Abbott & Costello did.
So did Cyrano.
Montgomery Burns, Homer Simpson’s boss on “The Simpsons,” does it to this day.
They all borrowed character traits developed in a 16th-century style of Italian theater known as “commedia dell’arte,” which is now on display, to a degree, in “The Glorious Ones” at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater.
The Off-Broadway musical, by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens (“Ragtime,” “Seussical”), is loosely based on the life of Flaminio Scala, an early practitioner of the form, and plays through Jan. 6.
Mace Perlman, of Greenwich, Conn., an actor and former Purchase College instructor, has made a study of commedia – and its signature characters and masks – since working with Giorgio Strehler, one of Italy’s foremost opera and theater directors in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.
Perlman, a cousin of Westchester-based actor Kevin Kline (to whom he bears a striking resemblance), also studied under master mime Marcel Marceau. He appeared recently in Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing,” at the Red Monkey Theater Group in Dobbs Ferry.
But it’s commedia and its rich characters that inspire him most.
“These are stock characters, but they appear in the American musical, in Dickens, in opera,” Perlman says. “They’re definitely larger than life.
“I think life is large and our entertainment today tends to make life small. Real life is larger than life. We all meet outrageous people all the time.”
Perlman has a trunk full of custom-made leather masks crafted in Italy and representing an accumulated cast of characters: the clown, the captain, the professor, the rogue.
All have a tradition in theater that stretches back to 1500s Italy. At the height of commedia – when there were competing troupes presenting their scenarios all across Europe – townsfolk would gather to see a show of short plays, certain to be entertained and surprised, even though they knew the characters already.
“What’s interesting to me is that these characters often get short-changed nowadays,” Perlman says. “People say they’re comic stereotypes, they’re one-dimensional characters.
“But what fascinates me about these characters is that they’re really human, no less so than Shakespeare’s characters, or ‘Seinfeld’ characters or even ‘The Simpsons’ or Bugs Bunny. When they are treated with sensitivity and artistry, they are enormously human.”
For example, Perlman says, the character Pantalone gets the reputation of being a cuckolded foolish old miser while Arlecchino (“Harlequin” in English) gets the reputation of being a stupid, gluttonous, lazy servant.
“The reality is actually more interesting. Pantalone is a capitalist and he’s amassed a great deal of wealth and that wealth isolates him and makes him frightened of being taken advantage of.
“Arlecchino is a servant and will never be a master. He may dress up as a master, but he’s a servant. Pantalone is a master and is somehow born into that.
“He’s a merchant. Actually, he’s middle class. After the commedia, there develops a merchant character. Venture capitalism starts in Venice in the West and so Pantalone could be on Wall Street today. He’s not a nobleman. He’s basically, the merchant of Venice.”
The Captain is another unique character.
“He’s called the captain and he’s a wannabe lover,” Perlman says. “He’s a military man, but it’s not clear if he’s a first-into-battle-and-first-in-retreat sort of guy. But there’s a sense of vanity. The captain often has a vain quality.”
In these characters, audiences saw all the vices.
“Arlecchino is lazy, Pantalone is a miser, the Captain is vain, full of himself,” Perlman says. “We tend to stop there and dismiss them. But there are many sides to the captain.”
The Dottore, or doctor, is the geek, full of all kinds of jargon, Perlman says.
“He speaks 868 languages, but he’s foolish, too, because nobody can understand what he’s saying. He likes to show off his specialized learning. Does it mean that he’s wise? Probably not.”
There is also a class struggle going on on the commedia stage. The zanni, lower class, are always conniving to get the better of the vecchi, the upper class.
Arlecchino and Brighella, the servants, are the forebears of Abbott & Costello.
“The buddy movies are based on this: Brighella is the servant with the upper hand, the Bud Abbott. Arlecchino is Costello, the little brother,” Perlman says.
“Gomer Pyle is the Arlecchino and Sgt. Carter is Brighella.”
The captain has his place in popular culture, too: Col. Klink from “Hogan’s Heroes” is the captain, Perlman says. So, too, is Cyrano, being played on Broadway this season by Perlman’s cousin, Kevin Kline.
“Cyrano is a fascinating outsider in a way, another captain character.”
The richness of the characters was borne out in remarkable scenarios, or stories.
“The stories are surprising. They’re not predictable,” Perlman says. “Otherwise, why would Europe have put up with them for 250 years?”
