Introduction
The Play
Six Characters in Search of an author is an impromptu play by ‘six characters’ that interrupt a rehearsal to ask the director to cast their story. The writer, Luigi Pirandello, uses the play as a medium through which the characters express their feelings and opinions. The play uses theatre as a stage setting for showing the interpersonal relations among its different players, including the actors, the audience, the playwright, and the characters. It depicts the characters as socially disaffected people faced with uncertainty and lack of self-awareness.
Pirandello achieves this by mixing reality and illusion. Pirandello uses the play to tell his views about the separation of a person from the “self” and society. The play does not involve fiction; rather, it recounts the ‘real’ lives of six characters as told by them on stage. Its unconventional form, language, and evident plausibility motivate the audience, the actors, and the characters to participate in a psychotic experience (Ragusa 85). The play brings to the fore the distinctions between reality and illusion, and art and life, among others. By depicting the play as a failure of artistic representation, Pirandello captures the imaginations of the audience and highlights the mental states of the time. In this essay, the writer explores various psychological aspects as depicted in the play’s mental and theatrical representations of the six characters.
The Era
The play is a 20th Century drama that was first played in the 1920s in Italy during the ‘modern era’. Modernism was a historical period characterised by an explosion of divergent thoughts and views in the arts and literary disciplines, which departed from the “established traditional conventions” (Fister 41). In drama, the modernist movement challenged conventional approaches in literary works that emphasised on structural order and logic in any performance. The era was marked by a literary structure that was not consistent with “conventionality and realism” in many disciplines, including drama (Ragusa 62). In this regard, modern drama went beyond the realism that was inherent in classical works by incorporating an element of illusion.
Pirandello, in the play, takes a modernist approach, which differs significantly from the realist one common in classical drama. Moreover, the characters in the play are depicted differently from the conventional ones. Their dialogue, language, emotions, and self-deceit are notably different from those of other plays. Pirandello’s use of theatre as the setting is not only innovative, but also helps in structuring the plot. Three things make this play different from classical drama: “the use of time, language, and context” (Ragusa 72). Unlike in traditional classics, time and language in modern drama “have no meaning and represent the absurd” (Ragusa 54).
Moreover, the modern drama text does not involve conventional languages; for instance, no clear meaning is attached to dialogue nor is it easy to determine whether “a character is honest or dishonest” (Ragusa 56). Additionally, the dialogues in modern drama were rather short compared to classical ones. Pirandello favoured the illusionism movement of the first decades of the 20th century that disapproved the use of realism in classical drama. The movement introduced the dramatic tools of soliloquy and audience-actor interaction because they believed that these elements were more expressive and “depicted the inner lives of human beings” (Ragusa 65) more accurately than classical drama.
The Playwright
Luigi Pirandello is one of the influential playwrights of the 20th Century drama. He was born in 1867 in Sicily, Italy during the Renaissance period. His parents, Stefano and Carerina were from upper-class families with investments in the sulfur industry (Caputi 84). Pirandello studied linguistics at various universities in Rome and Bonn, Germany. His 1891 dissertation focused on the dialects of Girgenti, his native urban area. He became a linguistics professor at the Real Istituto di Magistere Femminile between 1896 and 1921 (Caputi 69). The renowned dramatist and novelist won a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1933 for his role in the emergence of modern drama. Pirandello has authored numerous novels and plays, including the Six Characters in Search of an Author.
Pirandello married a daughter of a Sicilian business executive in 1894. In 1904, his wife, Antonietta Portulano, developed a mental illness and became paranoid and insane. Later, her condition deteriorated and she was hospitalised in a mental institution. Her condition had a big influence on Pirandello’s career as reflected in the psychoanalytic approach he uses in most of his work. Additionally, Pirandello’s sons were incarcerated as prisoners of war in the aftermath of World War I (Caputi 77). As a result, his sulfur mining business collapsed, forcing Pirandello to rely on writing for sustenance.
It is evident that these events influenced Pirandello’s psychodrama style in his works. In all his works, Pirandello blends reality with illusion to illustrate the different perspectives that people have on contemporary issues. For this 20th Century playwright, the spoken word is deceptive and reality can be construed as both true and false (Caputi 63). His works belong to the “Theatre of the Absurd” genre in which there is no clear distinction between reality and illusion (Caputi 71).
