La stranezza

1920. The homage for Verga's 80th birthday is the occasion for Luigi Pirandello's return to Sicily. On his arrival in Girgenti, painful news, the death of his beloved nanny Maria Stella, leads him to meet two gravediggers, Nofrio and Bastiano, two singular beings who also practise theatre for pleasure. A trivial mishap prevents and delays the nurse's funeral and forces the writer to enter with the two gravediggers into the infernal circles of corruption of the cemetery workers and then to wait for the incident to be resolved at his home in the Valley of Chaos. Obsessed by a strange and still undefined idea, the creation of a new play, Pirandello spends there restless and feverish hours during which spectral visions, memories, melancholic apparitions follow one another. Having returned to Girgenti after his meeting with Giovanni Verga, increasingly intrigued by the singular charm of the two gravediggers, Pirandello spies their rehearsals and attends the premiere of their new farce: La trincea del rimorso, or Cicciareddu e Pietruzzu. In the little theatre where the whole village has gathered, during the hilarious play at a certain point an unexpected event occurs that forces Nofrio and Bastiano to interrupt the performance. Suddenly, in the auditorium, the atmosphere veers from the comic to the tragic, and turns into a total showdown in which the audience and the actors are confronted. Pirandello spies on the slightest word, the slightest gesture of this sorrowful community and seems both amused and disturbed. Rome, 1921. The audience of great occasions has gathered at the Teatro Valle for the premiere of Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author. In the stalls, there are also Nofrio and Bastiano, guests of the author. The play begins and the two watch surprised and enraptured, as do the other spectators, at the succession of paradoxical situations proposed by the playwright in his play, until an unpredictable finale.
(Source: Translated from Italian official synopsis - Deepl)