| Title | : | Six Characters in Search of an Author and Other Plays |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 014018922X |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780140189223 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 224 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1921 |
Six Characters in Search of an Author and Other Plays Reviews
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In this collection of three of Pirandello's plays, including his most famous work Six Characters in Search of an Author, a common question threads itself through each: what is real and what is fiction?
In Six Characters in Search of an Author, a family of 'characters' invade the rehearsal of a play and demand to find an author. 'One is born to life in many forms,' the father says 'as a tree, or a stone, as water, a butterfly... or as human. And one can also be born as a character.' These characters are stuck without a text.
The whole play is a musing on what is real and what isn't, and to some extent the role of the author, AND begs the philosophical question of what happens to characters outside of their author's text? There's a lot going on. I feel I need a good lecture series on the whole thing. But it is enjoyable if you're into the whole Theatre of the Absurd stuff.
My favourite play in the collection was the second play, Henry IV. It involves a man who receives a head injury and believes himself to be Henry IV (the German one, not the French one or the English one). So, all his family and friends dress up as characters from the era of Henry IV, decorate his house to look like a palace, and all play along with his fantasy. Doctor after doctor visits him but nobody can cure him.
I found Henry IV to be a more competent musing on 'characters'. Each character in this play is playing another character for the amusement of the supposed King Henry. They're all acting a play within a play. It is also a meditation on madness and begs the question, who is really mad? Henry IV or the people who play along with his fantasy? This was a really stellar play.
The final play is an odd drama. So It Is (If You Think So) involves two characters who try to claim that the other is insane, due to the particulars of a marriage. Then all the other characters spend the rest of the play trying to figure out which one is actually sane and telling the truth and which is lying and insane. It's something of a farce-cum-detective play about, once again, madness and people believing their own lies. (I've a feeling Pirandello has a thing about madness and the nature of fiction eh?)
So It Is (If You Think So) is the weakest of the bunch but is still a fine play.
Overall this collection is a nice little compendium of probably Pirandello's best-known works. I feel I could probably hold my own in a conversation about Pirandello now (which will probably never happen but *just in case*). -
A great work, perhaps the best play of the 20thC. And a standard for great art: Think you've written really well? Did the audience fight for 20 minutes at the end, divided between hostility and admiration? That's what happened 10 Maggio '21, Teatro Valle di Roma. (Interesting that around then Italy won a gold medal in the 1920 Antwerp Olympics, but the Belgian band did not know the new Italian national anthem: they played O Sole Mio--and all the stands sang along. Unfortunately, the writer Capurro [?] had died a couple years earlier.)
The first reviewer said the issues of art vs life, and the nature of play-writing and performance are universal. It is also, of course, metadramatic, with the Son asseverating, "I am an undeveloped character."
The Capocomico (not really a "producer," but head of the troupe) treats the real lives of the people they stage as if they're invented--which brutalizes the "real" people.
As Molière tells about the task of writing comedy late in his Critique de L'Ecole des Femmes, Pirandello expresses his method late in Sei Personaggi in cerca d'autore.* The Father reflects on literature's superiority to life; a character has a life, he is always "someone," but a man, un uomo:
"un personaggio ha veramente una vita sua, segnata di caretteri suoi, per cui è sempre 'qualcuno'. Mentre un uomo-- non dico lei, adesso-- un uomo cosi in genere, può non essere 'nessuno'"(71)
Moreover, all one's lived reality today may appear an illusion tomorrow.
The Father adds that the written character is an eternal reality, immutable, so terrible or thrilling for the Capocomico to approach. The Capocomico responds, But where have you ever seen a character step out of his part and explain the part, as you just have? "Quando mai s'è visto un personaggio che, uscendo dlla su parte, si sia messo a perorarla così come fa lei, e a proporla, a spegarla. Io non l'ho mai visto!"
Illusion, the question that ends it. Is the boy's death acted?
Now, may I add, Giordano Bruno's one comedy, Candelaio, is also metadramatic--in 1582! In the last scene the Latin teacher, just beaten as he did his students, is asked to look at the audience, "Doesn't it seem you're on stage?" Yes, it does. "At what point in the drama would you like to be?" The End! "Then hold up the Plaudite sign."
