TEHRAN-The play “The License” written by Italian dramatist Luigi Pirandello and directed by Mohammad Shabdar is on stage at Da Theater House in Tehran.

The one-act comedy is about a fight between Chiàrchiaro, who is believed to be jinxed, and Judge D’Andrea’s son. 

“The License” was first published in a newspaper in 1911 and then collected in the volume “The Trap” in 1915. It was added to the third Collection of Pirandello’s “Stories for a Year” in 1922.

The story touches on a series of familiar Pirandellian tropes and is a typical example of the author’s practice of umorismo (his specific theory of humor). The legal setting and framework speak to Pirandello’s realist interest in representing the actual ways in which law and social custom combine to limit or define the horizons of life for individuals, who are subject to the law and to convention in ways that can be stultifying. 

At the same time, the existential threat posed by legal or social judgment is a recurrent theme in Pirandello’s work, one that aligns him with the writers of the grotesque theater movement of the 1910s and with broader modernist responses to the strictures of conventional life. 

In this story, the seemingly ridiculous image of Rosario Chiàrchiaro, who appears before Judge D’Andrea in a kind of homemade costume to make him look like what local superstition would define as a jinx, gives way to a sad revelation of the serious side of his comical self-presentation. 

This combination of tragic and comic elements is typical of Pirandellian humor and also an example of Pirandello’s compassionate interest in the suffering and pain of his characters, and of people in modern society more generally. 

Pirandello (1867–1936) was also a dramatist, novelist, poet, and short story writer whose greatest contributions were his plays. He was awarded the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature for “his almost magical power to turn psychological analysis into good theatre.”

His works include novels, hundreds of short stories, and about 40 plays, some of which are written in Sicilian. Pirandello's tragic farces are often seen as forerunners of the Theatre of the Absurd.

Razieh Bahrami, Mahbod Feizi, Omid Akbarzadeh, Hossein Behzad, Ali Rouzegar, Elham Gholami, Zahra Pashapour, Sadra Isapour, and Fatemeh Hosseinabadi perform in “The License”.

The play will run through December 22 at Da Theater House, located at No. 5, 1st Dead-end, Khark St., Enqelab St.

SS/SAB