Pirandello and his SIX Characters

SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR

Luigi Pirandello

Context

A brilliant playwright who practiced what is regarded as a precursor of Absurdism, Luigi Pirandello was born in Girgenti (now Agrigento), Sicily in 1867 to a wealthy family of sulfur miners. During the 1880s, he attended the University of Rome and then the University of Bonn, earning his doctorate in Roman philology in 1891. In 1894 he married Antonietta Portulano, the daughter of a sulfur merchant, in what appears to have been a business deal between their respective families. From 1904 onward, Portulano suffered severe bouts of hysteria and other mental illness that weighed heavily on their household, Pirandello ultimately institutionalizing her in 1919 upon the capture of both their sons in a World War I military campaign.

Pirandello began writing while at university and returned to Rome in the late 1890s to pursue a career as an author. After a flood ruined his family's sulfur mines, Pirandello began to support himself by teaching rhetoric and then Italian Literature at various local colleges. During this time, he translated Goethe's Roman Elegies, wrote hisElegie Renae, two books of poetry, and a volume of short stories entitled Amore Senz' Amore (1894). Pirandello's first novel, L'esclusa, appeared in 1901; Il Fu Matta Pascal, his first major success, followed in 1904. Though Pirandello had begun writing plays in the 1880s, he initially considered drama an impoverished medium in comparison with the novel. He would only come to the theater in 1915, ferociously producing sixteen plays in six years. Pirandello became so prominent on the Italian dramatic scene that he would later win Mussolini's support to lead an ultimately failed campaign to establish a National Art Theater in Rome. Much to the dismay of his present readers, Pirandello was an ardent fascist who joined the party in 1923. Though he harbored a somewhat idiosyncratic and not entirely uncritical relationship to the government, Pirandello remains remembered for his blunt declarations of allegiance to the party and his extravagant displays of support, most famously, "I am a Fascist because I am an Italian." The most oft-cited example of the latter is the donation of his personal gold, including his 1934 Nobel Prize medal, for the Italian campaign into Ethiopia.

Eric Bentley, perhaps Pirandello's most canonical critic in Anglo-American dramatic studies, divides the playwright's career into three major phases: the early period of Sicilian folk comedies, Pirandello's philosophical works, and that of the mythic plays written under fascist rule. It is for the works of the second period, those often considered progenitors of the absurdist theater, that Pirandello is remembered today. Apart from the famous Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), notable examples include Right You Are If You Think You Are (1917), a tale of a mysterious woman who could be either one of two different people, and Henry IV (1922), the story of a madman who believes he is a German Emperor from the eleventh-century. To accommodate his madness, his sister keeps him in a medieval castle surrounded by actors playing the role of his courtiers.

Premiering to great controversy in Rome, Six Characters in Search of an Author recounts the fate of a family of characters left unrealized by their author. Desperate to come to life, the characters interrupt the rehearsal of another Pirandello play and demand that the director and cast stage their story. Pirandello retrospectively grouped this surreal tale in a trilogy of "the theater in the theater," along with Each His Own Way (1924) and Tonight We Improvise (1930). Taking the theater itself as its setting and subject, this trilogy drew upon the relations between all the major players of the dramatic spectacle—directors, actors, characters, spectators, and critics—to "present every possible conflict." As such a deeply self- referential or meta-theatrical work, Six Characters is also a key exercise in what Pirandello termed il teatro dello specchio or "the mirror theater," a play that turns a mirror onto the theater itself. As critic Anne Paolucci notes, the result then is not a reflection but a shattering, Pirandello generating his works through the fracturing of the dramatic spectacle itself.

Plot Overview

The audience faces an empty stage. The company enters from the back and gets ready for a rehearsal of Pirandello's Mixing it Up. The Manager enters and calls for the second act. The Leading Man asks if he must absolutely wear a cook's cap. The Manager jumps up in rage.

