Mask and Face in Bahram Beyzai and Luigi Pirandello’s Theater

This article provides a comparison between the conventional and modern theater of revolt. It also indicates that the modern theater’s attitude of revolt is twofold, existential, and social. Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw, Brecht, Pirandello, O’Neill, and Beyzai, all from different parts of the world share one idea which separates them from their predecessors and links them to each other; it is their attitude of revolt toward what makes them modern playwrights. Luigi Pirandello and Bahram Beyzai’s drama embrace the atmosphere of revolt in the modern era considered as the precursors of Existential drama of revolt. The modern theater starts with the sense of spiritual and social disintegration, fragmentation of man, and his estrangement of officialdom. Within the framework of comparative literature and the philosophy of Henri Bergson, this article analyzes the philosophical traces of the issues of life, time, and the human-made concepts and forms of life and applies them to the selected plays of Pirandello and Beyzai Ultimately, this paper distinguishes two types of human revolt in theater and differentiates between Beyzai and Pirandello and concludes that whereas Pirandello’s revolt is based on moving from one mask to another, Beyzai’s revolt is on ripping off the masks and facing the ultimate nudity of the existential face of human being.