Pirandello

In elucidating the way Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov established the foundation of modern drama, he opened minds to the revolutionary accomplishments of Pirandello, Brecht and Beckett.

It is so if you think so, to borrow a phrase from Luigi Pirandello: the notion that narrative, or identity, must be conditional, a reflection of the observer more than the observed.

Not every situation comedy would work equally well reimagined this way — “Gilligan’s Island,” you could refit as a Pirandello play, maybe, but it’s hard to imagine milking an ongoing drama out of that unlikely crew.

And as a man of the theater who directed plays by the likes of Pirandello and Beckett, Camilleri was no stranger to unorthodoxy.

It was spun off, so Davidson thinks, from the title of Luigi Pirandello’s 1921 play, “Six Characters in Search of an Author.”