*My Italian copy, Biblioteca Economica Newton, Newton Compton: Roma, 1997. And economica it was, only $1.80,
3000 lira. -
The theater of Luigi Pirandello relentlessly begs the question, within a theatrical context, of what is realistic and what is fictional drama. An appropriate, recent example of Pirandello's influence at work is Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, NY, a film in which the main character Caden's attempt to make a theatre about "everything" results in a sort of solipsistic confusion about what he is actually experiencing and what is merely an acted out rendition of his past (or present for that matter). Kaufman, who does have a slight background in the theatre himself, took this theme and reinvigorated what was an already innovative idea.
This of course makes for a very theoretical type of theater. And Pirandello, once he has laid out his main concept, spends much of the time within his plays musing on exactly what makes staged performance, theater. Take Six Characters in Search of an Author for example. A theater group is putting on Pirandello's own play, Ille Gioco del Parti (the Game of Roles). The play is interrupted by a quarreling family of six. The father of the family explains that they are in search of someone to finish their story. After explaining their background and current conflict, he pleads with the director of the play to complete this real-life drama. Pirandello tactfully juxtaposes the actors doing the Pirandello play, and the characters who almost seem to invade the theater with their dramatic reality. So the question that keeps coming up here is, well, to put it frankly; what is reality? Pirandello was part of a theater movement called anti-illusionism, or theatricalism. This movement rejected realism in favor of dreamlike symbolism. It shows too. Despite the fact that the father's character defends his family's actual situation and how steeped in reality it is, Pirandello is still trying to make the point that this is yet another layer of some sort of theatrical drama. The odd thing about this play is that the actual situation and history of the family seems irrelevant after a point. It is rather the questions about theater that Pirandello poses that makes Six Characters in Search of an Author such an engaging play.
The other two plays in this Penguin edition, Henry IV and So It Is (If You Think So) are concerned with the same basic questions. Although in these plays there is a more solid emphasis on how madness can play an important role in determining what is real and what is imagined or fictionalized. Henry IV is all about a man who is diagnosed by his family as insane, in light of which an historically based fiction is created to appease his delusions. The question here is, is he actually mad, or is he the one placating his family's madness? So It Is (If You Think So) assesses the reliability of personal testimony as truth. One family, the Agazzi's, are obsessed with the mysterious lives of another family, the Ponza's. Regardless of the source of truth about the Ponza's living situation, the Agazzi's would never be content. Once again, this is Pirandello questioning the reliability of language as well as personal testimony.
Pirandello's epistemology is so utterly pessimistic and distrustful that his plays can be a bit long-winded. Despite the playful brilliance of this content, his trademark, endless meta-questioning tends to overwhelm most of the dramatic elements. It's almost unfortunate in a way because it seems as if some of his plays could actually be written as theoretical essays on theater rather than actual plays. Still, Six Characters in Search of an Author is a delightful piece of modernist theater, and was an incredibly innovative play for its time. -
They say I was born in June. The day, the year somehow ceases to exist. I live with my mother. She stares at the wall, singing songs unnoticing my existence in the house. Is this how being an orphan feels like? I used to work at Madame Pace’s dress shop. Only it wasn’t a dress shop. It was a whore house where I used to entertain clients throughout the night. My mother was unaware of my earnings, but as if it mattered. Then, one day I fell in love. In fact, I fell in love with his eyes. The same brown affectionate eyes that I own. They were so memorable, they were mine. I could see myself in them. My eyes on this strange face, mesmerizing yet daunting. He was my client, elderly yet so affectionate. Months went by, but he never visited me again. I looked for him but no avail. They say, he shot himself out of guilt. He was my biological father. The shame of seducing his own blood ate him up after finding my truth. So, as I lay in a pool of blood, the cold metal burning against my sinful hands, I pierce the sharp edge into the warm blob of flesh. I killed my baby. I killed my brother. I practically cease to exist now. Shame and numbness has weighed my soul into nothingness. The man once my mother had left my father for took her away. So, here I come to you with an unfilled life and an unfinished story pleading you to bring an authored conclusion.
