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Six Characters in Search of an Author | Introduction

Six Characters in Search of an Author created Luigi Pirandello's international reputation in the 1920s and is still the play by which he is most widely identified.

With originality that was startling to his contemporaries, Pirandello introduced a striking and compelling dramatic situation that initially baffled but eventually dazzled audiences and critics alike. In what begins as a realistic play he introduces six figures who make the extraordinary claim that they are the incomplete but independent products of an artist's imagination—"characters" the artist abandoned when he couldn't complete their story. These "characters" have arrived on the stage to find an author themselves, someone who will give them the fullness of literary life that their original author has denied them. Furthermore, these "characters" claim that they are more "real" than the actors who eventually want to portray them.

This concept was so startling it helped to incite a riot in the audience when the original production of the play was staged in Rome on May 10, 1921. Later that year, however, audiences and critics had assimilated the extraordinary idea and were enchanted by a remounted production in Milan. The play would then see successful productions in London and New York in February and October of 1922 in Paris in 1923, and in Berlin and Vienna in 1924. Pirandello's own theatre company, founded in 1925, then performed the play in Italian throughout the major cities of Europe and North and South America. As a result of this assault on the theatre world, Pirandello became one of the most respected and influential dramatists in the world by the end of the 1920s, and today Six Characters in Search of an Author is considered one of the most influential plays in the history of world literature.

Six Characters in Search of an Author Summary

Act I
When Six Characters in Search of an Author begins, the stage is being prepared for the daytime rehearsal of a play and several actors and actresses are milling about as the Producer enters and gets the rehearsal started. Suddenly the guard at the stage door enters and informs the Producer that six people have entered the theatre asking to see the person in charge. These six "characters" are a Father, a Mother, a 22-year-old Son, a Stepdaughter, an adolescent Boy, and young female Child. These "characters" claim that they are the incomplete creations of an author who couldn't finish the work for which they were conceived. They have come looking for someone who will take up their story and embody it in some way, helping them to complete their sense of themselves.

The Producer and his fellow company members are initially incredulous, convinced that these "people" have escaped from a mental institution. But the Father, speaking for the other characters, argues that they are just as "real" as the people getting ready to rehearse their play. Fictional characters, he maintains, are more "alive'' because they cannot die as long as the works they live in are experienced by others. The Father explains that he and the other "characters" want to achieve their full life by completing the story that now only exists in fragments in the author's brain.

The Stepdaughter and Father begin to tell their "story.'' The Father was marned to the Mother but left her many years ago when she became attracted to a young assistant or secretary in his employ. Though the Father was angered by his wife's feelings and sent his young assistant away, he grew impatient with his wife's melancholy and sent their son away, to be raised and educated in the country. He eventually turned his wife out and she sought her lover, bearing three more children by him before the man died two months before the piay begins. These three children and the son from her marriage with the Father stand before the Producer and his theatrical troupe.

The Father's version of these events is variously contested both by the Mother and the Stepdaughter. The Father ciaims that he turned his wife out because of his concern for her and his natural son and that later he was genuinely concerned for his wife's new family. However, the Mother claims the Father forced her into the arms of the assistant because he was simply bored with her, and the Stepdaughter claims that the father stalked her sexually as... » Complete Six Characters in Search of an Author Summary