arguing that their reality, their drama is the genuine reality; the absolute reality of
form contrasted to the relative reality of the flux of life.
The characters are fixed, characters in a narrative that have never been written, the
creatures of an authors imagination who have escaped his control and who are not
interested in finishing their story.
So, the characters are in search of an author to finish their narrative and give their
lives the order and coherence of a definite work of art.
They long to be released from their purgatory where they are all entrapped .Their
desire is to re- enact the crucial scene of the meeting of the Step daughter and the
Father at Madame Paces brothel .Having a sexual interest in her, the Father suffers
disgrace and shame when he understands that she is his own stepdaughter.
They convince the director to stage their story and the actors are called to give their
interpretation of the individual scenes .That of course differs substantially from the
original version presented by the characters and further on , it differs from each one of
the characters own point of view.
According to Pirandello the characters should be presented as created realities,
unchanging constructs of the imagination and therefore more solidly real than the
actors with their fluid naturalness .They should wear masks to set them apart from the
actors and each mask should express the essential fundamental feeling of the
character. The Fathers mask should express remorse, the Stepdaughters revenge, the
Mothers sorrow and the Sons scorn.
The masked characters have a superior consciousness and are more dense, substantial
and continuous characters than the actors .They are bigger than life but exactly
because they are so intense and dramatic, they are experienced as dead. As if, art
creates meaning from the chaotic life but is also entrapped in its own state.
In comparison, the actors have the attributes of an unmediated and spontaneous life
but seem lesser than life; undefined and uninteresting individuals who are always in
search of a text to enact and become alive through it.
The moment of the theatrical enactment is the only moment they meet. The stage
becomes the zone where different realities meet.
For Pirandello and his ironic understanding of the human condition, the theatrical is
the fate of the human being, condemned to it by consciousness. Theatre is a mask that
imposes a constructed order on a chaotic reality as the individual creates an artificial
order to survive.
If the collision of life and theatre is a metaphor for an existential dilemma, then the
mask and the face are also on a collision course. It is not possible to live with the
mask and it is impossible to survive without it. The mask is a positive adaptation
because it provides form and coherence and creates an artificial pattern from the
chaos of life. It is also a negative because it suppresses the vitality of the human face
and is connected to the paralysis of self consciousness.
There is no possibility to achieve a union of opposites. Mask and face are in an
unresolvable opposition and character has become ontologically problematic.
For Marx the reduction of the full human potential to a mask is a direct result of
capitalism and its false perception of the artificial construct of the individuals social
role, as an absolute value. But for Marx the mask has a positive side both as a social
role created in reaction to others but also as a chosen means to project a personal
voice, a persona.
Brecht follows Marx in the analysis of the social aspects of human life in class
societies where corruption, poverty, misery and the ruthless exploitation of the
individual are everyday phenomena .He uses the mask as a social role which allows a
realization of personal aspirations and their integration with the social life of the
subject, into a whole personality.
In his play The Good Person from Szechwan the female prostitute Shen Teh is
disguised as her male cousin Shui Ta with the use of mask and costume.
Shen Teh is goodhearted, spontaneous, generous, compassionate and impulsive in her
desire to help others. But she is also politically, socially and emotionally nave and
easy to manipulate.
Shui Ta is a young gentleman, a cunning, cynical and opportunistic character .A
natural talent in the exploitation of others and the ability to increase his own
economy; a capitalist who succeeds in creating a tobacco industry from a small
tobacco shop. He displays a greater knowledge of the discriminations of the class
system than Shen Teh.
The female subject stages her alter ego as an act of desperation, reinforced by social
and emotional reasons and this new persona gives her the opportunity to act in both
roles .
In this double act the character unites and combines the two desires to continue being
altruistic and compassionate but also to create and sustain the economical
presuppositions for the future of her child to be born.
In moments of great emotional distress the identity of the male cousin is threatened as
the female breaks through the masculine mask. In these dramatic moments, when the
construction of the face/mask is breaking down, we see the mask of Shui Ta and we
hear the voice of Shen Teh.
Like in a multiple personality disorder in which a stronger character takes control to
protect more vulnerable parts of the self, Shui Ta threatens to permanently displace
Shen Teh.
At the end Shen Teh understands that without knowledge about the dialectics of class
and economics, to be good can do more harm than good .She becomes aware that her
goodness can not exist outside the domain of the society. Goodness is not a
metaphysical quality.