The Six Characters enter from the rear. A "tenuous light" surrounds them—the "faint breath of their fantastic reality." With embarrassment, the Father explains to the angry Manager that they are in search of an author. When the Manager replies that he has no time for madmen, Father rejoins that he must know life is full of absurdities that do not need to appear plausible since they are true. To reverse this process is the madness of acting: that is, "to create credible situations, in order that they may appear true."

Father explains that as their author unjustly denied them stage-life and its immortality, they bring their drama to the company. The seductive Step-Daughter begins its elaboration: after what took place between her and Father, she cannot remain in society, and she cannot bear to witness her widowed Mother's anguish for her legitimate Son. Confused, the Manager asks for the situation and wonders how a Mother can be a widow if the Father is alive. The Step-Daughter explains that the Mother's lover—her, the Child, and Boy's father—died two months ago. Father proper once had a clerk who befriended Mother. Seeing the "mute appeal" in their eyes, he sent her off with him and took her Son. As soon as the clerk died, the family fell into poverty and, unbeknownst to Father, returned to town. Step-Daughter became a prostitute for Madame Pace. The "eternal moment" of their drama shows the Step-Daughter surprising Father as her unsuspecting client. Father then gestures to the Son, whose cruel aloofness is the hinge of the action. The Mother will re-enter the house with the outside family. Because the son will make her family feel foreign to the household, the Child will die, the Boy will meet tragedy, and Step- Daughter will flee.

The Manager takes interest. He gives the Actors a twenty-minute break and retires with the Characters to his office. After twenty minutes, the stage bell rings. The Step-Daughter emerges from the office with the Child and Boy. She laments the Child's death in the fountain and angrily forces Boy to show his revolver. If she had been in his place, she would have killed Father and Son, not herself.

Everyone returns to the stage, and the Manager orders the set prepared for rehearsal. Confused, Father wonders why the Characters themselves should not go before the public. The Manager scoffs that actors act. The Manager suddenly notices that Pace is missing. Father asks the Actresses to hang their hats and mantles on the set's clothes pegs. Lured by the articles of her trade, Pace appears from the rear. The Leading Lady denounces this "vulgar trick." Father wonders why the actors are so anxious to destroy the "magic of the stage" in the name of a "commonplace sense of truth." Pace's scene with Step-Daughter begins before Father finishes. When the actors urge them to speak more loudly, Step-Daughter replies that they cannot discuss such matters loudly—Father might overhear. Pace comes forward, saying, "Yes indeed sir, I no wanta take advantage of her." The actors erupt in laughter. The Manager finds the comic relief of her accent magnificent. Father cautiously greets the young prostitute and gallantly offers her a new hat. Step-Daughter protests that she cannot wear one as she is in mourning. The Manager interrupts, and calls the Leading Man and Lady to play the same scene. Father protests, and Step-Daughter bursts out laughing. The Manager complains that he never could rehearse with the author present.

He instructs the Father to continue. When Step-Daughter speaks of her grief, he must reply "'I understand.'" Step-Daughter interrupts: Father actually asked her to remove her frock. She refuses to let them compose a "romantic sentimental scene" out of her disgrace. Acknowledging that tomorrow the actors will do as they wish, Step-Daughter offers them the scene as it truly was. Father's "eternal moment" is the nucleus of the first act. The Manager approves and notes that the curtain will then fall. To his annoyance, the Machinist lets the curtain down in earnest.

The curtain rises, revealing new scenery: a drop, a few trees, and the portion of a fountain basin. The Step-Daughter tells the exasperated Manager that the entire action cannot take place in the garden. The Manager protests that they cannot change scenes three or four times in an act. The Leading Lady remarks that it makes the illusion easier. Father bristles at the word "illusion." Pausing, he approaches the Manager asks if he can tell him who he really is. A character can always pose this question to a man as he is always somebody while a man might be nobody. If man thinks of all his past illusions that now do not even seem to exist, perhaps his present reality is not fated to become an illusion tomorrow. The character is more real as his reality is immutable. The Manager commands Father to stop his philosophizing. He is but imitating the manner of an author he heartily detests.

