The work of avant-garde auteurs from the mid-twentieth century onward is a testament not only to Pirandello’s ongoing influence but to the ways artists continue to break open fresh paths, building on Pirandello’s aesthetic. Through the destabilization of day-to-day existence, especially in his theatre trilogy – Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), Each in His Own Way (1924), and Tonight We Improvise (1930) – Pirandello shatters every kind of theatrical binary. Out of these eruptions, a sense of the postmodern emerges, evoked via the experience of a messy, chaotic collaborative process that culminates in an “anti-play” filled with seemingly random and often sinister playfulness. This essay closely examines the processes and performances of the Living Theatre’s (New York, 1959) and Robert Brustein’s American Repertory Theatre (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1987) productions of Tonight We Improvise. John Jesurun and Takeshi Kawamura’s Distant Observer: Tokyo/New York Correspondence at La MaMa (New York, 2018) is the next focal point – only one of many current transmittals of Pirandello’s genius, moving forward.

This chapter addresses the use of technological media in contemporary adaptations of Greek tragedies that have used the form, narratives, and cultural cachet of Greek tragedy to create work that engages spectators in examinations of human culture and behavior which have deep historical and emotional resonance, even when the productions themselves are destabilising and sometimes undermining the cultural position of their ancient Greek referents. The approaches span a large gamut from the use of video as scenography to the immersion of the audience in theatrical landscapes fragmented through media. Central to the discussion are artists such the Wooster Group, Jay Scheib, John Jesurun, and Jan Fabre, who use technology to create intermedial effects that express and interrogate the relationship of media to contemporary culture and representation. These works manage to encapsulate the rapidly changing modes of discourse, both live and mediated, and the ever-increasing problematics of representation in a media-saturated world.