“You imbecile”, yelled the stage-manager. “You expect me to believe this garbage and let my actors perform your absurdity".
“Yes”, I affirm, “The settings should be realistic and the truth should be told in its unaltered form.”
“I am an unrealized character sir”, I humbly say, “I need you to finish my story and bring it to life”.
The stage manager now enraged walks away hurling obscenities and muttering, “Acting is our business here. Truth up to a certain point, but no further”; as he looks at me with a sardonic smile.
Pirandello illuminates the ‘Theatre of Absurd’ genre in this bizarre performance. A form of drama that emphasizes the absurdity of human existence by employing disjointed, repetitious and meaningless dialogue, purposeless and confusing situations and plots that lack realistic or logical development. Purely in its theatrical form he depicts a tale of six characters in search of an author who is able not only to complete their fragmentary story but to perform their ingenuous legitimacy. A story which is not a story after all. Through the numerous arguments between the six characters and the stage manager about portrayal of reality in its unaltered state to the audiences marks the debate of life reality v/s stage reality. The sense of illusion what is illustrated to be a reality on performance stage is far from the factual forms.
The plethora of reality television that demarcates an entire generation outlook mutates the genuineness of its characters. How real are the nuances of these actors who state publicly that their respected shows are not scripted but spontaneous? The movies that state ‘based on a true story’, how far do they enact the truth or is pragmatism edited to normalization of absurdity. Pirandello stresses on the theatre being an illusion of reality where actors masquerade real emotions through rehearsals and mutability.
A brilliant existentialism perception of individuals being characters all through their life portraying roles that their born into and the normality of emotions attached to their specific roles. Who are we? The roles that we are born into or the tangible roles we want to play. -
Sáu nhân vật đi tìm tác giả ra đời vào năm 1921, là “cú bomb” thật sự không chỉ cho riêng Pirandello giúp tên tuổi ông biết đến rộng rãi trên toàn thế giới; mà còn là những đổi mới truyền thống kịch nghệ. Với sự độc đáo và gây sửng sốt về muôn mặt vấn đề, có thể nói đây là đỉnh cao của kịch nghệ thế kỉ 20, và là dấu mốc chói lọi của nhà văn được trao Nobel Văn chương 1932.
Luigi Pirandello trong các tác phẩm của mình, hầu như luôn đi tìm một nhân dạng đã mất. Văn chương của ông là sự bóc trần sự thật. Ngòi bút là nhát gươm xé toạc bóng dáng ẩn chứa trong gương, để ông, trong hành trình có phần cô độc, xóa nhòa dấu gạch nối trong cái tôi thứ hai, và nhiều cái tôi xếp hàng dài nữa, trong thời nhân quần đảo điên. Nếu các tác phẩm như Đi tìm nhân dạng hay Mattia Pascal quá cố có một nhân vật thực trên hành trình đi tìm tiếng nói bản thân, thì Sáu nhân vật đi tìm tác giả lại hiển hiện hơn sự đối đầu thực tại và mộng ảo, khi đó là vở kịch nay được diễn lại nhưng luôn nhập nhằng giữa sự thật và mang hàm ý sự thật.
Ngay từ thời khắc được trình diễn, vở kịch đã khiến khản giả sởn gai ốc bởi sự mới lạ của nó. Bởi nhẽ, khi người ta chờ một hiện thực được kể lại từ ảo mộng, thì những nhân vật của Pirandello không làm gì khác là khuấy tung nó lên, như một đĩa salad với mọi hỷ nộ ái ố. Họ là diễn viên, hay nhân vật chính? Câu chuyện của họ là thực, hay chỉ mộng ảo? Ngay cả Pirandello, bên cạnh motif đi tìm nhân dạng thân quen, ông cũng xoáy sâu vào vai trò của kịch, của sự diễn và cái giả dối tất yếu.
