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November 21, 2004
Play Explores Mental Illness
For almost 20 years, the Fells Point Corner Theater has been one of the area’s best community theaters. Coming up weekends October 29 to November 28 is a play dealing with mental illness from the perspective of the relationship between illusion and reality, Luigi Pirandello’s Enrico IV, in a new version by Tom Stoppard.
According to Barbara Migeon, the Corner Theater’s dramaturge, “Pirandello wrote Enrico IV in 1922, [influenced] by his wife’s long [mental] illness… Although she was paranoid, jealous, and even violent, he kept her at home 15 years, and was the major target of her venom. He had always been interested in the problem of identity—and how difficult it is to discover the truth about who we are—but his wife’s illness led him to explore the themes of madness, isolation, and the blurred space between illusion and reality.”
The central character in the play lives out a delusion, set in modern times, that he is an eleventh century German king who engaged in a battle against the pope. He can get others to participate in his delusion because he is a very rich Count.
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