Pirandello: Six Characters in Search of an Author Essay

A theatre company is preparing to rehearse whiz of Pirandellos plays, which no one unsounded when it was written and which makes even less sense today (Director, I). Before they ar able to begin, however, the tones enter and beg off who they are, and that the author that created them had non been able to finish their play, and that they were in search of roughlyone who would help them by application the job.The theater director agrees, and the characters tell their story, demonstrating scenes that were to be played. Not long after the first scene is played, it appears that there is some disagreement between the Characters and the ships company, regarding the direction that the scenes should take. The Characters argue that they way that the Company play their roles is not real enough, not true enough. Contrariwise, the Director argues that some license must be allowed for the physical and secular restrictions that stage output puts on their candor.The Characters insist on continuing their demonstration, culminating in the suicide of the Boy. The Company is horrified, some believing the tike to be truly dead, others insisting that it was a trick. The give replies to their questions with What do you mean, a trick? It is reality, reality, ladies and gentlemen Reality (Father, III). The Director, horrified and confused, calls for lights. When the lights founder come up, the Characters are gone. Exasperated, the Director cries, Theyve cost me a whole day of rehearsal striking ELEMENTSPoint of Inciting Interest The Characters appear during rehearsal and reveal that they are seeking someone to tell their story. The director agrees to help.Major Crises*The Director realizes that the Characters are not actors looking to rehearse, and that they expect him to serve as their author and spell out their play. After some discussion with the Father, he agrees to continue.*At several points during the play, the Director is confronted with situations in which the Characters are hard-pressed with the scenery or the look or performance of the actors, or the direction that the Director is giving. Each time, there ensues a discussion on the reality of what the Company is portraying, versus the reality of the Characters story. Each time, the Characters eventually decide, reluctantly, to accept a less-than-perfect portrayal of their story. These crises have been condensed into one bullet point for conciseness.ClimaxThe Boy, demonstrating the final scene, shoots himself and dies.DenouementThe Company is horrified. The Father explains to them simply that this is reality, ladies and gentlemen The Director calls for lights and finds the Characters have gone. He then cancels the remaining rehearsal time and exits.REACTION/ abridgmentPirandello takes on quite a challenging question in Six Characters. This question, of how reality can be defined, goes all the way back to Plato,with his Allegory of the Cave. While Pirandello does not make that question , perhaps an ultimate answer is impossible to conceive, he does take it to a different level, and leaves the audience thinking.This universal question, in Six Characters, takes on a great depth. We, the audience, are presented with two realities, and are asked to define which is more real of the two. On one side, we have the Company, composed of real people who create fabricated stories through their work on the stage. However, Pirandello gives them perfectly no depth. It is clear that they are merely vessels for portraying this fiction, creating real stories in their shows, but they seem to have no real stories of their own.Contrariwise, the Characters, who are not real people, i.e. they have been created by some unknown seed have a story, a life, that is much more real than those of the Company. Conflict ensues when the reality that is created by the Company does not acceptably conform to the exacting standards of the Characters. The problem is that the Company must conform to t he physical and temporal limitations inherent in stage productions, and sometimes they do not fully grasp the nature of the Character that they are portraying. This bothers the Characters, as they feel that it affects the reality of their story, to have it altered. But thats not the way it rattling happened, seems to be their continual complaint.The question that Pirandello presents to us, and leaves us to ponder at the end of the play, is Which is more real, the true reality of the fictional Characters, or the fictional reality of the real Company? Being a non-dualist, I would personally argue that they are both real, however that is only my opinion. One final item that I allow for present for consideration is the religious connotation of the creator-deity figure, the Author. It is interesting to note, than when the Author of the Characters work is referred to, it is always Author, not author. The Characters are searching for an author to help them bring to life the story that w as created by the Author. Perhaps Pirandello is drawing a subtle connection between the Characters quest, and our own search for truth. In the end of the play, the Characters vanish after complete their demonstration.Through their quest for self-definition, the Characters actually achieve self-definition. Perhaps Pirandello is trying to say that, in a poster fashion, it is our human quest to define ourselves that, in the end, defines us.