Theater and madness are allied states of mind. So it’s no surprise that there are so many great plays about madmen. That two of them — Shakespeare’s Othello and Pirandello’s Enrico IV — are kicking off the American Repertory Theatre’s regular season is a bit more conspicuous, all the more so when you remember that this is artistic director Robert Brustein’s swan-song season. Is this a case of some " Mad King of the Loeb " reflecting on his loss of reason and control?

Absolutely not. If madness and obsession have emerged as the putative themes of Brustein’s 23rd season at ART, his obsession is with theater itself and its peculiar capacity to probe the human psyche through performance. Enrico IV joins Othello in the repertory this weekend, in an adaptation by Brustein that is directed by Karin Coonrod. In his ART debut, stage and screen vet David Patrick Kelly takes on the title role.

As soon as I sit down with Brustein and Coonrod, they touch on a practical concern that goes right to the thematic heart of the play: how to list the eponymous character in the program. The hero of Pirandello’s 1922 drama is an unnamed Italian aristocrat who 20 years earlier dressed up for a lavish historical pageant as an obscure 11th-century monarch, King Henry IV of Germany. After an accident knocked him out cold, he woke up thinking that he really was King Henry IV, and locked in a political tug-of-war with Pope Gregory VII. When the curtain rises, this 20th-century madman has been playing out this historical masquerade without stop for two decades, supported in his delusion by an elaborate theatrical set-up.

As the play proceeds, we meet other characters, both under their own names and in the historical roles they play in Henry IV’s never-ending 11th-century reality. But the central figure remains nameless but for his mask, which raises the small but not trivial typographical question of how to identify him in the cast list. In parentheses? As a blank? Who is he beyond his role? Does he truly have an identity? Questions like this lead one into the heady hall of mirrors that Pirandello made his theatrical bailiwick.

For Coonrod, Enrico (as he is known to avoid confusion with his Shakespearean brethren) has at least one sure identity. " He is an artist, " she says. " That may be a way of saying that he has no identity, " Brustein retorts. " One of the central tenets of Pirandello’s drama and philosophy was that people don’t have identity, that they seek identity by finding masks which they impose on their faces, whether it is the mask of the madman or the actor or the teacher or the father. Finding a role that you can play provides you with an identity, but life itself is evanescent and continually in flux. Therefore, one of the terrors is that you can never really find yourself. "

Over the years, one of Brustein’s many masks has been as adapter of great modern classics for the ART. Following Six Characters in Search of An Author, Tonight We Improvise, and Right You Are (If You Think You Are), Enrico IV is his fourth Pirandello adaptation. He directed the first three as well but decided to hand over the reins for this one to Coonrod, who staged a different form of madness for the ART when she mounted The Idiots Karamazov two years ago. In New York, she has earned a reputation as a downtown director of classical drama, including a production of Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays at the Joseph Papp Public Theatre. Her most recent work, a staging of the Flannery O’Connor story " Everything That Rises Must Converge, " completed its run at New York Theatre Workshop just weeks ago.

Coonrod and Brustein seem equally excited about welcoming newcomer David Patrick Kelly to the ART. " We always hesitated about doing Enrico IV because it needs a great actor, " says Brustein. " For years, I was after Christopher Walken to play it. He was tantalized by it but never had the time. And now we have a great actor in David Patrick Kelly. " Kelly is a veteran downtown actor who received an Obie for Sustained Excellence in 1998. He has worked regularly with avant-garde director Richard Foreman, played Woyzeck and Tartuffe at Hartford Stage Company, and appeared in a number of films, including the current K-PAX. " He is an actor who can play a clown or a king, " says Coonrod. " He is extraordinary that way. His inner landscape is very rich. "

Enrico IV plays in repertory at the American Repertory Theatre December 7 through January 13. Tickets are $26 to $61; call (617) 547-8300.

Issue Date: December 6-13, 2001

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