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Modern Italian theater began in the 16th century with the first commedia dell’arte troupes. Drawing upon a vast reservoir of fools from every village and town in Italy, they created the well-known masked characters of the lovers Pierrot and Columbine, the old dotard Pantaloon and his constant antagonist the ridiculous Doctor, the intriguer Brighella, the braggart Captain, cowardly Scaramouch, Punchinello, source of the English Punch, and, the most famous clown of all, Harlequin. 

The descendants of these zanies can be found on every stage in Europe, but they ring true because they can also be found in our lives and in ourselves. 

In Jaques’ “All the world’s a stage” speech in As You Like It, William Shakespeare makes a catalog of some of these characters, naming one in particular, “the lean and slippered Pantaloon with spectacles on nose and pouch on side, his youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide for his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice, turning again toward childish treble, pipes and whistles in his sound.” 

Shakespeare’s description is accurate and detailed, but more importantly he understood that these stock figures of the Captain, the Doctor and Pantaloon, these Masks, are the great archetypes of the human psyche. Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist is densely populated with the same buffoons and they pop up in everything from Moliere through Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers on to the San Francisco Mime Troupe. 

The original commedia companies did not present written plays, but improvised from brief scenarios. They refreshed their memories during performance by glancing at a scenario pinned to the backstage wall. Within these loose structures, they were able to go on endlessly improvising comic scenes for the length of a show. Every time they returned to a scenario, they were free to add to, subtract from, or change it in whatever direction seemed to be working at the moment of performance. Acrobatics, juggling, legerdemain, song and dance were all part of their repertoire. 

Over time, some of these scenarios became fixed into actual plays and among the most famous is Carlo Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters which was written for Gennaro Sacco around 1746. Known as Sacchi, he was considered the greatest Harlequin of his time and his particular variation on the standard Arlecchino was the Mask of Truffaldino, the servant of the title. 

This play was written during Goldoni’s evolution from classic commedia toward a more naturalistic, Moliere-influenced comedy in which the written text triumphed over improvisation. In fact, Goldoni probably incorporated much of the comic improvisation and physical action of the performers into the play as published in 1753. We are able to see the old improvised commedia shining through Goldoni’s nascent reformed style. 

The words of the play are almost inconsequential. The simple scenario is all that matters: two pairs of lovers are thwarted for three acts by Pantaloon, the Doctor, Brighella and Harlequin (Truffaldino in Goldoni’s text) who appear here as two fathers, an innkeeper and a servant, respectively. 

Mozart loved this play and considered making it into an opera in 1783. Michael Redgrave played one of the lovers in a 1928 amateur production when he was still a student at Cambridge. Impresario Max Reinhardt, who produced and directed the 1935 film version of Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed it many times, but it was the great 20th century Italian director, Giorgio Strehler (1921-1997), founder of the Piccolo Teatro di Milan in 1947, who created the modern form of this play that same year as Arlecchino, Servant of Two Masters. 

He closed the Piccolo Teatro’s first season with an astoundingly fresh revival of the Goldoni classic featuring Marcello Moretti in the title role. Moretti reintroduced improvised business into the play and what had seemed a death mask came to life again. After not having been played in Italy almost since the time of Goldoni, it became the longest running play in Italian theater history with Strehler eventually recasting the play a further 10 times.  

Ferruccio Soleri, who joined Piccolo Teatro di Milano in 1958, became identified with the role of Arlecchino after a 1960 performance substituting for Moretti at the City Center in New York. He continued understudying Moretti until 1963 when, transcending merely copying Moretti, he became the definitive Arlecchino. Soleri might have been daunted by the loss of the commedia tradition over the previous two centuries. Instead, he reached down into his own comic soul to find again our common foolishness and humanity. He will be performing the role he has owned for the last 45 years this week in Berkeley with Piccolo Teatro di Milan as part of a world farewell tour that began in 1977 and hopefully will continue well into the future.  

The Piccolo Teatro di Milano will perform Arlecchino, Servant of Two Masters with English supertitles at Zellerbach Playhouse at 8 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 26 through Saturday, Oct. 29 with matinees on Sat., Oct. 29 at 2 p.m. and on Sun., Oct. 30 at 3 p.m. During the run of this production there will also be lectures, conferences, pre-performance talks and an exhibition of commedia dell’arte costumes and masks in the Zellerbach Playhouse Lobby. For tickets and more information call 642-9988, or see www.calperfs.berkeley.edu. 

Luigi Ciminachi/Piccolo Teatro di Milano 

Company members in Piccolo Teatro di Milano’s production of Arlecchino, servitore di due padroni (Servant of Two Masters).›