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This masterwork of Pirandello revolves around the interruption of a play rehearsal by six characters searching for a playwright to finish their plot left unfinished by their creator, so to allow them catharsis. The conflict comes when the searching characters ask the director to stage their story and insist on playing the parts themselves, instead of allowing the actors to do so. The characters’ previous story comes to life again on stage, and as they re-enact their conflict and remorse, the story subtly and tragically inches forward. The audience is left to wonder if the dramatic conflict is real or the illusion of theater. |
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PREMISE (To Six Characters in Search of an Author, Each in His Own Way, and Tonight We Improvise) Each of the three works collected in this first volume of my plays presents characters, events, and passions peculiar to it and having nothing to do with those of the other two; but the three together, however different, form something of a trilogy of the theatre in the theatre, not only because there is action both on the stage and in the auditorium, in a box and in the corridors and in the foyer of a theatre, but also because the whole complex of theatrical elements, characters and actors, author and actor-manager or director, dramatic critics and spectators (external or involved) present every possible conflict. The difference between the three works, beyond being a difference of plot, stems from the mode and quality of these conflicts between the Characters and the Actors and the Actor-Manager; in the second, between the Spectators and the author and the Actors; in the third, between the Actors become Characters and their Director. Where the comedy is “in the making” as in the first, to be improvised as in the third, the conflict (not the same nor even similar, but rather exactly opposite) prevents the play from being created and the improvisation from being regulated and controlled, from proceeding logically to a conclusion; where the comedy is already created, as in the second, the conflict sends the presentation- the performance- up in smoke. But what was to be presented was precisely this different conflict in each of the three works, and just for that reason, if they remain incomplete or interrupted in their pretexts or plots, they are in themselves complete and finished and can go together to form, as has just been said, a trilogy of the theatre in the theatre. It goes without saying that one is speaking here of the artistic structure of the three works and of the reason why they are collected in a group. As to whatever else each may contain within itself, this is not the place or the occasion to speak of it- nor is it for me to do so. L.P., 1933 (translated E.B., 1950)
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| The Father | Is man of about 50: hair is thin at the temples; he is not bald, however; thick moustaches, falling over his still fresh mouth, which often opens in an empty and uncertain smile. He is fattish, pale; with an especially wide forehead. His eyes are very clear and piercing. Wears light trousers and a dark jacket. He is alternatively mellifluous and violent in his manner. |
| The Mother | Crushed and terrified as if by an intolerable weight of shame and abasement. She is dressed in modest black and wears a thick widow's veil of crepe. When she lifts this, she reveals a wax-like face. She always keeps her eyes downcast. |
| The Step-Daughter | is dashing, almost impudent, beautiful. She wears mourning too, but with great elegance. |
| The Son | (22) is tall, severe in his attitude of contempt for The Father, supercilious and indifferent to The Mother. He looks as if he had come on the stage against his will. |
| The boy | 14 years old, and also dressed in black. |
| The child | little sister, about four who is dressed in white, with a black sash at the waist. |