Title:
Six
Characters In Search Of An AuthorTitle:
Six
Characters In Search Of An AuthorGenre: -Drama
Sub-genre: -
Nationality: Italian-
Time Period: 20th Century
First and Last Read by Dr. Rearick -1977 at ENC // May 2001
Rated: A+-
Location: -Dr. Rearik's Office, home and mainframe
Used for: Masterpieces of World Literature
Comments: Although called "A Comedy in the Making" I suspect that few students will find this work hilarious. It is, however, absurd. It brings up basic questions about what is reality and what is not. Are the actors who have lives outside of the theater but who make a living by wearing the mask of other characters more real than the characters who have no life or existence outside of the play. The question is a mind game since we the audience are viewing the play which is the place where the characters have all their life. Thus they convince us that they are more substantial than the buffoons (as one source called them) who try ineffectively to portray them.
Very Helpful Notes can be found at Class Notes:
http://www.gradesaver.com/ClassicNotes/Titles/sixcharacters/
Dramatic Personal:
The Father: One of the characters, he initially marries a peasant
woman and has the son by her. After making her leave to live
with another man, he misses the family that she creates and
watches them grow up. He later meets his step-daughter in a
brothel and almost has sex with her before the mother stops
them. His reason for bringing the other characters to the theater
is to find an author to finish their play.
The Mother: One of the characters, she is overly emotional and
is the only character unaware of the fact that she is in fact only a
character.
The Step-Daughter: One of the characters, she is almost
seduced by the father while working as a prostitute. She is
anxious to play out the scenes in order to humiliate the father.
The Son: One of the characters, he is an aloof young man who
is upset with his mother for abandoning him as a child. He tries
to leave the theater but cannot go until his scene is played out.
The Boy: One of the characters, he is silent because he will die
at the end of the play by shooting himself.
The Child: One of the characters, she is young an silent because
she dies in the fountain at the end.
Madame Pace: A character who shows up only for her scene.
She is in charge of a dress shop that also serves as a brothel, and
she is the person for whom the step-daughter works.
The Manager: The director of the play that the theater company
is rehearsing. He is willing to listen to the father and agrees to
write down the play while the characters perform it for him.
Leading Lady: One of the actors, she is highly offended when
the characters interrupt the rehearsal.
Leading Man: One of the actors.
Second Lady: One of the actors.
Juvenile Lead: One of the actors, he is interested in the
step-daughter.
Property Man: The man who gets the various articles for each
stage setting.
Pirandello takes advantage of classical drama to create the
division between the characters and actors in the play. The "real"
actors are buffoons, the "alazones", who think they know
everything about the theater. They will make fun of the
characters and be condescending throughout the play. They
stand in contrast with the characters, the "pharmakos", who as
scapegoats and sufferers are bombarded throughout the play.
The issue of a mask on the face is extended here to include
anyone performing in a play. The actors, or the "dramatis
personae", literally mean the masks in the play. This will set up
one of the conflicts, namely the fact that the characters do not
have masks, and in that sense are more real than the actors who
try to portray them later.
Pirandello wants his audience to accept the reality of the play, to
think this is a real rehearsal of a play, and then to realize it is a
joke. This serves as his way of conveying his ideas concerning
the artificiality of the theater. It turns the play into a form of
meta-theater, in which the audience is incorporated into the play
and where the characters contemplate on the nature of theater.
The characters for example suffer and reflect on their forms, and
since they are cursed with hindsight they can reflect on their
actions even without having yet performed them for the
audience.
The Mother is the only character unaware of being a character.
She is a peasant woman whose main attribute is that she is an
emotional rather than a self-reflective character. This helps to
explain her inability to come to terms with her existence as a
character; she will try to avoid having the drama performed,
without realizing that she cannot escape her role.
The silence of children is a wonderful dramatic effect. Their
silence is necessary because they are already dead, as we find
out when the father informs the manager that they both die in
the final scene.
There are three struggles that occur in this play, the first of
which is already evident: the struggle between the characters
themselves. The characters hate each other with a passion born
from their existence as forms in an unfinished play. The
step-daughter despises her father for going to a brothel, her
brother for keeping her out of the house, and her mother for
running away with the secretary. The son despises the entire
new family and especially his mother for abandoning him.
Pirandello takes advantage of this act to attack two things: the
setting and the director. The characters are horrified when they
realize that the setting is not at all realistic, it is not the way that
they remember it. This represents the physical difference in
location between the theater and the actual place that the events
were meant to take place. The theater cannot overcome this
limitation and must therefore remain fake. The manager's
willingness to cut and rearrange the scene is also attacked quite
vehemently by all the actors. The father argues that truth must
be played, in its unalterable form. This is a direct attack by
Pirandello on conceptual directors who cut and alter an author's
work.
Two more struggles emerge in this act. There is primarily a
struggle between the characters (tragic) and the actors (comic).
This is complemented by a secondary philosophical struggle to
ascertain who is more real, the fictional characters or the real
actors. The father says, "What, haven't we our own
temperaments, our own souls?" He is pointing out that as
characters they are more real in their parts than the actors can
ever be, whereas the actors are claiming that he can never be
"real" because he cannot change his reality.
There are therefore two realities: one consisting of the actors and
their props, and one comprised of the characters. This dual
reality is seen in Mdm. Pace's dress shop where the scene is first
played by the characters and then acted by the actors. The
furious disapproval of the way the scene is acted heightens the
tension between the two realities: what is real is not necessarily
"real" in any sense.
This leads Pirandello to a form of relativity of truth in this act.
The manager claims, "Acting is our business here. Truth up to a
certain point, but no further." He is unwilling to concede that the
stage is always trying to show truth. Pirandello is essentially
mocking the hypocrisy with which truth is made to fit the stage
and then presented as if it were the real truth.
Pirandello deals here with the immutability of reality for the
characters. There is a conflict of life versus form, where the
characters are forms. These forms imprison them into the action
they were imagined for, and it is involuntary for them to be what
they are. Thus the son tries to escape his form, but cannot leave
the stage. This contrasts with Pirandello's previous work, Henry
IV, where Henry at least can choose to remain in his role. Here
the Mother and Son struggle against their forms, but are unable
to leave and must play their parts.
This final moment of drama is primarily an attempt to
disintegrate the stage reality. The sense of illusion with respect to
reality is challenged, and the manager and his actors are left
unsure whether what they witnessed really happened or whether
it was all acting. Of course, both interpretations are accurate,
because for the characters it was real whereas for the actors it is
a scene that can be played again. Pirandello is saying that the
tradition of reality in the theater is false.