Thách thức, kiên ngạnh, trật tự trong sự mất trật tự; Sáu nhân vật đi tìm tác giả dễ bị nhận xét là hỗ lốn theo bất kì phương diện nào mà ta nhìn vào, thế nhưng khi đi sâu và hiểu rõ những thách thức Pirandello đặt ra, ta sẽ bất ngờ khi hiểu được đằng sau những mê cung muôn phương vạn hướng, bộ áo choàng lông cừu vàng của sự thật là rất đáng để thử. Vừa tôn vinh hiện thực và cũng là mộng ảo, vừa đánh đổ kịch nghệ nhưng cũng đưa nó lên một tầm cao mới; có thể nói đây là tác phẩm tiên phong nhất, nổi bật nhất và cũng đặc sắc nhất của Pirandello. -
Pirandello, always ahead of his time.
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A farce! Six Characters in Search of an Author is a remarkable invention of genius by the Italian Nobel laureate, Luigi Pirandello, which mixes the real with the verisimilar, where a drama is acted out within a drama. In this work he explores the ambiguous nature of reality and truth.
This drama is in two acts, which can be read in around ninety minutes. A director and a company of actors are in preparation for their rehearsal. Then six people or characters - a father and his family - who have already made their way into the hall, interrupt them. They say they are in search of an author and intrude on to the stage. Incredulous and reluctant as the director is, not to mention the actors, the six characters are allowed to state their case piece by piece. The director thinks they are a crazy bunch of fools, but never has a chance to have them thrown out. Eventually he is persuaded by this family of characters and taken to their story. Subsequently he readies his actors to attempt it. But the six insist that they be allowed to act out their own story, instead of the company of professional actors, since they are already familiar with the story.
The whole series seems preposterous and that is one point of the drama that Pirandello brings to light. Here Pirandello mixes reality and art, with the appearance of reality imitating art, but it is actually art's imitation of reality. Or is it? This farcical sketch of man's fallibility in distinguishing one from the other is well worth the initial confusion that ensues upon reading the first pages. -
The original metafiction. We start off with some actors and actresses, who are putting on a different Pirandello play, Mixing It Up, of which the stage manager says, “Is it my fault if France won’t send us any more good comedies, and we are reduced to putting on Pirandello’s works, where nobody understands anything and where the author plays the fool with us all?”
The titular six characters consist of a disjointed family: the Mother (aka Amalia), the Father, the Step-Daughter, the Son, the Boy, and the Child (aka Rosetta). They come into the theatre, interrupt the rehearsing players, announce that they were born characters rather than people, and demand an author for their story. The stage manager thinks they are insane, but they counter him: “Are you not accustomed to see the characters created by an author spring to life in yourselves and face each other? Just because there is no ‘book’ which contains us, you refuse to believe . . .”
The manager lets them tell their story, which is this: the Father and Mother had the Son together, but when he was two years old, Mother fell in love with Father’s secretary. Father sent the secretary away, but saw that Mother moped over him. According to Father, he sent Mother to be with the secretary because he didn’t want her to be unhappy, but according to Mother, he did it to free himself of her.
Anyway, Mother has three children with the secretary: Stepdaughter, Boy, and Child. At some point, they move away.
Two months prior to the play, the secretary died, leaving Mother a sort of widow, even though her legal husband (Father) is still alive. Mother takes her children back to her hometown (where Father still lives with the Son, but Father doesn’t know they’re back in town).
Stepdaughter, unbeknownst to Mother, begins working as a high-class call girl. One night, Father shows up as one of her clients. They’re about to exchange money for sex (and it’s not clear whether either Father or Stepdaughter recognized the other) when Mother walks in on them.
The manager is intrigued and agrees to hear their story in detail and become their “author” (to the derision of his actors). He has the characters start acting out their scenes, and assigns actors to play them; the characters are appalled by the fact that the actors run the scenes with their own inflections, gestures, and personalities, and fail to recognize themselves in the rendition.
They also object to the Manager making changes to scenes (making them more romantic, more sentimental, more audience-worth), because those changes are not their reality, as characters:
Our reality doesn’t change: it can’t change! It can’t be other than what it is, because it is already fixed forever.
The Son objects to all of this: he doesn’t want the play at all, unlike the rest of the family. He has no interest in showing the world his family’s shame, “And I stand for the will of our author in this. He didn’t want to put us on the stage, after all!”
