California Italian Studies

This article––originally published in 1942, and reprinted in the artist’s 1945 volume, Commedia dell’arte moderna––comprises de Chirico’s first and most extensive discourse on the subject of theater. In this revealing essay, de Chirico speaks to the metaphysical power of theater; to theater as the fulfilment of man’s primeval need for a preternatural world; to the futility of realist and open-air theater in their failure to liberate the spectator from reality; to the absurdity of modernist theater in its enslavement to novelty and fashion; and to the proper use of the mannequin, so execrably exploited on the modernist stage.