Six Characters in Search of
an Author
Luigi Pirandello
Written in 1921
Luigi Pirandello (1867 –1936)
Nobel Prize winner in 1934
Plot
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Six characters appear on a stage that is being used for
the rehearsal of a Pirandello play.
They ask the Stage Manager for help since they have
been created and then discarded by an author.
They seek another author to cast them in a play and let
them play out their roles
A group of actors steps forward to portray the lives that
the six characters have just described, but when they do
so the characters object to their re-enactment, claiming
that it distorts the truth.
When one of the characters commits suicide, the rest of
the characters mourn his death while the actors insist
nervously that it is only make believe. Which is it? And
how will the situation be resolved?
Meaning of the Play and its
Relationship to Cubism
Whereas cubism is art about
art, this play focuses on theater
about theater, on the process of
“how to craft” a play.
Problems to be Resolved
by the Play
How is the raw material of life
transformed into theater?
How are multiple perspectives
(characters/actors) revealing the
complexity of life incorporated into
a unified whole in a theatrical
production?
How is the “eternal moment” (the
present) expressed in a theatrical
production?
What are the roles that dramatic
conventions and stagecraft play
in a theatrical production?
How is complex characterization
portrayed on the stage?
How are unity and a harmonious
balance (composition) achieved
in a theatrical production?
Theatrical Innovations
introduces Pirandello's device of the "theatre
within the theatre"
 explores various levels of illusion and reality and
the distortion of truth
 presents a theatrical collage, exploring the
interaction between theater and life on the stage
 had a great impact on later writers, particularly
such practitioners of the Theatre of the Absurd
as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and Jean
Genet, as well as Jean Anouilh and Jean-Paul
Sartre
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