The six characters show the Manager the rest of the story—the Child drowns in a fountain in the garden or perhaps was drowned by the Boy (the Son came up and saw the Boy watching the drowned Child in the fountain). Stepdaughter rushes over and weeps over the Child. The Boy shoots himself nearby. Stepdaughter runs away.
It’s a very curious book, and Pirandello is very funny, in an obscure wink-wink nudge-nudge way. -
One of the most progressive writers of 20th. century with a wonderful revolutionary look on human and history.
ایده ی این نمایش برای سال های ابتدای قرن بیستم، یک نبوغ است که به
زیبایی ترسیم شده. یک کمپانی بازیگری می خواهد نمایش نامه ی "قوانین بازی" را تمرین می کند. با شروع تمرینات، شش نفر ناشناس، غیر منتظره وارد می شوند و یکی از آنها ادعا می کند که ما شخصیت های کامل نشده ای هستیم، در جستجوی نویسنده ای تا داستانمان را تکمیل کند. گروه بازیگران، ابتدا می پندارند این شش نفر دیوانه اند. اما همین که آنان جزئیات داستان خود را روایت می کنند، کارگردان که جذب قصه شده، با وجود مخالفت بازیگران، می پذیرد تا داستان این شش نفر را روی صحنه بیاورد. شخصیت ها معتقدند که تنها آنها می باید در نقش خود بازی کنند و مایل اند همه چیز واقعی جلوه کند. کارگردان از بازیگران می خواهد تا تماشاگر صحنه باشند. وقایع بسیاری رخ می دهد، دختر خوانده (یکی از شخصیت ها) از دکور و وسایل راضی نیست، در لحظه ی آغار تمرین، خانم پیس (یکی دیگر از شخصیت ها) غایب است و پدر (شخصیتی دیگر) برای فریب، لباس های خانم پیس را روی لباس دیگران آویزان کرده تا غیبت او معلوم نشود، شخصیت مادر نیز، به صحنه معترض است. همین که بالاخره بخشی از صحنه تمرین می شود، کارگردان کار را متوقف می کند و از بازیگران می خواهد تا همان بخش را بازی کنند. اما شخصیت ها از این که بازیگران آنها را تقلید می کنند، به خنده می افتند و شخصیت دختر، از این که بازیگران قادر به تقلید صدا و حرکات او نیستند، نمی تواند خنده اش را متوقف کند. شخصیت پدر با کارگردان، در مورد واقع گرایی صحنه بحث می کند و شخصیت ها دوباره اجازه می یابند تا خود را بازی کنند. جدال میان واقعیت و بازی، با رضایت کارگردان از تمرین، محو می شود. در صحنه ی پایانی در باغ، وقتی دخترخوانده، بچه و پسر نزد پدر می مانند، و پدر به دنبال مادر می گردد، پسر اعتراف می کند که از خانواده متنفر است و دیگران را عضو خانواده نمی داند. صحنه با غرق دختر کوچولو در استخر، خودکشی پسربچه با هفت تیر و فرار دخترخوانده از تیاتر خاتمه می یابد. کارگردان که از این همه گیج شده، به این نتیجه می رسد که بهرحال روزش را خرج تشخیص واقعیت از ناواقعیت کرده. این نمایش نامه نیز با نام "شش شخصیت در جستجوی نویسنده" به فارسی برگردانده شده و در تهران روی صحنه رفته است. -
Pirandello is awesome. Clever, witty and marvelous.
Somewhere in the world there is a picture of me next to his statue in Agrigento, Sicily, Italy.
I'd like to have that picture back. I was skinny and had hair back then.
Anyway, can't recommend Pirandello enough. -
Masterpiece. HILARIOUS masterpiece.
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For a book that I read off and on for months (and therefore clearly not one I was particularly compelled by), I have to say I really enjoyed all three plays in this collection, and I can't decide which I liked best. The first (and titular) story is about a group of "characters" who show up during a play rehearsal (cleverly, the actors are rehearsing another of the actual author's plays). They claim to have been invented at some point but need someone to tell and finish their story, and they try to explain that they are not authors and not people but characters who have no choice but to be what they were written to be. They are somehow compelling to the director of the other play, who accepts their story despite not fully understanding or believing in them, and he tries to figure out how to tell their lives the way they want them told. However, the characters seem dismayed that the actors in this troupe are going to try to play them, and it's this odd dance between the characters trying to tell the actors how to portray them and telling the awful stories of their family drama and their lives. It's got this very creepy realism about it where they're both aware of the tragedy of what and who they are and also unaware of any exit they could have to the trap they're in--being compelled somehow to discuss their past, live it out, and exist in a strange balance with their inevitable fate while knowing it's both fictional and real.
