Allen feels strongly about protecting the honesty and humanism behind Neo-Futurism. He equates the illusion of the fourth wall, a kind of dishonesty associated with traditional theater, with emotional deception he has observed in everyday life. “I felt like [actors on the traditional stage] were lying to me, treating me the same way people in my community were treating me... People had this performative sheen going on to express themselves as happy people, and yet my high school had one of the highest suicide rates in the country. It was a reaction to people not being emotionally honest with each other, and that was destroying lives. And I saw that being reflected in the theatrical conventions of fourth-wall theater.”
USE YOUR ILLUSION
At first, Pirandello and the Neo-Futurists seem diametrically opposed in their approaches to theater. Pirandello builds a “hall of mirrors,” according to Puchner, which is precisely the kind of illusion that the Neo-Futurists seek to shatter. Yet they both recognize the inherent falsehood of illusionistic drama, often pointed out by skeptical philosophers, and push theater to its limits to investigate the possibility of greater honesty.
Pirandello uses meta-theater to draw out drama’s conventionalized lies and “poses the question that theater maybe could be something other than what it is – something closer to life,” says Ortiz. Puchner takes a slightly different stance on Pirandello’s mission. “He admits that the theater is an art, and this means artificial, but he does not want to get rid of this feature,” he writes.
The Neo-Futurists take Pirandello’s investigations one step further. Instead of reflecting on the condition of theater, they tear the veil down entirely, creating a new type of performance that is totally real. “If the whole goal of the art form is human connection, then I’m going to have to be myself,” says Allen. “Anything that would create artifice would then also tarnish that connection between audience and performer. It becomes an aesthetic about wiping away any sense of pretending.”
Both also manage to incorporate a kind of philosophy – “Six Characters” in its content, the Neo-Futurists in their mission – without being entirely derisive of action, which Puchner calls one of the main pitfalls of philosophical theater. Neo-Futurism takes a philosophical approach to justify an entirely action-based form, while Pirandello, Puchner claims, uses meta-theater to “turn the theater itself into an occasion for action”—for example, in the interactions between actors and the six characters.
Thus, not only do Neo-Futurism and Pirandello undermine the idea that theater’s deceitful nature is incompatible with philosophy, they also reject suggestions that philosophy’s pedagogy may have no place in theater—bringing the two together into a harmony of form which both entertains and challenges their audiences.
—Staff writer Daniel K. Lakhdhir can be reached at daniel.lakhdhir@college.harvard.edu.