The Manager prepares the scene. Step-Daughter leads Child to the fountain. "Both at the same time" the Manager commands. The Second Lady Lead and Juvenile Lead approach and study Mother and Son. The Son objects that it is impossible to live before a mirror that not only "freezes us with the image of ourselves, but throws out likeness back at us with a horrible grimace." He also protests that there was no scene between he and Mother. When Mother went to his room to speak with him, he simply went into the garden. He then saw the drowning Child in the fountain, and the Boy standing stock still like a madman, watching her. A shot rings out from behind the trees where the Boy is hidden. Some cry that the Boy is dead; others that it is only "make believe" and "pretence." "Pretence? Reality?" the Manager cries in frustration. "To hell with it all. Never in my life has such a thing happened to me. I've lost a whole day over these people, a whole day!"

Analysis of Major Characters

The Father

The Father is a "fattish" man in his fifties with thin, reddish hair, a thick moustache, and piercing, blue oval eyes. He is "alternatively mellifluous and violent." Along with the Step-Daughter, he is the Character who most fervently insists on the staging of the Characters' drama. In some sense, he figures as the drama's progenitor, having produced the situation of the step- household, a situation that culminates in an inadvertent sexual encounter with his Step-Daughter. Though the Father ostensibly seeks remorse, Pirandello intimates a number of times that a "deal" has perhaps been struck between the Father and Manager, the play's two authorial figures. Thus the Son and Step- Daughter warn against reading the play according to his word alone. As the Manager laments, the Father is the play's philosopher, continually stepping out of his role to sermonize about ideas of the inner workings of the Characters' drama and the relations between the Characters and Actors. His excessive tendency for preaching would mark him as a roughly drawn character and as a double for the author. In particular, the Father insists on the "reality" of the Characters, a reality he poses over and against that of the company. Unlike the "nobody" Actors, the Characters are "real somebodies" because their reality—the reality of both their drama and role—remains fixed and independent of the vagaries of time. This reality has little to do with the plausibility nor the codes of the "actable." Thus, both he and the Step-Daughter relate the sense of estrangement in seeing their reality rendered by the Actors.

The Step-Daughter

Dashing, impudent, and beautiful, the Step-Daughter also seeks the realization of the Characters' drama. Her "reality" as a Character is a fixed, grimacing mask of vengeance. She seeks stage-life to revenge herself on the Father and she appears in two principle forms that define a certain fantasy of woman. As noted above, she and the Father are the major players in their drama's traumatic scene: the inadvertent sexual encounter that precipitates the encounter between the original and surrogate families in the back of Madame Pace's shop. Exploited despite her mourning for her father, the Step-Daughter appears here as victim. At the same time, on-stage she appears seductive, exhibitionistic, and dangerously cruel.

As she tells the Manager, the Father's perversity is responsible for hers. Her perversity emerges in particular with her obsession with the spectacle of the Characters' drama. Whereas the Father offers their play as a more "cerebral drama," tracing its players' motivations, its overarching structures, and its narrative trajectories, she will conjure its scenes in speech, calling for its trappings forth on the stage. Many of these props concern the visual: the mirror, the window, and the screen. The Step-Daughter also functions as object of this spectacle. Though dressed, like the other members of her immediate family, in mourning for their own father, she wears her clothes with "great elegance." For example, she brashly erupts into a cabaret-style performance of "Prenez garde à Tchou-Tchin-Tchou": her display would lure the company into their drama's realization. More explicitly does the Step-Daughter reveal her obsession with her self-image in her memory of the author. As she tells the company, she strove most to seduce him from the shadows about his writing table. In her vision of this seduction, she progressively exiles the other Characters from the room, ultimately leaving her alone to illuminate the darkness. With the Characters' drama, the Step-Daughter would become a star. For her, the drama's stage-life would realize her self-image above all.