The most intriguing bit about this story for me was when the characters couldn't stop criticizing the set and the acting that was supposed to be them, to the point that they got the director to listen to them in setting up a scene where another missing character was not present and THEY BASICALLY MADE HER APPEAR BY GETTING CLOSE ENOUGH WITH THE SET. This other character just showed up because she couldn't not; she was part of the original scene when it happened in their real fictional lives, so she appeared when it was time to do so. It felt like a Twilight Zone episode for a second. I also found the visuals of how the "masks" were described very interesting, and kept trying to picture the characters. The awful description of what happened to the stepdaughter when she is propositioned by the father and how that affects the mother is really well told. And the ending of course was really memorable.
The second play, "Henry IV," was similar to the first in that people are portraying other people and there is some confusion over who is engaged in a ruse. Henry IV is actually not Henry IV; he is a man (his real name isn't revealed) who fell off a horse and hit his head while PLAYING Henry IV in a costumed event, and when he came to he believed he really was Henry IV. After he was determined to be suffering from a consistent, longstanding delusion, others in his life decided he would be content living in a dwelling made to look like a royal castle, with servants paid to pretend they are living in the eleventh century. (My favorite thing was when they hired a new guy and he thought he was to be working for a more well-known Henry IV, so he studied the wrong Henry.) There's some really interesting discussion of the responsibility others have to the mad, and then some even more interesting developments when Henry confesses to some of the other characters that he used to be genuinely deluded but now knows it is modern times and he is not Henry IV--but still prefers the ruse to reality. I wasn't so into the plot where the daughter of his former crush is dressed up like her mother as an attempt to "shock" Henry into reality, but this is one of those plays where you end up thinking maybe everyone is kind of awful.
And the last play was probably the one I had the most fun with, "So It Is (If You Think So)." It was a bizarre situation where a group of nosy neighbors basically want to know what's going on with some folks living nearby, one of whom is a big shot in the local government. One neighbor is an old woman who claims her daughter is married to a man who loves her so much he won't let her go outside, so she has to communicate with her own mother in little notes passed between balconies. And the man claims that he once was married to the old woman's daughter, but the old woman is crazy and her daughter is actually dead, and now she thinks his second wife is her daughter and he doesn't let her see the old woman because that's awful and awkward. But the plot thickens! Because now the old woman says her original explanation is a cover story for when the man went crazy and . . . well, it just gets complicated, and soon the neighbors all have their doubts about who to believe. They want answers, and employ various methods to research records, talk to people who knew the parties from way back, and even go so far as to demand that they get to talk to the wife/daughter. What's the real story? Uh . . . well, nobody knows. Do we care? Yes, but maybe no, but maybe yes. Okay! That was a lot of fun and I loved the absurdity. -
Three plays, all covering (in some way) people portraying people they are not, while involving other people in various ruses for various purposes. In one, six characters search for an author who can carry their stories into reality, as they struggle with their fate of being unable to be anything other than what they were written to be and having to see actors take up their identities to portray them (even as they go through the motions of their own lives). In another, a man with a head injury wakes up thinking he's Henry IV, and when the delusion seems incurable his family arranges to accommodate the delusion, only to later find out how long the delusion actually persists and what keeps "Henry" in his royal life now. And in the last, a man, his wife, and his wife's mother have a complicated relationship in which the man and mother-in-law both tell various stories to the neighbors to explain the peculiarities of their interactions; is the man lying that his mother-in-law is crazy and only THINKS his wife is her daughter, or is the mother lying to protect the sanity of the man who believes his wife is a different person? (Hey, why doesn't someone ask the wife? And why doesn't that seem to solve anything?)
