Six Characters in Search of an Author (Style)

Style

The Play Within the Play

The most obvious device that Pirandello uses to convey his themes is to portray the action as a play within a play. The initial play within a play is relatively easy for the audience to handle — Pirandello’s own Rules of the Game is being performed in rehearsal by a troupe of actors. Then the “characters” enter and they seem to embody a completely different play within the play. Furthermore, they insist on acting out the story that have brought to the rehearsal, which is done twice, once by themselves and again by the actors. And once the audience has more or less assimilated all of this, a seventh character, Madame Pace, is created on the spot, as if out of thin air. The effect is similar to that presented with nesting boxes, one inside another and another inside that until the audience gets so far away from their easy faith in their ability to distinguish between reality and illusion that they might throw up their hands like the Producer and simply say, “Make believe?! Reality?! Oh, go to hell the lot of you! Lights! Lights! Lights!”

Throughout the production of Six Characters in Search of an Author the audience in fact experiences the difficulty of distinguishing between reality and illusion that constitutes Pirandello’s main theme. And the Producer’s company of actors in many ways speaks for the audience throughout — from the initial, derisive incredulity at the entrance of the “characters” to the ambivalent response at the end of the play. And a crucial moment in this process comes early in Act I, after the derisive laughter of the actors has died down somewhat, and the Father explains that “we want to live, sir . . . only for a few moments — in you.” In response, a young actor says, pointing to the Stepdaughter, “I don’t mind. . . so long as I get her.” This comically libidinous response is ignored by everyone on stage, but it represents an important turning point in the minds of the actors in the company and in the minds of the audience as well. It embodies a playful, tentative acceptance of the illusion, a making do with what’s available, an abandonment to the situation as it presents itself. In short, it represents the response to the mystery of life to which human beings obsessed with absolute certainty are ultimately reduced. One must simply get on with life and make the best of it, accepting the hopelessness of trying to draw fine distinctions between what is real and what is not.

Comedy

A less obvious device in the play is Pirandello’s use of laughter to lighten the audience’s confrontation with this frustrating collision of reality and illusion. The play is not easily seen as humorous on the page, but in production the humor can be rich and is certainly essential in order to reassure the audience that their inability to easily distinguish between reality and illusion is an inevitable but ultimately comic part of human existence.

The humor is most obvious in the frustrations of the acting troupe. Serious but self-important, they are comical in their inability to deal with anything they are too inflexible to understand. The Producer is admirable in the way he finally bends to the unusual situation and vaguely sees the emotional intensity that the “characters” have brought to him. But he is ultimately comical because he is hopelessly obsessed with stage conventions. He insists on trying to “fit” this phenomenon within the boundaries of what he’s most familiar with and his efforts are comically doomed. In the Edward Storer translation of Pirandello’s original text, the play ends with the Producer throwing up his hands and saying “never in my life has such a thing happened to me.” What often makes comedy rich is witnessing human beings forced into being resilient under the common, existential circumstance of confronting the ultimate mystery of the universe.

But the play also displays a grim kind of humor in the desperation of the “characters,” who stumble across this rehearsal looking for an “author” and end up settling for a director with decidedly commercial tastes. The Producer is not an author who can complete their story but someone who depends on a script that’s finished. The best that he can do is to exemplify the incompleteness the “characters” have brought him; the worst he can do is to create more barriers to their sense of an accurate portrayal of their story, which he what he most comically does. The Father and Stepdaughter laugh when the actors portray them so differently from the way they see themselves, but the joke is ultimately on them.

At the very beginning of the play, the Producer is complaining of the obscurity of Pirandello’s Rules of the Game. He is satirically instructing his leading actor that he must “be symbolic of the shells of the eggs you are beating.” It is a very funny moment, given the actors’ and Producer’s frustration, as well as Pirandello’s playful self-denigration. But it is also a moment filled with rich comic ambiguity because the Producer’s dismissive explanation is quite seriously what Pirandello’s play is all about: “[the eggs] are symbolic of the empty form of reason, without its content, blind instinct! You are reason and your wife is instinct: you are playing a game where you have been given parts and in which you are not just yourself but the puppet of yourself. Do you see? . . . Neither do I! Come on, let’s get going; you wait till you see the end! You haven’t seen anything yet!”