Neither identity is really the true Self. Shen Teh realizes that Shui Ta is a necessary
part of herself. Both are components of the Self, which is created by the dialectics
between the face and the mask. The masculine mask is antithetical to the feminine
face in the spatial dimension since they can not exist simultaneously, but they are
complementary in the temporal dimension as the one follows always after the other.
The social role, the masculine mask contributes to the evolution of a solid and whole
personality by imposing valid limits to the shapelessness of the subjectivity and the
chaos of the emotions of the feminine .The Good Person becomes able to function in
society. The mask sets to work a potential for growth.
Brecht arrives at a projected synthesis of the face and the mask and develops a
genuine dialectic where the social role acquires only a relative truth and hope for a
society that can allow the social role to be reintegrated into the Self.
In the prologue of his play The Blacks: A Clown Show, Jean Genet notes that the
play has been written by a white author and it is thought to address a white audience.
If for any reason it happens to be performed in front of a black audience there should
always be at least one white spectator, who should be placed in an honorary seat at the
middle of the first row .During the whole enactment a spotlight should be on him/her
and the enactment should be addressed to him/her. If there is no white person then
white masks must be distributed to the black audience. If the black audience rejects
the idea to wear white masks, then a white dummy could serve the purpose to
symbolize the white audience. So, the author of the play and its audience are literally
or symbolically whites and the actors on stage should always be blacks divided in two
groups, the white Court and the Blacks.
The white Court is composed of the Queen, her valet and the dignitaries of her court.
The Queen is a sad mask and the masks of the court members express their grandeur,
and are stereotypes of white colonialism.
The black cast should play the white Court with the blackness of the actors clearly
visible behind their white masks .
The second group of black actors who play the Blacks, play the roles of black actors
enacting a variety of black stereotypes ,the traditional roles that the expectations of
the white social order has given them. But the removal of the masks dont lead to the
indicated end of the play .When there is something suggesting a closure the audience
are denied that and the performance remains suspended as within question marks .
The end is a similar configuration to that of the beginning of the play.
This play, on both its theatrical and meta-theatrical level is a discourse on the
performativity of racial identity as a culturally and historically defined, constructed
and performed process
The Blacks, denied the privileged positions of the subject, remain peripheral and
visible only in relation to the dominant centre of control, the Whites.
Within this binary system the blacks can not perceive themselves separate from
whiteness since their actions are reactions to a historical process of colonization and
racism.
An indictment of the white authoritarian colonialist behavior and the hate that it has
given birth to, the spectacle of The Blacks is the spectacle of their self- hate, stupidity,
grossness, criminality and violence; all foisted upon them by The Whites.
The only possible relationship between the two groups is theatrical. On the theatre
stage and only when they wear their masks they can address each other.
The theatre is more real than reality, the characters are more real when they assume
roles than when they are themselves, the masks are more real than the face, the
reflection is more real than the subject it reflects.
In the cruel rituals of Genet, the individual becomes authenticated only when it finds
its role in the construction of the society. The mask is the social role, but there is
nobody behind the mask .The characters are masks , neither true of false. These empty
forms are perceived as alive only because of the repetitive power of the ritual, the
constant reinforcement of social and racial roles. Identity is a performance and it
relies on a repeated enactment. Character is a continual deferral to an unattainable,
absent original. The human face has become the mask of stereotypes and the mask
conceals a nothingness underneath. In Genet the mask becomes an integral part of
human experience but as a sign of a non existing self, a terrifying void.
In the mask/face dualities of Brechts dialectics, Pirandellos metaphysics and Genets
death rituals we witness the impossibility of the unified self.
The crisis of the Self is based upon the fundamental face / mask polarity.
In western thought the mask always implies opposition. The mask is always in contrast to the
ultimate sign of subjectivity, the last resort of the idea of the unique self, the human face, Even
when the mask is a sign of the impossibility of creating some true self there is always an
underlying, melancholia, nostalgia or wrath for the never existed core, as in the case of Pirandello
and Genet..
Despite the lack of contemporary plays written for mask, I would like to make a
connection between the concept of the Mask with some plays which are not written
for masks but may point towards other relations between the face and the mask and
some contemporary ideas about the Self.
I would like to present another concept that has obvious affinities with the mask, the
concept of Metamorphosis.
Metamorphosis is the transformation of appearance, or substance. This radical change
of form may contain a rupture with the unity of identity and its spatiotemporal
continuity but other times the subject may retain its identity through the process of
metamorphosis, despite its physical or spiritual transformation.
