Six Characters in Search of an Author (Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore) is the most famous and celebrated play by the Italian writer Luigi Pirandello.
The play is a satirical tragicomedy. It was first performed in 1921 at the Teatro Valle in Rome, to a very mixed reception, with shouts from the audience of "Manicomio!" ("Madhouse!"). Subsequently the play enjoyed a much better reception. This improved reception was helped in 1925 when, with the third edition of the play, Pirandello provided a foreword clarifying the structure and ideas contained in the play.
Plot Synopsis
Act I
The play begins with an acting company preparing to rehearse a play, incidentally one of Pirandello's own, Il Gioco delle Parti (The Rules of the Game) . As the rehearsal is about to begin the play is unexpectedly interrupted by the arrival of six strange people. The Manager of the play, furious at the interruption, demands an explanation. The Father reveals themselves as unfinished characters in search of an author to finish their story. The Manager initially believes them to be mad, but as they begin to argue amongst themselves and reveal details of their story he begins to listen. While he isn't an author, the Manager agrees to stage their story despite the disbelief amongst the jeering actors.
Act II
After a 20 minute break the Characters and the Company return to the stage to act out some of the story so far. They begin to act out the scene between the Stepdaughter and the Father in Madame Pace's shop, which the Manager decides to call Scene I. The Characters are very particular about the setting, wanting everything to be as realistic as possible. The Manager asks the Actors to observe the scene for he intends for them to act it out later. This sparks the first argument between the Manager and the Characters over the acting of the play, with the Characters assuming that they would be acting it out seeing as they are the Characters already. The Manager moves the play on anyway, but the Stepdaughter has more problems with the accuracy of the setting, saying she doesn't recognize the scene. Just as the Manager is about to begin the scene once more he realizes that Madame Pace is not with them. The Actors watch in disbelief as The Father lures her to the stage by hanging their coats and hats on racks, "attracted by the very articles of her trade".
The scene naturally begins between Madame Pace and the Stepdaughter, with Madame Pace exhorting The Step-Daughter, telling her she must work harder herself to save the Mother's job. The Mother protests at having to watch the scene, but she is restrained. After the Father and Stepdaughter act half of the scene the Manager stops them so that the Actors may act out what they have just done. The Characters break into laughter as the Actors try to imitate them. They continue but The Step-Daughter cannot contain her laughter as the Actors use the wrong tones of voice and gestures. The Father begins another argument with the Manager over the realism of the Actors compared to the Characters themselves. The Manager allows the Characters to act out the rest of the scene and have the rehearsals later.
This time the Stepdaughter explains the rest of the scene during an argument with the Manager over the truth on stage. The scene culminates in an embrace between the Father and the Stepdaughter which is realistically broken up by the distressed Mother. The line between reality and acting is blurred as the scene closes with the Manager pleased with the first act.
Act III
The final act of the play begins in the garden. It was revealed that there was much arguing amongst the family members as The Father sent for The Mother, The Stepdaughter, The Child, The Boy, and The Son to come back and stay with him. The Son reveals that he hates the family for sending him away and does not consider The Stepdaughter or the others a part of his family. The scene ends with The Child drowning in a fountain and The Boy committing suicide with a revolver. The final lines end with The Manager confused over whether it was real or not, concluding that whether it was real or not he lost a whole day over it.
Characters
The Father - Originally married to The Mother and insisted on The Son being sent off to live in the country. Afterwards, he told The Mother to marry another man whom he felt she loved more. Later, he nearly has an affair with The Stepdaughter, until The Mother interferes. When he learns that The Mother's second husband died, he brings her, The Son, The Stepdaughter, The Child, and The Boy back to live with him.
The Mother - Originally married to The Father, she falls in love with one of his clerks and leaves with him at The Father's orders. She has three children, The Boy, The Child, and The Stepdaughter with the second husband and has The Son with The Father.
