This is the play that established Pirandello's international reputation as a playwright. Already well-known m Italy as a prose writer, critic, and poet, he had begun to write for the theatre shortly before World War I increasing his output rapidly after 1918. Six Characters caused a scandal when it first appeared, and the first night ended with a riot, due to the taboo subject-matter of the play: incestuous desire.

Six Characters is the first of three plays known as the "theatre-in-the-theatre" biology, because the action involves the attempted staging of a play within another play. A rehearsal of a Pirandello play is supposedly taking place in an Italian theatre, but is interrupted by the arrival of six people, who claim to be characters looking for a playwright to tell their story. That story then gradually unfolds, told principally by the Father and the Stepdaughter. At some point in the past, the Father and the Mother have separated, and the Mother has gone to live with another man by whom she has had children. She is accompanied on stage by the Son and by two smaller children, the Boy and the Little Girl. Relations between the characters are strained: the Stepdaughter detests the Son and the Boy, the Son has a grudge against the Mother, and the Father is an outsider altogether. The Father claims to have always loved the Mother and her children, but the Stepdaughter depicts him as a debauched elderly man who used to spy on her when she was a child.

In the second act, the Characters summon up a seventh person, Madame Pace, the owner of a seedy milliner's shop that serves as a brothel, where the Stepdaughter was working and where the Father met her when he came looking for a girl. The incestuous encounter between the Father and the Stepdaughter is interrupted by the Mother's cry. In the last act, the Mother tries to win over her sullen, resentful Son, but while her attention is distracted, the Little Girl drowns in a fountain and the Boy shoots himself The Stepdaughter runs away and the Father, Mother, and Son are left, prisoners of their own despair. The boundary between fiction and reality has completely broken down, the Director and the other Actors are left bewildered by what has happened, and the play ends. Pirandello uses ingenious devices to mark the passage from one act to another, and manages to preserve the shape of the well-made play while simultaneously deconstructing it as a form. The text of the play was modified considerably after the famous Pitoeff production in 1923, when the appearance of the Six Characters, one of the great moments of theatre magic, was heightened by having them arrive on stage in a huge elevator. In the preface that he added to the second version of the play, Pirandello explains the function of the Characters in relation to his own creative process. He was constantly concerned with the problem of the vital, moving process that constitutes life, in contrast to the rigid fixity of art, and Six Characters explores that duality. The Characters are fixed in their tragic story, unmovably, for as Pirandello says, they are created out of "unvarying fantasy." Ironically, although the Characters are fictitious, Pirandello argues that they appear more real than the Actors with their "changeable naturalness." Art, for Pirandello, can seem more real than life, and this is the paradox he seeks to expose.

What Pirandello does m Six Characters is to strip the play down to its bones, offering the audience the basic tools—the Actors, the Characters, a...