Metamorphosis is a revelation of the world as it unveils its true capacities,
destabilizing our notions and revealing other possibilities of alternative worlds.
Identity is unstable but metamorphosis is both its loss and its guarantee, the moment
of metamorphosis encapsulates the moments both before and after the self.
Paradoxically, the fluidity of transformation affirms even while destabilizing, the
survival of the self.
If the deconstructed subject is basically a schizoid subject trapped between the
dualities of identity and alterity, metamorphosis adds another dimension offering a
way out of the binary oppositions.
Metamorphosis reconnects to other fields of life as an imagined ability of the human
to transcend gender, sex, time, space and the human dimension to its animal and
divine source. And the mask becomes the strongest sign of metamorphosis since it
translates it into a visual experience of here and now.
The notion of metamorphosis, so popular in antiquity has been present since the
beginnings of the European theatre as an unmistakable trait of divinity.
At the end of The Aeshylean Oresteia the Chorus of the Spirits of Wrath is
metamorphosed into the spirits of Blessing.
In the Euripidean Bacchae Dionysus presents himself in his mortal guise in the
beginning of the play and as the epiphany of the God, at the end.
After a period of silence metamorphosis becomes appealing again and re -enters the
theatrical stage in the twentieth century.
In one of Yukio Mishimas Noh plays, Sotoba Comachi the homonymous 99 year
old character transcends age and spatiotemporal unity moving 80 years back in time,
transforming herself into the nineteen year old girl she once was.
In Robert Wilson and Daryl Pinckneys dramatization of Virginia Wolffs Orlando
the character transcends gender and spatiotemporal unity moving through three
hundred years of history.
In Tony Kushers Dybbuk the soul of a dead man enters the body of his beloved
transforming her to a Dybbuk.
At the end of Sarah Kanes play Cleansed the character of Grace looks and sounds
like her deceased brother Graham. She has been transformed into him.
Heiner Mullers Quartet may, in its ambiguity, be interpreted as a play containing a
series of metamorphoses.
The play is based upon the epistolary novel by Laclos Liaisons Dangereuses
And is situated in a post historical no mans land in the time/space continuum defined
by a salon before the French Revolution and a bunker after the Third World War.
Two characters, Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont play themselves and
two other absent characters who are the objects of their desire and hate; Solange, who
is Merteuils virginal niece and Madame de Tourvel , the loyal wife of a judicial
functionary.
Sexuality, love, desire, morality, and emotions are nothing more than means of
domination and submission in the eternal battle of the sexes. Their power games are a
repeating pattern which conflates desire and competition leading to death. The action
consists of series of changes that appear at five crucial points .Due to the ambiguity
of the text we can not define if they are appropriations of the lines of the other
character, changes of identities ,a masquerade or actual metamorphoses .
Merteuil becomes Valmont and holds a monologue addressed to the absent Tourvel
and Solange. Valmont responding to Merteuil/Valmont becomes Tourvel and
commits suicide .At the moment of death she shifts back to Valmont who is being
poisoned by Merteuil, dies also. Death is what Merteuil waits for her last line being
Now we are alone, cancer, my love..
In this apocalyptic landscape of terror the extinction of the male principle passes
through the hands of the revengeful female. The explosion of the subject ends with its
implosion and death
If we add the possibility of actual metamorphoses through the mask, then another
dimension can be developed.
During the enactment, we may twice have the simultaneous presence on stage of two
Valmonts .One with the face, body / voice of Valmont and the text lines of Tourvel
and the other with the mask of Valmont, the text of Valmont and the body / voice of
Merteuil. In this way, the deconstruction of the subject into its constituent elements of
body, voice and text may also include the face.
Merteuil and Valmont become icons of the protean character that is always associated
with the theatre; always being untrustworhty and unreliable .The chameleon, is the
figure who resists all attempts to define his true nature, whose essence is his masks .
Metamorphosis may be one way of actualizing the presence of the mask on the
contemporary stage .Further on, I would like to point to some other connections
between the concept of the mask and some contemporary ideas of the Self.
The essentialist and unified subject and the ideologies that have been the matrix of
such an assumption, has been heavily criticized by poststructuralist theories .The form
of subjectivity emerging from these fields of theory are presenting the subject as a
historical, social and cultural construction placing history and society as the
determinants of identity. The Subject is no longer an essence on a free standing
ontological base with definability, substantiality, continuity or the feeling of an
unmediated and spontaneous life. It has become a historical, social, racial, ethnical,
and gender construct.