Professor Paolino (the Man) leads a quiet life punctuated by the demanding private lessons he gives to his students. Among these young people is Nonò, an 11-year-old boy whose mother is the charming and modest Mrs. Perella (Virtue). The clandestine romantic relationship between Paolino and Mrs. Perella satisfies both of them and would remain so if an accident hadn't befallen them: a sudden and unwanted pregnancy. There's no doubt about the paternity, because Perella's husband (the Beast), a veteran sailor who's often away from home and is himself involved in an extramarital affair with another woman with whom he has fathered two more children, has long refused to have any physical contact with his wife. What to do? What stratagems can be used to save appearances and to safeguard Mrs. Perella's honor and Paolino's respectability? From here springs the tragicomedy that will eventually delineate the characters perhaps differently from how they appear at the beginning: is Paolino really a Man? Is Captain Perella the real Beast? And is Mrs. Perella really such a virtuous woman?

Man, the Beast, and Virtue is perhaps Pirandello's most atypical text: grotesque, dreamlike, and mad. A strangely funny comedy, full of comical situations, yet the apparent simplicity of the classic love triangle (husband, wife, lover) conceals powerful themes that still resonate with us today. Aren't keeping up appearances, hypocrisy, and respectability still our traveling companions today? What's the point of morality these days? And then there's the morbidity of sex... the possession of the body of the woman we love... aren't these still stories that fascinate us and that we often find in the crime sections of newspapers?

In a dreamlike setting, the characters (introduced by Pirandello with captions describing them as animals) move as if suspended in an indefinite time, dreamily like the Six Characters or as in Non si sai come: because in Pirandello, dreams often reveal more than reality, or reality often coincides with dreams. And nothing more than the theatrical narrative (never real, but a mirror of reality) can reveal the murky desires, pettiness, violence, and darkness of the human soul.