Luigi Pirandello

it for everyone else.

And finally, to end, this is Luigi Pirandello, who says anyone can be heroic from time to time, but a gentleman is something you have to be all the time.

But you can replace the word gentleman with anything there.

Yeah.

The work was a long way from the stock company parts of his early years.

He appeared in Ibsen's Peer Gynt and Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine, then moved through plays by Shaw, Pirandello, and Dostoevsky.

He worked alongside Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne, and other actors at the center of New York theater.

His personal life was coming together, too.

The performative nature of this overseas Italian-ness, its theatricality, is reinforced by walls decorated with photos of the owners posing with Italian-American celebrities like Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, or Sylvester Stallone.

It is as if we've all been given roles, customers and waiters alike, in a Pirandello play that challenges distinctions between illusion and reality.

My kids love YouTube and TikTok videos in which a nonna or nonno from a well-ordered kitchen in Italy reveals how to make the creamiest cacio e pepe or the tastiest tomato sauce.

These elderly cooks appear to embody an authentic art to being Italian that cuts through the mimicry and stagecraft.

It was very culturally alive and interesting, stimulating.

I remember being asked, like, "You don't know who Pirandello is?" when I was, like, seven.

[laughs]

[laughs]

Well, I mean, yes, unless you're Ukrainian and being pounded from the sky every night by kamikaze drones and ballistic missiles.

So, so the, yeah, there's something kind of theatrical and ridiculous and sort of Pirandello-like-

Yeah

... about, about their endeavors.

Talked about her with Pete Pryor and Jen Childs, who had also worked with her at UArts.

But what was she like as a director in this Pirandello play? There are

amazing stories about Irene.

Most of them are probably true.

So the new generation has no time.

to wait to become something they're not sure about, okay? So there was a very important poet from Italy called Pirandello that was used to say, , okay? One nobody and 100,000.

So these are the amount of personalities you feel today, you know? you now are a great podcaster.

Maybe tomorrow you'll become a great photographer.