The first Call for Pirandellian Dramaturgies was published at the beginning of 2021 on the Pirandello Society of America’s website, Playbill, and NYC Playwrights. Out of over thirty submissions from American and European dramatists, three plays were selected for publication because they creatively engaged with the Pirandellian canon, proposed compelling stage action for our times, and directly referenced Six Characters in Search of an Author, the main theme of the PSA special issue for 2020/2021.

Unanimously, the editors’ top choice was Diane Rao Harman’s The Eternal Moment ⌗3RR, which envisions two “eternal” female characters from Six Characters battling by proxy, as they show up at the apartments of competing Wikipedia editors and coax them to edit and re-edit information about Madame Pace’s questionable fashion atelier. In times when our life has gone digital to an unprecedented extent, this play shows one of the main conflicts in Pirandello’s play shift to the internet and reflects on the difficulty of holding on to a particular truth among a multiplicity of digital opinions.

Of the two runners up, Peter Filichia’s comical Restore Me, Please finds Jesse Berger – director of New York’s classical theatre company Red Bull Theatre – visited by an Angel/Agent who represents six characters expunged from classical plays but eager to be reintegrated. The characters stem from Ancient Greek, English, and Russian classics by Sophocles, Aristophanes, William Shakespeare, Anton Chekhov, Samuel Beckett, and J.M. Barrie, and the Angel succeeds in his endeavor once he offers to produce the new shows to a director economically stranded because of the pandemic.

Finally, Catalina Florina Florescu‘s Rehearsing Lines (a short play for stage, screen, Zoom, or audio) proposes a dialogue between two strangers at a bus stop that resembles the situation of The Man with the Flower in His Mouth and the need for meaningful human contact, while meditating on people’s search for illusions/characters at the theatre.

Stefano Boselli, PSA Theatre and Performance Editor