Summary of the Story
The story starts with a play rehearsal on a stage. A bunch of actors and a manager enter the stage ostensibly to rehearse their roles in an upcoming play. The manager takes charge and tells one man, the ‘Property Man’, to read the checklist of each actor’s costume and role in the play. Before they could begin to act, the ‘Leading Man’ starts to complain about the appearance of his costume. The manager asks him if he knows the symbolism associated with the costume (props) used in the play. He responds that he has no clue regarding their meaning. The manager also submits that he does not understand the symbolism.
The conversation is interrupted when the ‘Doorkeeper’ enters into the stage and informs the manager that he has visitors waiting to see him (Pirandello 21). Before he could finish, a family of six people arrives on the stage. One of the characters, the father, tells the manager that they (the characters) have a story that needs to be developed into a complete play. He requests the director to help them complete it. Additionally, he tells the manager that they (the six visitors) are not real; rather, they are the play’s characters. The manager and the other actors on the stage dismiss them as jokers and resume their rehearsal.
The manager decides to send them away, but before he could do that the father says that the characters would “want to be brought to life by being played by the actors” on the stage (Pirandello 21). He further tells the manager that their play has only two scenes and thus, needs to be completed. At this moment, the Step Daughter hints to the director that their play is very hilarious. She says that in the play, one of the characters (the little girl) will die while she (the Step Daughter) will survive and run away to a safe place. At this point, the characters begin to narrate their life experiences as a family. Apparently, the mother and the father were once married and had a son.
One day the father decided to get rid of his wife (the mother) by persuading her to elope with his workmate (personal secretary). In the new marriage, she bears three children who include the Stepdaughter and the two little children. The son, who remains behind with the father, becomes angry with his mother for abandoning him. Subsequently, the father seeks to reunite the mother with his son. After the death of the secretary, the mother and her three children relocate to the city to search for employment. The mother finds a job at Lady Pace’s dressmaking shop as a mender while her daughter works at a brothel as a prostitute.
Throughout the story, the father keeps a watchful eye on his former wife and stepdaughter. One day, he visits the brothel to seek for the services of a prostitute. He meets with his stepdaughter and begins to seduce her. However, before the two would do anything, the mother shows up and recognises his former husband (the father). During the play, the stepdaughter repeats this scene several times to shame his father (Pirandello 23). At this point, the son remarks that the reunion with his stepsister has changed his life as he is forced to share many things with her. The stepsister also blames him for abandoning her on the city’s streets. At this point, the father informs the manager that at the end of the play, the little girl dies, the son commits suicide, and the stepdaughter runs away from the rest of the family.
The manager appears bemused with the story and tells them that he will develop it into a drama. The father requests the director to record every detail of their performance on the stage to complete their play. Subsequently, the manager agrees and invites the six characters to his office to iron out the details of the story’s plot. However, the actors on the stage become angry with the manager for allowing the characters to interrupt their rehearsal. They are convinced that that the manager, just like the six characters, has gone crazy. The subsequent sections cover the characters’ rehearsal of their play.
Analysis of the Story
Luigi Pirandello uses the play to highlight the characters’ psychological problems (McTeague 13). In this play, the characters reveal their fantasies and aspirations on the stage, which blurs the distinction between reality and illusion. This approach is characteristic of a psychodrama, where the characters are allowed to “express their inner feelings” in order to resolve their mental problems (McTeague 14). In this genre, the actors or patients create their roles while on stage without any pre-reading or rehearsal. The characters also create their own dialogue on the stage. This allows each character to share his/her psychological problems and feelings with the actors and the audience.
In this play, the characters are depicted as people with self-identity problems. The issue of identity emerges in the form of the ‘masks in the play’ where the characters appear more real compared to the actors playing their roles. Pirandello shows that reality is not a static concept because the masks worn by people (actors) conceal their self-identities during a performance. Pirandello believes that reality is neither fixed nor universal; rather, it is a subjective concept.
In the play, the actors represent the masks (illusion), as they play the roles of the characters. On the other hand, the six characters are real because they reveal their actual experiences to the audience. According to Abrams and Harpharm, illusions created in a play serve as a way of asserting one’s identity (17). The characters, unlike the actors, appear insane as they narrate their family history and individual experiences. Through their stories, it is evident that each character has a mental problem and needs help to achieve his/her real self-identity. The characters’ psychological problems are revealed through their lack of a sense of identity.
