Six Characters in Search of an Author (Dover Thrift Editions) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Luigi Pirandello's 1921 play "Six Characters in Search of an Author" ("Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore") has the deserved reputation of being the first existentialist drama and having a profound effect on later playwrights, especially those practitioners of the Theater of the Absurd such as Samuel Beckett ("Waiting for Godot"), Eugene Ionesco ("Rhinoceros"), and Jean Genet ("The Maids"). Pirandello's writing often focuses on elements of madness, illusion and isolation, all of which are inspired by the tragic aspects of his personal life in which his wife went insane and his daugther tried to commit suicide. In 1921 during a five week period Pirandello wrote his two acknowledged masterpieces, "Six Characters in Search of an Author" and "Henry IV." While "Six Characters" was successful when it opened in Rome it was also considered scandalous. However, it soon being performed in Milan, London, New York, and Germany. Because of his great influence on modern theater, Pirandello was awareded the Noble Prize for Literature in 1934. Two years later, while in negotiations to appear in a film version of "Six Characters," he died.

The setting for "Six Characters in Search of an Author" is a rehearsal for a play (By Pirandello) that is interrupted by the arrival of six characters. Their leader, the father, tells the manager that they are looking for an author. It seems that the author who created them never finished their story and they are unrealized characters who have not yet been fully brought to life. The father insists that they are not real people but characters, and the manager and his cast can only laugh at the idea. But then they become intrigued by the bits and pieces of the story the six characters have to tell.

The father is an intellectual who married the mother, a peasant woman. However, she fell in love with his male secretary and the father, bored with his wife, encouraged her to leave. She does, leaving behind the eldest son who is embittered by the abandonment. The mother has three children with this other man but then the father starts to miss her and watches the other children grow up. This new family moves away, but after the other man dies the mother and her children return to the city. The mother gets a job at Madame Pace's dress shop, but it turns out to be a brothel where the step-daughter ends up being employed. One day the father shows up and is set up with the step-daughter. However, the mother stops them from reaching the obvious conclusion and the entire family moves in with the father and the resentful son.

The manager agrees to produce their story and become the author for whom they have been searching. He tries to stage the scene where the father meets the step-daughter in the dress shop but both characters insist that what the actors are doing is not realistic. The manager allows them to finish out the scene instead. This sets up the basic juxtaposition of "drama" and "reality" for the rest of the play, with the key scenes in the lives of these characters providing more questions than they answer about what happened and what it means. At the point when the manager can no longer tell the difference between acting and reality he becomes fed up with the entire thing and ends the rehearsal, providing an audience that has already been challenged by these changing notions of reality with an abrupt ending to the drama.

Almost all of the characters in the play are known by their roles rather than their names, such as the Leading Man and the Second Female Lead. One of the few characters in the drama who has a name is Madame Pace, who is in charge of the dress shop that also serves as a brothel where the step-daughter works. It is perhaps this formality that serves to distance us from the production more than the strangeness of the action or the aged of the words, even though they are adapted to the modern ear. There may or may not be a real story here, but the ultimate point of this play is that the tradition of reality in the theater no longer holds true.

The radical idea here is that there is an immutability of reality for these six characters. Because they are forms, forced into performing the actions for which they were imagined, there is an inherent conflict with life. This is why the son wants to escape but cannot leave the studio and must play his role, as must the Mother and the rest of the characters. This is just as true of all the other characters besides the six, although the others are less inclined to see the truth, or at least the reality, of their own situation until the end, when the final scene of the drama seeks to dissolve the "stage" reality completely. Where Pirandello succeeds in the end is in having it both ways, for we can interpret what we have seen as being reality or as being acting. Either way, you are left to the same conclusion.

Pirandelloès Six Characters in Search of an Author was written in 1921, in the shadow of World War 1 -- long before the beginning of the Absurdist movement, long before Ionesco and Beckett and Stoppard began probing the same themes Pirandello does here. While, indeed, less subtle and perhaps less artful than these playwrightès later works, it was the pilot -- the opening of the modernist door. The sheer tragedy of life, our inability to communicate our experience accurately to others which sentences us to eternal alienation, the thought that we are, indeed, all characters in search of the author of our fate, seem now commonplace. But in Pirandelloès time they were revolutionary. Itès well worth the read for this alone, although the story of the chracters is convoluted at times.

Luigi Pirandello kicked theatre convention out the door with "Six Characters in Search of an Author." Illusion and reality get a bit bent out of shape, as fictional characters stroll about and converse with managers and actors. It's a brilliant piece of existentialist work, and one that had a distinct effect on theatre after that.

It opens with several unnamed theatre people -- the Manager, the Leading Man, the Prompter -- rehearsing a play in an empty theatre. "During this manoeuvre, the Six CHARACTERS enter, and stop by the door at back of stage," Pirandello tells us: a florid Father, timid Mother, equally timid Boy, arrogant Son, sexy Step-Daughter and too-young-to-have-much-personality Child.

"As a matter of fact . . . we have come here in search of an author . . ." the Father tells the manager. The characters have been abandoned by their author, who "no longer wished, or was no longer able" to put them into a story. And now they want the theatre company to provide them with a vehicle that will make them immortal -- and they have to convince the Manager that they are worthy.

Pirandello dispels the unreality of the play with "Oh sir, you know well that life is full of infinite absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, since they are true." While the events of this play seems to be sort of gimmicky, Pirandello uses them with unusual grace (and not a few moments of bizarre comedy).

The characterizations are among the weirdest I've ever seen -- we have an entire family drama going on without a play/novel/film for it. Lovers, illegitimate kids, sibling rivalry and marital fights. Ironically, the Character family overshadows the "real" people on the stage. The Manager is a fun character, though, perpetually impatient and overstressed. "Pretence? Reality? To hell with it all!" the Manager cries near the end of the play.

But Pirandello's odd play "Six Characters in Search of an Author" is both pretense and reality, and it's a fun and enlightening ride while it lasts.