This is the first book in English to explore Italian "grotesque" theater in the twentieth century. Chiarelli's "The Mask and the Face" Antonelli's "A Man Confronts Himself", and Cavacchioli's "The Bird of Paradise" have been widely staged in Europe and the Americas by prominent directors, including Pirandello. These playwrights exercised a pivotal role in stage renewal, forged links with the most avant-garde contemporary thinking, and, some of them at least, set the pace for what became, much later, "theater of the absurd."