After seeing “The Glorious Ones,” which stars Marc Kudisch, at Lincoln Center, Perlman was unimpressed, saying that the writers glossed over the characters without giving them their due.
“These characters are incredibly Italian and incredibly Mediterranean. At the same time, you can find them in China and in our culture. They’re very universal.”
For six years, Perlman studied under Strehler, “the Laurence Olivier of Italy,” returning in 1993.
“He was like a god in Italy,” Perlman says. “He still looms in the popular imagination.” (Strehler died in 1997.)
More than a dozen years later, the student is still learning.
“I hate the idea of reproducing something,” he says. “It’s not about that at all. In my education, I was able to begin to become familiar with material that is so vibrant, so powerful that every time I go back to the original, I get more. It’s a little like Shakespeare.”
Like Shakespeare, commedia had its Promethean promoters, its Edwin Booths.
“Francesco Andreini played Captain Spavento, who was enormously imaginative, larger than life,” Perlman says. “He was like Paul Bunyan, tall tales, and Don Juan and Cyrano and Don Quixote, most of all. A great dreamer and poet and funny, able to quote Dante, Cicero and Aristotle. He was a Renaissance man.
“He was in a tradition of blowhard soldiers – Milos Gloriosus from Roman comedy – but what Francesco added to that was a brilliant ability to make metaphor, a dreamer.”
Seeing “The Glorious Ones” makes Perlman burn to share what he knows with students. He has taught at Purchase College and is pursuing teaching positions at Juilliard and at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus, a stone’s throw from the stage that “The Glorious Ones” calls home.
Character’s emotions show in masks
Most of the characters in commedia dell’arte – Pantalone, Arlecchino, Brighella and the Dottore – wear masks.
Not so the lovers, says Mace Perlman.
“The lovers were beautiful people, even back then, and they were there to be physically admired, so they wore no masks,” he says.
These masks look like they’re rigid and fixed. But, in fact, they have all the emotions: They can smile; they can weep; they’re much more mobile than they appear to be.
“That has to do with how we as an audience read into a mask,” Perlman says. “When we watch an actor who is really alive, we look at the body and through the body language, the mask appears to be smiling or frowning.
“The mask speaks directly to your subconscious. When I play in the masks, I may be playing a Renaissance character, but people will see family members. They’ll say ‘That reminds me of Uncle so-and-so.’ ”
A mask can look beautiful and not necessarily come to life on the actor.
“That’s a mystery,” Perlman says. “I call them ‘souls in a box.’ They have human energies.”
Each of Perlman’s masks is fashioned by hand by Italian mask-maker Renzo Antonello, in Vicenza, near Venice.
“We’ve been working together for 20 years. They’re works of art. It’s like a fine musical instrument.
“They’re made from leather that’s stretched over wood, with a wire around the edge of the mask that fits to the actor’s face. They’re very light and they need to breathe with the actor,” he says.
Still the mask only takes you so far as an actor, Perlman says.
“When it’s going well and you’re acting well in the mask, you don’t feel that you have anything on. That’s a good sign. If your acting is labored and it’s not working, you feel like you’ve got a big piece of leather on your face.
“When it works well, it’s really like another face.”
Before Perlman dons a mask, he looks at the shape of it: the shape of the cheeks, the eyebrows, the furrows in the brow.
Those lines tell Perlman all he needs to know about the character who wears the mask.
When he slips on the block-cheeked Brighella mask, with deep ridges in its brow, he is at once a lumbering fellow, solid.
He speaks in a deep voice, with an Italian accent.
“He is beeg, like mountain of a man,” Perlman says, fully in character. “He is proud, maybe live on horse. Love his mama.”
When Perlman puts on the Captain’s mask, with its long nose and angular cheek lines, he stands ramrod straight and his whole appearance changes, to that of a bird, a peacock. This one speaks with a clipped German accent.
“For some reason, this is middle Europa,” he says. “He is sqveezed. Mit de France und der Poland. In ze middle, yah?”
You can tell a lot about a commedia dell’arte character by his nose, Perlman says.
“Pantalone has a long nose. He’s never had his nose pushed in by the world. No one’s ever told him to shut up. So his energy comes out in his long nose, unstunted. Arlecchino is constantly being stomped and pushed back, his nose is a stub.”
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Peter D. Kramer
