47 pages • 1 hour read
Luigi Pirandello, Transl. Edward StorerSix Characters in Search of an Author
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1921A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Cultural Context: The Avant-Garde and Modernism
When Six Characters in Search of an Author was first performed in Italy in 1921, the audience was so perplexed, angry, and provoked that a riot erupted. The provocative nature of Six Characters is easy to forget today, but it was part of a European cultural movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that actively sought to provoke. Called the avant-garde, these writers and artists were designated with the French word for the “advance troops” of a military; they understood themselves to be engaged in an assault on bourgeois values and bourgeois habits of cultural consumption. Igor Stravinsky’s ballet, Rite of Spring, ended in a riot when it premiered in Paris in 1913, and Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, a painting that was considered both deliberately hideous and an immoral, tasteless depiction of nude sex workers, nearly provoked a riot when it was unveiled in 1916. Like these other works, Six Characters deliberately undermined “normal” expectation for an evening at the theater and deliberately included scandalous and shocking material—in this case, frank discussion of an incestuous encounter between the Father and the Step-Daughter.
Six Characters resembles avant-garde visual art in another, perhaps more important way. The play “deconstructs” the formal elements of the theater, breaking the so-called fourth wall (i.e. when a character in a play, movie, or book directly addresses or acknowledges the audience or reader, blurring the line between fiction and reality), for example, and querying assumptions about representation in art. In this way, the play parallels artistic movements like cubism, as many critics have noted. One of the chief aims of modernism in this period was to “deconstruct” the formal and material elements that are essential to a particular form of art—whether music or painting or literature or the theater—and to allow these formal elements to be the focus of interest and artistic creation. For music, this might mean using the 12 tones of the tempered scale without the key system; for literature, it might mean crafting prose or poetry with a focus on sound and rhythm rather than semantic sense (Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons). Cubism, a movement that inspired Gertrude Stein, violated the idea that a paining should primarily “represent” a scene or objects. Above all, cubism violated expectations of perspective. In a similar way, Six Characters plays with perspective as this is meant in theatrical art, along with other elements like “characters” and “scenes,” and the play likewise tramples on the idea that a play should satisfy viewers interested in immersion in a story world.
Literary Context: Metatheatricality in 20th-Century Drama
Aspects of plays that draw attention to their status as plays are sometimes called metatheatrical or metadramatic. The experimentation in Six Characters with the formal elements of the art of theater, and its stepping back from the assumptions of representation, made the play an influential masterpiece of metatheater.
Metatheatricality is nothing new. Shakespeare incorporated a play within a play in Hamlet, and Romeo and Juliet toyed with metatheatricality by drawing attention to the play’s artificiality and self-conscious literariness, as when Romeo and Juliet speak together—as if spontaneously—a fully formed sonnet in their alternating lines. However, for reasons indicated above, metatheatricality became especially important in the early 20th century.
Luigi Pirandello’s metatheatricality draws on the techniques of Epic Theater and anticipates many of the ideas that will develop more fully in the Theater of the Absurd. Epic Theater is a type of drama that avoids creating convincing illusions and appeals instead to the intellect over emotions. The playwright might include direct address to the audience, stylized acting, and spectacle to create an emotional distance between the audience and the play, which encourages the audience to look at any ideas that arise in the play with a conscious, critical eye. This movement rejects realism, method acting, and the emphasis on a character’s psychology. It is most closely associated with German dramatist Bertolt Brecht, whose most well-known plays include Mother Courage and Her Children (1939), Three Penny Opera (1928), and The Good Person of Szechwan (1941). Pirandello likewise creates an alienation effect that prevents the audience from making personal or emotional connections with the characters or “losing themselves” in the story.
Pirandello uses many metatheatrical elements. Characters themselves discuss the difference between the real and performance. Various characters act as the audiences to different performances in the play and comment on them. The set is itself a rehearsal stage for a play; by setting the play in this space, the audience is always aware of the theatrical nature of the play. The reference to Pirandello’s own plays by the acting company at the beginning of the play further draws attention to the play’s constructedness. The Manager’s insistence on a physical script works as another layer of breaking the fourth wall. There is, in fact, a script for the show within a show because it is a part of the script for the show itself.
The play features many involutions of reality and illusion. While the characters are performing their own drama, they are also interrupting each other; the Manager fancies the idea that his troupe might act their parts better than they do, and so on.
Six Characters is often cited as an influence on the Theater of the Absurd. This movement originated in post-World War II France. Like Epic Theater, playwrights of absurdist theater reject realism and traditionally structured plots. Communication breaks down and a play’s structure is often circular or nonlinear and frequently includes repetition and word play. Characters are unable to control their own lives and are at the will of invisible or uncaring outside forces. Two of the most prominent plays in this category include Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953) and Eugène Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano (1950). The influence of the Theater of the Absurd is felt in the plays of Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, and Tom Stoppard.
Critical Context: Commedia Dell’arte and the Characters
The Italian dramatic form called commedia dell’arte was popular between the 16th and 18th centuries. These shows were largely improvised with a stock plot as a framework for the dialogue. Commedia dell’arte was the first type of theater to include professional women actors, and the shows were often performed outdoors on platforms in town squares. Troupes of players of commedia dell’arte traveled throughout Italy and Europe.
In this form, characters were often stock characters or stereotypes of figures from different social classes, and the acting was exaggerated and broad. Characters included servants and clowns called the Zanni, wealthy old men called Vecchi, young lovers called Innamorati, and a braggart called Il Capitano. Others include the comedic servant Harlequin, the wealthy merchant Pantalone, and the greedy old man Il Dottore.
Aspects of Six Characters hearken back to commedia dell’arte: The characters appear as their own troupe in search of a playwright, and they resemble stock characters at least insofar as they are not given names but presented as types: “the Father,” and so on. In addition, the characters exhibit broad and extreme emotions like stock characters do in commedia dell’arte. In his preface to the play, Pirandello suggests that the characters should wear masks, another evocation of this antique form.