The Mother

Dressed in modest black and a thick widow's veil, the Mother appears crushed by an "intolerable weight of shame and abasement." Her face is "wax-like," and her eyes always downcast. She bears the anguish of the Characters' drama, serving as its horrified spectator. She is the consummate figure of grief, mourning the Characters' inexorable fate. As Pirandello notes in his preface to the play, the Mother would incarnate nature without mind in her suffering—she suffers the torture of what has befallen the family without cognizing it as the Father does. In this respect, she is not even a woman, she first and foremost a mother in anguish. Caught, like the other Characters, in the unchanging and inexorable reality of both her drama and role. She laments that she suffers her torture at every moment; her lot as mourner is fixed for eternity. The two mute children, accessories of sorts, underline her function as an image of grief. Particularly agonizing to her is the aloofness of her estranged Son, whom she will approach to no avail throughout the play.

The Son

A tall, severe man of twenty-two, the Son appears contemptuous, supercilious, and humiliated by his fellow Characters. Having been grown up in the country, he is estranged from his family and, in his aloofness, will cause the elimination of the stepchildren within the Characters' drama. Ironically then will he ultimately appear as witness to the two younger children's demise. His role as a character lies in his ashamed refusal to participate in the household and the Characters' spectacle, a spectacle to which he nevertheless remains bound. More specifically, he appears to be structurally tied within the Character's drama to the Step-Daughter, whose look of scorn and exhibitionism fixes him in his guilt, shame, and reserve. In his aversion to spectacle, he in particular attacks the Actors who would imitate them. For him, the Actor-as-mirror, in its necessary inability to reflect the Character as he sees himself, freezes the Character's self-image and renders it grotesque. The Son also protests to the Manager that he remains an unrealized character, perhaps one that even stands for the will of the author in objecting to their drama's staging. As the Father counters, however, his unrealized nature is his own situation in both the Characters' drama and its attempted rehearsal on-stage; his aloofness within the drama makes him the drama's very hinge. The Son's position as an unrealized character appears most clearly in the scene he would refuse to play with his Mother in Act III, a scene that is actually a non-scene. The Mother enters his bedroom, and the Son, in his aversion to scenes, flees to the garden to witness his step-siblings' deaths.

Themes, Motifs, and Symbols

Themes

The Theater of the Theater

As noted in the Context, Pirandello retrospectively grouped Six Characters in a trilogy of the "theater of the theater." These works generate their drama out of the theater's elements—in this case, through the conflict between actors, manager and characters, and the missing author. For Pirandello, the theater is itself theatrical—that is, it is itself implicated in the forms and dynamics of the stage. Beginning with a supposed daytime rehearsal, Six Characters puts the theater and its processes themselves on stage. Put otherwise, the play is an allegory for the theater. Thus it presents characters dubbed the Second Leading Lady and Property Man and it hinges on multiple frames of (self)-reference, staging the staging of a play within the play. Akin to a hall of mirrors, this device, the mise-en- abîme, is common to plays that would reflect on the properties of their own medium. Self-referentiality attains heights here. The play's act divisions, for example, mirror those of the Characters' drama, a number of scenes show the Actors playing the doubles of the audience, and onward. Crucial to this project is a dismantling of the conventions of the "well-made" play that would render the play's workings visible to the spectator. Six Characters often appears improvisational, sketch-like, what the Manager calls a "glorious failure." Note the aborted rehearsal, rejected and incompletely drawn characters, hastily assembled sets, and onward. To anticipate the Father's confession, one could describe Pirandello as perhaps subject to the "Demon of Experiment."