The importance of truth--and the way lies can become a type of living truth--is a theme throughout all of these plays. It's very entertaining to get caught up in the drama of each of these micro-cultures of families with very peculiar, specific problems and get invested in what is going to happen (even when there are quite a lot of characters you're not meant to exactly like). -
This review is split by each play in the collection.
Six characters in search of an author (3 stars):
I am definitly going to have to re-read this, I'm not sure I understood exactly what was going on. I really enjoyed the first scene in here, where the cast were getting ready to rehearse the play that was being put on. I think a lot of the humour for me came from the relatability of the situations. Once the "characters" arrived I got very confused. I think some of the confusion came from the language used because of how old the play is. However the phylosophical nature of it was a bit much for me. I believe it was a commentary on reality and closure, I may be completely mistaken on that though. I thought that certain things in the "characters" plot line came out of nowhere, however given the fact that they were technically personifications from a never finished play, that could have been the whole point. I also think the ending happened somewhat out of nowhere. I'd be interested in how this would be performed though. -
I read this play years ago, and I recently put it on my reading list because it such an influential play of the 20th century. The play sets the stage for future absurdist plays of the 1950’s and forces my students to engage with a meta-theatrical work.
I’m not sure I like this term “meta-“ anymore because I think that since writing was invented, literature has contained elements and structures that force the reader to realize he is engaging with artifice. -
This is a classic of absurdist theater written in 1921... while a manager is directing another Pirandello play six characters show up without an author and only a sketchy plot. It's a bit disconcerting...BUT it makes us think about the difference between reality the unreality of drama.
This is considered one of the greatest plays of the 20th century. -
So glad a friend found me this book of plays! Intelligent farces with curious characters, full of personality and wit. 'So It Is', the last play stands out as the extremes of curiousity of strangers - town gossip gone wild.
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Provocative plays that dwell on the nature of reality, the fictions we create for ourselves and the tenuousness of sanity.
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I really enjoyed these plays, shame Pirandello was a fascist
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Non di facile comprensione. In fondo siamo tutti personaggi in cerca di autore.
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did i write a 4 page paper on this? yes. do i understand what it's about? no not really
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3.5 rounded down to 3/5 stars. (Goodreads, get half-stars.)
I definitely need to see these performed. Reading them was wholly unsatisfying. -
Six Characters in Search of an Actor is a highly original play by the Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello. The play starts with six characters coming to the stage, claiming that they were invented by the author but were rejected by him. They demanded the Manager to stage their drama. A confusing family tragedy enfolds between and among the six characters (the father, mother, step-daughter, son, boy, child). It is therefore a play about a play within a play and theatre within a theatre.
The characters moans that the actors can never represent them because the characters are more than real than the actors. Actors act because the characters are in the book. What if, as it is now in the play, the characters themselves come to live on the stage? Do we need actors anymore?
Fresh from reading Stanislavski's Actor Prepares, these questions interest me. On actors' role, Stanislavski said, 'At such times a creative artist feels his own life in the life of his part and the life of his part identical with his personal life. This identification results in a miraculous metamorphosis.' Actor makes a character to come to live through his imagination and emotional memory. He contributes his own creative inputs to make a metamorphosis, implying that the character is no longer the author's sole ownership but is rather transformed by the actor.
However if the characters themselves were on the stage, the actors would have been superfluous. As the Father repeatedly said, the actors could never represent them, no matter how skillful their actings were.
At heart, the issue is reality. Paradoxically the characters are more real than the actors insofar the characters are fixed and timeless in a book while actors and people in general are merely illusions by their daily changing. However if reality were defined as physical certainty, then individuals had the physical bodies of which the characters were lacking.
Luigi Pirandello is credited as the precursor of absurdism, existentialism and post-modernism. I haven't read his other plays but this play alone is enough to peep into his complex brain.
