The first production of Six Characters in Search of an Author at the Teatro Valle in Rome on May 10, 1921, astonished its unsuspecting audience. As Gaspare Giudice reported in his biography of Pirandello, "things started to go badly from the first, when the spectators came into the theatre and realized that the curtain was raised and that there was no scenery." Some spectators considered this "gratuitous exhibitionism," especially as it was yoked with stagehands and actors milling about as if they were not really in a play. The arrival of the "characters" was even more "extraordinary" and "all this was enough to infuriate anyone who had gone to the theatre to spend a pleasant evening. The first catcalls were followed by shouts of disapproval, and, when the opponents of the play realized that they were in the majority, they started to shout in chorus, 'ma-ni-co-mio' ('madhouse') or...