The Character's Reality

Throughout the play, the Father insists on the reality of the Characters, a reality that, as the stage notes indicates, inheres in their forms and expressions. The Father offers his most explicit meditation on the Character's reality in Act II. Here he bristles at the Actors' use of the word illusion as it relies on its vulgar opposition to reality. He approaches the Manager in a sort of face-off to challenge this opposition, one that underpins his identity. Convinced of his self-identity, the Manager readily responds that he is himself. The Father believes otherwise. While the Character's reality is real, the Actors' is not; while the Character is somebody, man is nobody. Man is nobody because he is subject to time: his reality is fleeting, always ready to reveal itself as illusion, whereas the Character's reality remains fixed for eternity. Put otherwise, time enables an opposition between reality and illusion for man. Over time, man comes to identify realities as illusion, whereas the Character exists in the timeless reality of art.

The Eternal Moment

The Father and Step-Daughter sell the Manager on their drama with the scene around which it crystallizes: the inadvertent sexual encounter between them in the back room of Madame Pace's shop. In Act I, the spectator receives it in exposition, the Father offering an existentialist interpretation of its nature. For him, its tragedy inheres in man's belief in his unitary being. He only perceives this once caught in an act, so to speak, that determines him entirely. Judged by another, he appears to himself in alienated form, suspended in a reality that he should have known. The Step-Daughter should not have seen the Father in Pace's room and he should not have become real to her. The Father's suspension as pervert simultaneously fixes him as a Character. Similarly, the other Characters remain bound to this "eternal moment." This scene, for example, impels the Step-Daughter to vengeance and condemn the Mother an eternal grief. The Mother figures as witness to this obscene exchange, releasing its anguish in her final, culminating wail. Eternally posed before this scene, the Mother can only live "every minute of her torture."

The Author-Function

In the rehearsal of another of Pirandello's plays within this one, the figure of Pirandello immediately appears as the maddening native playwright who "plays the fool" with everyone. Such fantasies of authorship are intrinsic to the literary work. The author is not only that which the characters search for; but as Pirandello laments in his preface to the play, the spectator as well. "What does the author intend?" wonders the audience. Though absent, the author haunts the stage. He will not assume body like the characters but become a function or mask that circulates among the players. Though in the preface Pirandello describes authorship through metaphors of divine and even the Immaculate Conception, speaking of "miracles," and "divine births," such identifications are covered over within the play. There the Father decidedly appears as the author's double.

The Act Divisions

Above we noted the multiple frames of reference at work in the play. As the Father's speech on the fatuous comedy of human existence suggests, these frames would implicate the spectator's reality as well. This gesture of implication becomes especially clear in Pirandello's act divisions. The conclusion of Act I, for example, would have the so-called reality of the spectacle invade that of the audience just as the Characters have appeared among the living Actors. Here the Manager agrees the experiment, and the Characters retire to his office. Thus they break the frame, leaving the audience with the actors who had come to serve as the Characters' audience. Their chatter, in which they jeer at the Manager's authorial pretentious, complain that this breaking of theatrical convention will reduce them to the level of the improvisers, and would add an additional sense of reality to the scene. The breaking of the frame and staging of a scene within the audience would ratify what we saw as real. The real-time pause—delimiting both the interruption of the action and the intermission—similarly attempts to fold stage reality into that of the audience's.

Symbols

In the play's preface, Pirandello confesses an aversion to the use of symbol in the theater. If we take the term loosely, however, we can identify a number of symbolic structures and objects in the play. First, as noted above, the play itself is symbolic of, or more accurately, an allegory for, the theater itself. Second, some of Six Characters's readers have suggested the symbolic properties of the Characters themselves. Critic Diane Thompson, for example, believes that the play echoes the Italian tradition of the commedia del 'arte, in which the mask designates the character's eternal quality in opposition to the transient "naked face" of the actors. The mask would give the impression of figures fixed forever in its own fundamental emotion: that is, Remorse for the Father, Revenge for the Stepdaughter, Scorn for the Son, Sorrow for the Mother.