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The three plays in this collection are interesting because they are more about the concept over characterizing any characters, although the last play So it is (If you think so) is the most interested in its individual characters. Six Characters in Search of an Author is the most interesting concept, and the toughest to pull off, but Pirandello pulls it off rather well. The plays probably needs to be seen over being read (as all plays, but especially this one) as the words do not really create a climax as the images do. On the dialogue of all three plays, it is often a little dry, but that may be due to the translation. So it is (If you think so) has the best dialogue of all three, as the dialogue matches the characters quite well, but the first two plays' dialogue seems to lay on the side of the poetic over what people would say, although this is more justified in Henry IV. And speaking of Henry IV, that is probably the best play of the bunch. Although the characters aren't as fleshed out as So it is (If you think so), the play is the most interesting, and has the best character (Henry IV) in all of his plays, mostly because of his philosophy, and his uncertain madness, which is the theme of the play.
The theme of uncertainty is the focal point of all three plays, as well as the complications of relativity, and the idea of the personna always being in movement, that is, that one is always changes how they act around different people, and for each person they are almost someone else, so the question Pirandello likes to bring up is can you say that you are you if you are always changing? Can you be defined? As a playwright who enjoys writing about this topic, and thinking about it, it is quite rewarding, but if you have thought about the subject in depth before Pirandello only lays down the basics of the theories.
Overall, grand plays. -
I performed in "Six Characters..." and read "So it is (If you think so)" in college. The performing experience was brutal, a mixture of the awkwardness of the script and an ill-conceived production that lacked focus and meaning and even sense. The faint memory of "So it is" led me to pick up this collection again--a play that I remembered featuring gossipy neighbors and a purported story that changed every time a new character had their say completely convincing everyone that their perspective was the truth, only to have another character enter and convince everyone the complete opposite in the next scene. It was a good bit of writing wizardry, and I enjoyed reviewing it a second time and would like to see it performed one day. Having recently seen, "THe Skin I Live In," I impulsively made parallels. Both feature stories that are high drama -- soap operatic -- in a realistic style.
The real pleasure though was the third play that I had never read called Henry IV about a man who was presumably mad and thought he was the historic Henry IV (of the 11th century?) whose nephew has as a consequence built a throne room for him and employed men to be his subjects simply to assuage his fantasies. A great play with great passages for the Henry IV characters. It touches on all the Pirandello themes, insanity, truth and illusion, acting and reality, but with a very surprising and interesting and dense script. -
Reality is not real but constructed. From this constructed standpoint, which is called reality, conformity and anomaly become easily distinguishable. Conformity is aligned with sanity and anomalies are indicative of madness. For instance, donning military uniform to attend classes might be thought of as an act of madness on account of the violation of social norms.
Nevertheless, anomalies are not acts of insanity but marks different taste and perception of an anomalous individual. Henry 4, in this play, is a character who plays the role of a 11th Century German king. He takes his role so seriously that he, seemingly, forgets his own identity. He walks around in his castle with a lantern while his make-believe attendants and counsellors use electric bulbs as soon as he is out of sight.
The masquerade appeals to reader's notice and points out at the ubiquitous role-performing carried out by almost all individuals, though in oblivion. It is, in order to keep up with conformity, incumbent upon every one to perform various roles from time to time. A man is, most often, required to play the role of a son, husband, father, brother, friend, 'good' citizen. This act of role-performing leaves no room for originality. All performers are clowns, or at least that's what the protagonist is trying to get across. The question is of a choice now : should we play clowns or madmen? -
Interesting idea of making Actors the characters and a separate set of Characters within the play, and I suppose it was new in the 1920's, but meh. I like the idea of exploring levels of truth- what's more real, life or art? But at the same time, the plot is a bit gimmicky. There are some powerful moments, but not many. I dunno, perhaps a little too intellectual and not emotional enough for me, along with a lack of impressive language. Then again, it is translated, so that doesn't really help.
FATHER: You have created living beings- more alive than those that breathe and wear clothes! Less real, perhaps; but more true!
FATHER: But that's the whole root of the evil. Words. Each of us has, inside him, a world of things- to everyone, his world of things. And how can we understand each other, sir, if, in the words I speak, I put the sense and value of things as they are inside me, whereas the man who hears them inevitably receives them in the sense and with the value they have for him, the sense and value of the world inside him? We think we can understand each other but we never do.
DIRECTOR: Oh, come on, you must have done some acting!
FATHER: No, no, sir, only as every man acts the part assigned to him- by himself or others- in this life.
