A Play Inside of a Play, About Creating a Play: Luigi Pirandello’s "Six Characters in Search of an Author"

                

                       (Luigi Pirandello, the playwrite, found in Google Image Search)

Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author is perhaps the most confusing play I have read this semester in terms of action, stage directions, actor relationship, and characterization.

I am not quite sure what to make of this play. It starts off with a drama company preparing for their first rehearsal of a new play (ironically by Pirandello), and randomly this family shows up, demanding they perform a play they are going to act out and create before them. The relations between all of the family members are unclear, expect they all think they are better than this professional acting company.

The family flatter’s the director into letting them act out this confusing play, which makes even less sense. The company actors are insulted and irritated, but end up going along with this, up until it looks like one of the family’s children dies upon the stage. Then everyone departs and the step daughter runs around laughing.

This play is extremely confusing and might make more sense if I could see it preformed. This would allow me to see the actor placement and frequent action and scene changes they are working with since the characters are essentially creating a play. Though I generally don’t mind the creation of a play inside of a play, (the play inside of Hamlet is the first one that comes to mind), this just seemed ridiculous! The way Pirandello lays this out, it seems more like a cheap trick to me than good drama.

However, Pirandello raises some interesting points in his play about the differences between reality, fiction, and performance. At the start of the semester we had a discussion about performance in everyday life. We talked about doing something as simple as following the social conventions sometimes of responding in a conversation about something you have not interest it as being a performance. You are putting on an act that you care what this other person is saying. This is what I kept thinking about when I was reading the play. Perhaps Pirandello was seeing the beginning of the blurring lines between reality and performance in everyday life and wanted to comment on it.

It was fairly easy for this family to walk in off the street and present themselves as ‘actors’ even though they claimed much of their story to be ‘reality’.

However, though Pirandello’s use of ‘breaking the frame’ by mixing in characters walk onto stage and join in effective. I found it very disorientating in this play. It almost creates more confusion than necessary, even if it helps strengthen the point he is trying to make.

Though, Pirandello’s play within a play is not as flawlessly and seamlessly transitioned into as it is in Hamlet, I also do not think it is not suppose to be. This is supposed to jar the audience into the same level of confusion as the characters with the original play.

I almost wonder, with the new level of mediation the world is going through at this moment, what Pirandello would have to say about it blurring the lines further between reality and fiction, especially with things like ‘reality TV’. Hmmm…..