We might also look toward certain objects in the play as bearing symbolic properties. For example, the mirror, screen, and window that the Step-Daughter calls for in the staging of the Pace scene indicate her obsession with spectacle and, more specifically, her self-image as that spectacle's object. The vein she recalls in her sexual encounter with the Father incarnates the disgusting excessiveness of the scene, excess that the Manager would keep off-stage at all costs. Pirandello also makes use of a numbers regarding the relation between reason and sentiment. Memorably, the Manager points to the Leading Man's egg- shells in Mixing It Up!as symbolizing psychology of empty reason without its counterpart. Similarly, the Father imagines a fact as an "empty sack" unless filled without these two qualities.

Important Quotations Explained

A character, sir, may always ask a man who he is. Because a character has really a life of his own, marked with his especial characteristics; for which reason he is always "somebody." But a man—I'm not speaking of you now—may very well be "nobody."

The Father makes this playful comment to the Manager in Act II. Note the mellifluous courtesy of his speech: this rhetorical ploy is typical of the speech he addresses to the company or at his moments of relative reserve. Throughout the play, the Father insists on the reality of the Characters, a reality that, as the stage notes indicates, inheres in their forms and expressions. Here he bristles at the Actors' use of the word illusion as it relies on its vulgar opposition to reality. He approaches the Manager in a sort of face-off to challenge this opposition, one that underpins his identity. Convinced of his self-identity, the Manager readily responds that he is himself. The Father believes otherwise. While the Character's reality is real, the Actors' reality is not real. While the Character is somebody, man is nobody. Man is nobody because he is subject to time: his reality is fleeting and always ready to reveal itself as illusion, whereas the Character's reality remains fixed for eternity as art—what the Actors would call mere illusion. Put otherwise, time enables an opposition between reality and illusion for man. Over time, man comes to identify realities as illusion, whereas the Character exists in the timeless reality of art.

Oh, if you would only go away, go away and leave us alone—mother here with that son of hers—I with that Child—that Boy there always alone—and then I alone, alone in those shadows!

The Step-Daughter makes this exclamation toward the end of Act III in her vision of the author. In her memory, the author sits at his writing table as the Characters haunt him from the shadows, hovering in the twilight between life and unreality. The Step-Daughter especially appears to him in all her seductive charm, attempting to lure him to grant her life. She appears consumed with her own image lost. Thus she progressively casts the Characters from the author's side, making a sudden movement "as if in the vision she has of herself illuminating those shadows she wanted to seize hold of herself." In entering the reality of the stage, the Step-Daughter would become self-identical and certainly dispense with the alienating figure of the actress. The Step- Daughter's narcissism appears explicitly in the act previous. There she furiously insists on the primacy of her part. As the Manager complains, the Step-Daughter would break the "neat little framework" of an organized cast, a cast with its primary and secondary figures that stays closely within the limits of the actable.

we have this illusion of being one person for all, of having a personality that is unique in all our acts. But it isn't true. We perceive this when, tragically perhaps, in something we do, we are as it were, suspended, caught up in the air on a kind of hook. We perceive that all of us was not in that act, and that it would be an atrocious injustice to judge us by that action alone, as if all our existence were summed up in that one deed.

Once again stepping from his role to sermonize, the Father muses on the act that defines him as Character in Act I. This act comes from the scene around which it crystallizes: the inadvertent sexual encounter between them in the back room of Madame Pace's shop that precipitates the encounter and ruin of the two families. Here spectator receives it in exposition, and the Father offers an existentialist interpretation of its nature. For him, its tragedy inheres in man's belief in his unitary being. He only perceives this once caught in an act, so to speak, that determines him entirely. Judged by another, he appears to himself in alienated form, suspended in a reality that he should have known. The Step-Daughter should not have seen the Father in Pace's room; he should not have become real to her. The Father's suspension as pervert simultaneously fixes him as a Character.

Yes, but haven't you perceived that it isn't possible to live in front of a mirror which not only freezes us with the image of ourselves, but throws our likeness back at us with a horrible grimace?

