the community into which the trio has recently moved is determined to discover the truth and, in a series of revelations, is led to believe first Signor Ponza and then Signora Frola.

The dramatic question propelling the play’s action involves the identity of Signora Ponza, the woman whom Signor Ponza claims is his second wife and Signora Frola claims is her daughter. Right You Are (If You Think So), also known as It Is So! (If You Think So), is at once a traditional melodrama and a clever investigation into the nature of truth. Rather, the very nature of theater ensures that this theme will be forever fresh in the hands of a playwright who, like Pirandello, has the audacity to make it new. In part this is a tribute to his creative imagination, but it also suggests that this theme is not merely one among others, one that-as some critics have charged-has been worn out through overuse. The relationship between reality and illusion provided Pirandello with a seemingly inexhaustible fund of dramatic material. For Pirandello, character creation involves a lessthan- subtle but endlessly clever interplay among the psychological, the social, and the theatrical, which consistently reiterates the playwright’s preoccupation with the multiple facets of reality and illusion. The typical Pirandellian character-Signora Ponza in Right You Are (If You Think So), for example, or Leone in The Rules of the Game-presents himself through both “mask” and “face,” a dichotomy that is more generally reflected in the playwright’s treatment of theater as both illusory and real.

In his inquiry into the nature of truth, Pirandello constructs and demolishes layers of illusion, probing the multiple perceptions and identities of his characters to reveal yet conceal the “naked mask.” In his fascination with his own power as artist-creator, he dramatizes the dialectic between the fluid, spontaneous, sprawling nature of life and the fixed, predictable, and contained nature of art. In Each in His Own Way, Luigi Pirandello (28 June 1867 – 10 December 1936) playfully has one of his characters ask another to justify his incessant “harping on this illusion and reality string.” So persistent is Pirandello’s dramatic examination of the multiplicity of personality, the nature of truth, and the interplay between life and art that the term “Pirandellian” has become synonymous with the complexities that result from any attempt to define the fluid line between what is illusory and what is real.

Author pirandello