Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello

Innovative for its time, but an underwhelming read today

Italian writer Luigi Pirandello won the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is best-known and highly acclaimed as a playwright, though he also published novels, short stories, and poetry. His play Six Characters in Search of an Author was first staged in 1921. At that time, the audience responded with jeers. History has been kinder, however, and the play is now regarded as a groundbreaking work in theatrical history. For its time, the play pushes the envelope of what was acceptable on a stage in a way that presages the works of later “Theatre of the Absurd” playwrights like Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett.

The play consists of three acts. The scenes take place on a stage during rehearsals for a play, so the sets present a behind-the-scenes look at the theatrical process, from a relatively bare stage to some apparently unfinished stage decorations for the future performance to come. The members of a theatre troupe are gathered on the stage, rehearsing for the production of a play (also by Luigi Pirandello). Then, in through the backstage door wanders a family of six unnamed individuals, led by a father figure who explains that they are six characters looking for a playwright to dramatize their story for the stage. The manager of the theatre company resents the interruption of his rehearsal and demands that the interlopers leave immediately. The six characters, however, manage to relate enough of their story—involving extramarital affairs, a broken marriage, and prostitution—to pique the director’s interest. He decides to adapt the family’s story for the stage and produce it as a play to be performed by his company.

This sort of meta-drama would have been very novel and even shocking to Pirandello’s audience of 1921. A century later, however, such plays-within-plays have become commonplace in theatre, television, and film. Actors in today’s biopics frequently collaborate with their subjects on the development of their characters (if those subjects are still living), much like the relationship between the stage director and the family depicted here. In the postmodern era, the boundaries and intersections between fiction and reality have been explored to much more extreme lengths than Pirandello has done here. Charlie Kauffmann’s films Being John Malkovich and Adaptation spring to mind, or even some episodes of Seinfeld. By comparison to these and many other recent examples, Characters in Search of an Author feels relatively pedestrian. But someone had to break every boundary first, and thus the value of this play relies on its historical precedence and subsequent influence. There have been plays-within-plays going back to Shakespeare and likely earlier, but Pirandello certainly takes a leap forward here in terms of thinking outside that box.

When performed on a stage, Six Characters in Search of an Author might very well be a lively and entertaining play. When read from the page, however, it is far from enthralling. The dialogue consists largely of the theatre company and the family disagreeing about how the story should be told. One side will say, “It should be done like this!” and the other responds, “No, that’s wrong, let’s do it this way instead!” over and over again for 70 to 90 minutes. To today’s readers, the play isn’t absurd enough to be funny and isn’t serious enough to be compelling drama. It may have historical significance, but you’d be better off reading works by those “Theatre of the Absurd” writers who built on Pirandello’s idea.
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