Mortified by the staging of the family's drama, the Son makes this protest to the Manager toward the end of Act III. It is particularly significant as Pirandello is known as the progenitor of the "mirror theater," a theater that concerns itself with the confrontation of the figures on the near and far side of the mirror relation. In the case ofSix Characters, these figures are the Actor and Character. The Son charts two effects of the mirror-relation between Actor and Character. Both spring from the inability of the Actor as mirror to reflect the Character as it would see itself, its inability to return the Character's proper self-image.

In the second and more straightforward complaint, the image of the subject imitated in the other renders that likeness grotesque. In the first, vaguely reminiscent of the Medusa, the fascinating image of the Actor would freeze the Character it reflects. Put otherwise, the animation of the image requires the petrifaction of the body; the life of the persona or mask is the death of the person. The animation of the Character in the place of the Actor, an animation that takes place through imitation, is the Character's defacement. This meditation on the petrifying effect of the mirror, one that kills the Character by fixing him, perhaps reads in tension with the Father's comments on the Character's life and reality. According to the Father, both inhere precisely in the fixity of its image. Unlike transitory man, the mask is real and alive insofar as it cannot change. The Character's drama and role are fixed for all time. Perhaps the difference inheres in the process of alienation. The frozen image is fatal when reflected in the Actor because the places the self-image in the place of the other.

She isn't a woman, she is a mother.

The Father introduces the Mother to the company with this qualification in Act I. It would define the Mother's reality and define what she is as a Character. She is the consummate figure of grief, mourning the Characters' inexorable fate, bearing, its anguish, and serving as its horrified spectator. In this respect, she is not even a woman, but she is first and foremost a mother in anguish. Pirandello elaborates this fantasy of maternal suffering further in his preface to the play. There the Mother is posed against the philosophizing Father, incarnating nature without mind in her suffering—she suffers the torture of what has befallen the family without thinking about it as the Father does. Caught, like the other Characters, in the unchanging and inexorable reality of both her drama and role, she laments that she suffers her torture at every moment. Her lot as mourner is fixed for eternity.

Key Facts

FULL TITLE ·  Six Characters in Search of an Author (Sei Personaggi in Cerca D'autore) AUTHOR · Luigi Pirandello TYPE OF WORK · Drama GENRE · Comedy LANGUAGE · Italian TIME AND PLACE WRITTEN · Rome, 1920 DATE OF FIRST PUBLICATION · 1922; first production in Rome, 1921PUBLISHER · Mondadori NARRATOR · None POINT OF VIEW · Not applicable TONE · Tragic-comic TENSE · The play unfolds in the time of the present SETTING (TIME) · Daytime SETTING (PLACE) · The stage of a theatre PROTAGONISTS · The Father, the Step-Daughter MAJOR CONFLICT · Six Characters interrupt the daytime rehearsal of Pirandello's play. Abandoned by their author, they seek a new one to put on their drama. To the Actors chagrin, they convince the theater company's Manager and attempt to stage their unwritten play RISING ACTION · The play does not adhere to a conventional model of rising action, climax, and falling action, but the rising action is possibly the harried, messy, and frantic rehearsal of the Characters' drama.CLIMAX · Pirandello offers the two ostensible climaxes of the Characters' drama in botched form: the sexual encounter between the Father and Step-Daughter in the back room of Madame Pace's shop at the end of Act II and the death of the Child and Boy at the end of Act III.FALLING ACTION · In the former case, the Manager moves to the footlights to appraise the spectacle, oblivious to its pathos; in the second, a confused melée ensues, and the Manager renounces the experiment in frustration.THEMES · The theater of the theater; the Character's reality; the Eternal Moment MOTIFS · The mirror; the author-function; the act divisions SYMBOLS · The Characters themselves, the Step-Daughter's vein, the trappings of Madame Pace's shop, the egg-shells, the Father's sack

FORESHADOWING · In selling their drama to the Manager, the Father and Step-Daughter give away its plot from the outset. Otherwise, most of the play remains unpredictable, subject to what the Father calls the "Demon of Experiment."

