|
Marta Abba, the Maestro's Muse |
||
 |
   |
  |
 |
 |
  |
|
After their meeting and for the rest of his life, Marta Abba was the stimulus to Pirandello’s creativity. She not only inspired him; she also gave him confidence in his work. Marta was the true actress for whom he had been waiting after his earlier disappointment with Eleonora Duse. The great Duse was already old by the time Pirandello became a famous playwright. He had hoped for years to have her perform one of his leading roles, with no success. In a theatre dominated by the glamorous, overly dramatic performances of Sarah Bernhardt, Duse stood out with her understated, controlled acting. Duse’s style of performance helped Pirandello to rectify and finally change his early negative views of actors as falsifiers, betrayers of the work of art. If a brief detour in Pirandello’s personal life can be allowed, and more precisely into his own home, we find on his desk his most beloved portrait of Marta. It is the portrait of a she-wolf- a face unrecognizable compared to her face with the line of her naked shoulders barely visible. In it Marta looks straight at the viewer, who is imagined in a slightly higher position. In short, she looks up a little. She could be coming out of a bathtub or getting up from a bed. Her eyes in this picture bring to mind the magnetic power of Laura’s gave in L’innesto (The Grafting) – the petrifying eyes of a Medusa, but also the hypnotizing eyes of Medea. Marta’s mouth is half open in a sensuous and provoking smile that shows her upper teeth between heavily painted lips – lips that seem ready to swallow up the viewer. She expresses sensuality and lust- emotions so uncommon to the austere and enigmatic features of the great actress. Was she the sexual creature whom the playwright must have desired terribly and whose reality, at the same time, he must have forbidden himself to acknowledge, except in a photograph or on stage. The dream-nightmare of seeing that Marta come out of the frame must have obsessed Pirandello for a long time, for at end of his life it materialized in the disturbing short story “Effetti di un sogno interrotto” (Effects of an Interrupted Dream). With Marta Abba’s entrance into his life Pirandello was at last able to develop, focus, and galvanize his various thoughts on woman. The “daughter of the air,” “the winged spirit,” had in her soul the fleeting essence of life itself. It was not by chance that Marta entered Pirandello’s world with the role of Dea, the protagonist of Massimo Bontempelli’s Nostra Dea, which premiered at the Odescalchi theater in Rome on April 22, 1925. Pirandello was then the director of the Company of Teatro d’Arte, and he had hired her on Bontempelli’s advice alone as prima attice, without having seen her. “She was announced as the dawn [of the Italian theater].” Nostra Dea was a great success. “The actress was particularly suited to the multiform interpretation of the various states of mind of the main character. There was a fire, and instinct and a mutability, a suffering that made her a perfect interpreter of Pirandello’s world.” For a year and a half Pirandello and Marta were together in successive theatrical seasons in Italy as well as England, France, Switzerland, Germany, and South America. Besides plays by Pirandello and Bontempelli, the repertoire included works by leading European playwrights such as Ibsen, Schnitzler, and Evreinov. During their tournee in Germany Pirandello wrote his first drama for Marta, Diana and Tuda. Marta Abba was to be the ideal interpreter of this message. Her acting style was passionate, intense, and at the same time extremely mobile, capable of sudden changes of humor; the perfect embodiment of the multiplicity and variability of human essence. After only a year of working together, the collaboration between the prima attrice and the Maestro had become intense and exclusive. She exemplified a new type of acting, natural and spontaneous, completely devoid of artistry and artificiality- Marta represented life, natural and free. From the moment Marta entered Pirandello’s life, his creativity displayed more openly its androgynous nature. With woman become the generating force of his plays and plots, all the characters acquire a new dimension of humanity, lose the cold cerebralism of their famous male ancestors, and, having put down the mask of logic, show humbly and desperately their weaknesses, repressions, contradictions. Life takes the stage. Pirandello lived for the theatre and in the theatre. Even after all the actors had left, he would stay there talking with technicians and electricians. He himself became one with his characters and expected the same from his actors. |
||