The Son - The son of The Father and The Mother. To make him stronger, the father has him sent off to the country to live with a wet nurse when he is a baby. Therefore, he grew up not knowing his parents and dislikes them. He also dislikes his stepfamily, not considering them a part of the family.
The Stepdaughter - The spirited daughter of The Mother and her second husband. She is employed by Madame Pace and after she is "two months an orphan", she nearly has an affair with The Father. It is stated that she runs away from home later in the story. According to her, she went to the author of the story constantly, trying to get him to finish the tale.
The Boy - The middle child and only son of The Mother and her second husband. He is disliked by The Stepdaughter, who thinks he is an idiot. He never speaks during the play. At the end of the play, he commits suicide by shooting himself with a revolver.
The Child - The youngest daughter of The Mother and her second husband. She is the favorite of The Stepdaughter. It is mentioned once that her name is Rosetta. She never speaks during the play. At the end of the play, she drowns in a fountain she was playing in, although The Son tries to pull her out.
Madame Pace - Employer of The Mother and (later) The Step-Daughter. She runs a brothel out of her store. She only appears for a short period of time in the play, when The Stepdaughter and The Father perform their scene in the shop together. She speaks in a comical jargon "half Italian, half Spanish".
Analysis
According to Professor Grant L. Voth of Monterey Peninsula College, Pirandello was part of a movement in the early 20th century called theatricalism or anti-illusionism. The theatricalists rejected realist drama and substituted the dreamlike, the expressive, and the symbolic. The theatricalists disapproved of realism because it had abandoned the defining tools of drama, such as poetry, interaction between actors and audience, soliloquies, asides and bare stages. They thought realism could not depict the inner life of human beings.
The play demonstrates these ideas in several ways. The focus of the play is on the interactions of the six characters with the real actors in the theater. This suggests that human beings cannot distinguish between the real and the apparent – the distinction itself is illusory. “Reality” is merely what one happens to believe in at the moment.
The Father character argues that fictional characters are more “real” than living ones, since they are fixed eternally, while a living person is constantly changing and subject to time.
'The Father [with a cry]: No, sir, not ours! Look here! That is the very difference! Our reality doesn't change: it can't change! It can't be other than what it is, because it is already fixed for ever. It's terrible. Ours is an immutable reality which should make you shudder when you approach us if you are really conscious of the fact that your reality is a mere transitory and fleeting illusion, taking this form today and that tomorrow, according to the conditions, according to your will, your sentiments, which in turn are controlled by an intellect that shows them to you today in one manner and tomorrow . . . who knows how? . . . Illusions of reality represented in this fatuous comedy of life that never ends, nor can ever end! Because if tomorrow it were to end . . . then why, all would be finished.'
Pirandello, in the preface to the play, says that whenever a reader opens Dante’s Inferno, Francesca will drift down from the dark wind in her circle of Hell and tell the Pilgrim her story; and it will always be for the first time – just as the Mother in Pirandello’s play at one point makes an agonizing cry, always for the first time.
Each character sees events and the other characters differently. Their readings of reality do not match up. No one character is more correct than the other. There are as many versions of the story as there are characters in the play. Each character is in fact many characters; each has a sense of who he or she is, but each also is what the others believe he or she is.
The play suggests that we are more victims of forces we cannot control than captains of our own fate and demonstrates Pirandello's conception that in place of a continuous ego, self or "I" are states of mind, masks or personae; the temporary result of forces brought to bear on us at that moment. The self becomes an anthology of such roles or masks. Theatricalists thought life was more like theater than vice versa. As in theater, we put on and take off masks, try out various roles, and make up our lives as we go along.
Première
The play was staged in 1921 by the Compagnia di Dario Niccomedi at the Valle di Roma to mixed results. The public split up into supporters and adversaries. The author, who was present at the presentation with his daughter Lietta, was forced almost literally to run out of the theatre through a side exit in order to avoid the crowd of enemies. This same drama, however, was a great success when presented at Milan.
Adaptations
See also
External links