Their claim that they are characters in need of a playwright indicates that the six characters do not have the “ability to achieve their real self-identities” on their own (Fergusson 117). In this regard, they believe that only an author has the ability to “bring them to life” (Pirandello 65). This can be seen in the conversations between the manager and the father. In act III, the father remarks, “Do you really know who you are?” The manager responds that, “What? Who I am? I am me!” (Pirandello 82).
This shows that neither the manager nor the characters have a strong sense of self-identity. Moreover, the father remarks that, “all these realities of today will seem tomorrow as if they had been an illusion that perhaps you ought to distrust your own sense of reality” (Pirandello 76). This indicates that the characters lack a sense of self-identity and self-awareness. On the other hand, the actors hide their self-identities through the masks they are wearing in the play. Moreover, they do not reveal their names on stage, which indicates that they have no identity. Additionally, the mother and the father in the play do not talk directly to each other and thus, cannot establish a “relationship with their anima and animus” in order to attain self-identity (Fergusson 87).
In the play, the actors and the characters are psychologically distinct individuals. The actors believe that they understand theatre and want the manager to dismiss the characters from the stage. Throughout the play, they tease and ridicule the characters and make them feel inferior. On the other hand, the characters pose as the victims of the actors’ condescending jokes. According to Young, Pirandello wants the audience to believe that the play is the actual rehearsal only to realise later that it is an illusion (11). Thus, both the audience and the actors take part in refining the appearance of the theatre. On their part, the characters endure criticisms while on stage and do not get time to reflect on their actions or rehearse their roles before they can perform. The six characters with the exception of the mother are psychologically aware of their role as characters. The mother comes out as an emotional character, who does not understand her role as a character in the play.
The young characters (children) remain silent throughout the play. Their death in the last scene augurs well with their silence in the first scene. The six characters also harbour hatred against one another. From their personal accounts, it is evident that they are involved in interpersonal struggles. ‘The Son’ hates all his family members because they abandoned him when he was young. On the other hand, the stepsister hates the mother for eloping with another man (the secretary) and the Son for abandoning her in the city. She also dislikes her father for visiting a brothel.
Besides the struggle with self-identity, the author underscores the importance of distinguishing reality from illusion. The play begins with a bare stage, which makes it difficult for the audience to distinguish between reality and illusion. According to Puppa, a bare stage makes the play “seem more realistic” (99). The characters are portrayed as real, but the audience knows that they are actors just like the others on the stage.
Moreover, the actors ask, “Is this some kind of a joke?” in response to the characters’ assertion that they have an unfinished play that needs to be rewritten (Pirandello 28). The actors also say, “It is not of use, I do not understand anymore” when the manager invites them to his office to “develop” their story (Pirandello 71). It is evident that the audience shares the same feelings regarding the manager’s actions. Moreover, in the end of the play, the author does not tell the audience if the performance was a reality or an illusion. He only states, “Make believe? Reality? Oh, go to hell the lot of you! Lights! Lights! Lights!” (Pirandello 44) The audience is left to decide whether the performance was a reality or an illusion.
Works Cited
Abrams, Harry and Geoffrey, Harpharm. A Glossary of Literary Terms. New York: Harcourt Bruce College, 2011. Print.
Caputi, Anthony. Pirandello and the Crisis of the Modern Consciousness. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998. Print.
Fergusson, Francis. “Action as Theatrical: Six Characters in Search of an Author.” Pirandello: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Glauco Cambon. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1997. Print.
Fister, Manfred. The Theory and Analysis of Drama. London: Green Wood, 1998. Print.
McTeague, James. The Dramatists and Role Playing: The Role Playing in the Works of Brecht, Unesco, Pinter. London: Greenwood, 1994. Print.
Pirandello, Luigi. Collected Plays: Six Characters in Search of an Author, trans. F. May. New York: Riverrun Press Inc., 1996. Print.
Puppa, Paolo. “Families of Characters and Families of Actors on the Pirandellian Stage.” Luigi Pirandello: Contemporary Perspectives. Ed. Gian-Paolo Biasin and Manuela Gieri. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Print.
Ragusa, Olga. Luigi Pirandello: An approach to his theatre. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001. Print.
Young, Stark. “The Pirandello Play.”Pirandello: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Glauco Cambon. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1997. Print.