Six Characters in Search of an Author [Mass Market Paperback]

"Six Characters" is set in a theatre where a director, his stage manager and a group of actors are about to rehearse another of Pirandello's plays, "The Rules of the Game". The curtain is up, the stage is empty of props and background, and the lights illuminate the bare wall at the back of the stage. It is an austere setting, a kind of theatrical analogue to the blank sheet of paper an author faces each day he sits down to write.

Suddenly, this austerity, this mundane theatrical rehearsal, is interrupted by the unexpected arrival of six characters--a father, a mother, a son, a stepdaughter, a boy, and a little girl. They are six characters who have lives, who have stories to tell, but whose dramatic text has not been written. They need an author. As Pirandello says in his 1925 introduction to the play: "Every creature of fantasy and art, in order to exist, must have his drama, that is, a drama in which he may be a character and for which he is a character. This drama is the character's raison d'etre, his vital function, necessary for his existence."

The play proceeds, with the six characters relating fragmentary scenes of incidents in their lives, scenes which are accompanied by commentary, quarrels, dialogue, and interaction among the characters and between the characters and the actors. A kind of theatrical hall of mirrors, the actors who view these characters become, in effect, an audience. The actors are also, however, the actors who will be called upon to play the parts of the six characters in the dramatic text which is being created in their presence. For these actors and these characters, the stage becomes more real than the world.

"Six Characters in Search of an Author" is a remarkable work of imagination, both in its structure and its dialogue. It is comic and absurd, tragic and ponderous. The play is a work of original genius; the text (like its characters) is open to multiple interpretations and meanings. As one character says, in an appropriate Pirandellian bit of dialogue: "[t]herein lies the drama . . . in my awareness that each of us thinks of himself as one but that, well, it's not true, each of us is many, oh so many, according to the possibilities that are in us."

The plot, I'm sure you know, involves six characters who stumble upon a theater rehearsal. They are not so much looking for an author as a play in which to exist. Pirandello breaks the fourth wall as no other author had before him. It is a very daring and original piece. A must for any serious student of drama.

In "Six Characters," a dysfunctional family confronts a theater director and his whole company. They challenge the director to turn their story into a play--a "painful drama."

This richly ironic play deals with many issues: the relationship between life and literature; the limitation of words as tools of communication; sexual transgression; authority and art; secrecy and shame; the fractured, shifting nature of personal identity; the relationship between an author and the characters he/she creates; and more.

This is truly a play of ideas; it's a constantly shifting intellectual house of mirrors. But Pirandello never loses sight of the emotional issues of human shame, pain, and interpersonal alienation. The play is full of great lines; my favorite is spoken by the director: "There's no author here at all."

It's amazing to think that (at the time of this review) this play is more than 80 years old. When I look at the contours of popular culture in the decades since this play premiered in Rome, it seems that Pirandello was as much a cultural prophet as he was a literary genius. "Six Characters" seems to prefigure such phenomena as reality TV shows (like "An American Family" or MTV's "The Real World") and films which explore the shadowy line between fiction and reality (like "The Blair Witch Project" or "Scream 3"). After all these decades, "Six Characters" remains a fresh, compelling, and relevant theatrical masterpiece.