Study Questions and Essay Topics

What is the significance of the inclusion of the "play within the play" at the beginning of Six Characters?

Six Characters is an exercise in what Pirandello calls the "theater of the theater"—that is theater that generates its drama out of the theater's elements, in this case, through the conflict between actors, manager and characters, and the missing author. For Pirandello, the theater is itself theatrical. That is, it is itself implicated in the forms and dynamics of the stage. This self-referential structure, that of a play about the play, is paralleled by another in the opening scene: the rehearsal of a play within a play. Both these plays belong to Pirandello. The inclusion of Mixing It Up and, later, a double of Pirandello himself, is self-indulgent. As Stanley Cavell notes, the work that would reflect on its own medium often interposes the figure of its author instead. Thus, in the rehearsal of Mixing,Pirandello soon appears as the maddening native playwright who "plays the fool" with everyone. Such fantasies of authorship are intrinsic to the literary work. The author is not only that which the characters search for, but, as Pirandello laments in his preface to the play, the spectator as well. "What does the author intend?" wonders the audience. "Who is this master who plays the fool with me?" Though absent, the author haunts the stage. He will not assume body like the characters but become a function or mask that circulates among the players.

The aborted excerpt of Mixing It Up also provides an allegory of sorts for Six Characters. As the Manager confusedly advises the Leading Man, the play is a "mixing up of the parts, according to which you who act your own part become the puppet of yourself." When he asks the actor if he understands, he replies: "I'm hanged if I do." Put otherwise, the actor who dons the mask becomes its hanged puppet. The actor's joke marks the presence of death in acting: in some sense, the animation of the persona involves the death of the person; the Character as somebody implies that the Actor is nobody. This brief exchange prefigures the advent of the Characters, who usurp the actors in terms of their life and reality.

What is the significance of Madame Pace's mysterious birth in Act II? Can one describe it, as the Leading Lady does, as a "vulgar trick?"

The strangest action of Act II is undoubtedly the birth of Madame Pace through the medium of the coats and hats that the Father borrows from the company's actresses. Her conjuring immediately provokes protests from the company. An adherent to the standards of plausibility discussed earlier, the Leading Lady denounces the conjuring as a "vulgar trick": it breaks the verisimilitude of theatrical illusion. Even worse, such an expedient device betrays a weakness in playwriting. For the Father, however, this trick is an exercise in the magic that defines the stage. In a work concerned with reflecting on its own medium, Pace's birth evokes the mythic origins of theater—that of rite, ritual, and ceremony, the coats and mantles on show serving as the scene's talismans. As with the Characters, theater would enable crossings from the other world. Equipped with a pair of shears and "puffy oxygenated hair," Pace is almost a comic Fate.

In a "specious argument" from Act III, the Father declares that while a Character is always somebody, man may be nobody. Explain this argument.

Throughout the play, the Father insists on the reality of the Characters, a reality that, as the stage notes indicates, inheres in their forms and expressions. The Father offers his most explicit meditation on the Character's reality in Act II. Here he bristles at the Actors' use of the word "illusion" as it relies on its vulgar opposition to reality. He approaches the Manager in a sort of face-off to challenge this opposition, one that underpins his identity. He wonders whether the Manager can tell him who he is. Convinced of his self- identity, the Manager readily responds that he is himself. The Father believes otherwise. While the Character's reality is real, the Actors' is not; while the Character is somebody, man is nobody. Man is nobody because he is subject to time: his reality is fleeting, always ready to reveal itself as illusion, whereas the Character's reality remains fixed for eternity. Put otherwise, time enables an opposition between reality and illusion for man. Over time, man comes to identify erstwhile realities as illusion, whereas the Character exists in the timeless reality of art.