Luigi Pirandello

 

Six Characters in Search of an Author
(Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore - 1921)

A COMEDY IN THE MAKING

 

Summary and Analysis

 

Summary and Analysis of Act One

 

The stage is set as if for a regular rehearsal. The actors arrive and pretend to prepare to rehearse the second act of a Pirandello play called Mixing It Up. The manager starts going through the various scenes and telling his Property Man what to write down for each. When the Leading Man protests about part of his costume, the manager yells at him concerning the symbolism of the props and asks if he understands. The man replies that he has no idea what he is doing, and the manager likewise admits to ignorance.

The Door-keeper arrives and tells the manager that some people have come to see him, but by the time he finishes the six characters have already come onstage. The father informs the manager that he has an unfinished drama for him to perform and that it only needs an author to complete it. He then claims that he and the other five people are all characters rather than real people. The manager and the other actors burst out laughing.

The manager is on the verge of throwing them out as jokesters, but the father persists and argues that he and the others want to be brought to life by being played by the actors. He informs them that their author only wrote two acts of their play and then left it unfinished. The Step-Daughter comes forward and tells them that they will be amazed by the drama in which the little girl dies and she, the Step-Daughter, is the only character who manages to run off.

The characters finally start to describe their history. The father initially married a peasant woman and had a son with her. However, when he got bored with her, he convinced his wife to run away with his male secretary. She subsequently had three children with the other man, but the son she left behind has become hostile and antagonistic. The father, attracted to the family he has lost, used to watch the Step-Daughter on her way to school. At some point he lost track of the family. After the secretary dies, the mother and her children returned to the city and started working in Madame Pace's dress shop. While the mother was a mender of dresses, the daughter actually worked as a high-class prostitute for Madame Pace.

One day the father apparently went to the shop with the goal of finding a prostitute for himself and started seducing the daughter. The daughter is eager to play the scene where she meets the father again in order to get revenge on him by revealing his shame. Before anything happens between them, however, the mother recognizes him and stops them. The father then indicates that the son plays a role in the drama as well. The Step-Daughter blames the son for keeping her out on the streets, but he blames her for showing up and ruining his comfortable life after so many years. The father tells the manager that their drama ends with the death of the little girl, the suicide of the young boy, and the flight of the step-daughter.

The manager has gotten interested in their story and decides that he can make a play out of it. The father asks him to become the author, telling him that all he has to do is write down whatever they perform for him. The manager agrees and takes them into his office to figure out the best way to do it. The other actors think that he has gone mad and are furious with the way the rehearsal has been interrupted.

Analysis

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.

 

Summary and Analysis of Act Two

 

A bell rings to announce that the actors should return to the stage. The Step-Daughter emerges from the manager's office along with the young boy and the little girl. She turns to the girl and tells her that they are on a stage, and that they will play their roles. She then turns on the boy and tells him he should have shot the father or the son rather then himself. He has a revolver in his pocket that he is hiding.

The father and manager emerge and call her back into the office while the mother and son come out. The mother pleads with the son to take pity on her, but he is furious that they want to put the entire scandal of his family life on the stage and thus refuses to listen to her.

The manager comes out again and has his machinist set up the stage as a single room, meant to represent Madame Pace's shop. He then hands out sheets to the actors and asks the prompter to take down the lines of the characters in shorthand. The father and the other characters are offended when they realize that the manager expects to have the actors play their parts. The father tells the manager that the actors will never be as realistic as they themselves are, since they are the actual characters that the actors are hoping to become. The manager brushes off this criticism and tells them to start the scene.

He soon realizes that Madame Pace is missing and asks the father where she is. The father asks the actresses for their hats and puts them on the hat pegs. He also takes a cloak and hangs it up as well. The manager asks what he is doing, and the father tells him he is arranging the stage so Madame Pace will show up. Sure enough, she arrives and the step-daughter runs over to her. The scene starts with them speaking to one another, but so quietly that no one can hear them.

The manager yells at them to speak louder and the step-daughter tells him they cannot because they must prevent the father from hearing them. When the Mother realizes what is about to be enacted she jumps up and tries to prevent the scene, but is restrained. The Step-Daughter takes over and finishes her scene with Madame Pace who exits at the end. The father then enters and starts to play the scene with his Step-Daughter.

The father tries to seduce her, but she points out that she is in mourning. The manager interrupts them and has the actors go and prepare to imitate the scene that they have just watched. The Step-Daughter and father burst out laughing when they see them pretend to do the scene. The manager tells them to be quiet, but a few moments later they again protest that it is all wrong. The manager finally gives up and tells them to continue the scene themselves.

The Step-Daughter starts to play her role, expecting the father to ask her to remove her frock. The manager is mortified that it will seem inappropriate to stage such a scene in the theater and tries to cut it. The girl protests, and the mother, overcome with emotion, bursts out crying. The manager agrees to allow them to continue the scene and the step-daughter places her head on the father's chest, holding him while the mother bursts onto the stage screaming and calling him a brute.

 

Inizio pagina

Analysis

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.

 

Summary and Analysis of Act Three

 

The setting for the second act of the six character's drama is set in a garden outside the father's house. The manager is about to have them start but keeps trying to alter the scene. When the characters protest he is shocked to learn from the father that the characters have no reality outside of what they are performing for him. He then tells the manager that it is most unfortunate for them, because they were created and then denied life by having the author leave his work unfinished. The father then begs the manager not to alter them too much as he writes down the play, claiming that it would destroy them as characters.

The manager alters the plot enough so that it will fit into the garden scene, for example putting the young boy behind a tree instead of inside the house. The manager tries to get the boy to speak, but the step-daughter informs him that as long as the son in present, neither of the children will say anything. The son, happy to have the chance to leaves, tries to go and is forcibly stopped by the manager. The step-daughter laughs and tells the manager that the son cannot leave even if he wants to.

They then start to play the scene, and the step-daughter quickly puts the young girl near the fountain. The mother goes to the son and starts to talk to him, but the son, in order to avoid an argument, leaves her and goes into the garden. He sees the young girl, in the fountain, drowned. From behind the tree the young boy has pulled out his revolver and he shoots himself. The mother runs towards him screaming, and the manager, now unsure of what is real or not, orders the play to end. The curtain closes.

 

Analysis

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.