Rating: 
Summary: Captivating!
Review: "Six Characters in Search of an Author" is truly a unique play. For some readers, characters on paper are actual human beings, but once we see them portrayed by genuine living people on the stage and big/small screen, we abandon our imagination about the person the character began as. Luigi Pirandello took this idea and wrote an ingenious play. Is reality in fact reality, or is it only what we perceive it to be? This play opens up a world of uncertainty. The concept of the play challenges the mind. I recommend.
Rating:
Summary: The thin line between performance and reality
Review: "Six Characters in Search of an Author," by Luigi Pirandello, is a really remarkable work of drama. The English version by Eric Bentley is published as a Signet Classic. The translator's introduction notes that the play premiered in Rome in 1921.In "Six Characters," a dysfunctional family confronts a theater director and his whole company. They challenge the director to turn their story into a play--a "painful drama." This richly ironic play deals with many issues: the relationship between life and literature; the limitation of words as tools of communication; sexual transgression; authority and art; secrecy and shame; the fractured, shifting nature of personal identity; the relationship between an author and the characters he/she creates; and more. This is truly a play of ideas; it's a constantly shifting intellectual house of mirrors. But Pirandello never loses sight of the emotional issues of human shame, pain, and interpersonal alienation. The play is full of great lines; my favorite is spoken by the director: "There's no author here at all." It's amazing to think that (at the time of this review) this play is more than 80 years old. When I look at the contours of popular culture in the decades since this play premiered in Rome, it seems that Pirandello was as much a cultural prophet as he was a literary genius. "Six Characters" seems to prefigure such phenomena as reality TV shows (like "An American Family" or MTV's "The Real World") and films which explore the shadowy line between fiction and reality (like "The Blair Witch Project" or "Scream 3"). After all these decades, "Six Characters" remains a fresh, compelling, and relevant theatrical masterpiece.
Rating:
Summary: Captivating!
Review: "Six Characters in Search of an Author" is truly a unique play. For some readers, characters on paper are actual human beings, but once we see them portrayed by genuine living people on the stage and big/small screen, we abandon our imagination about the person the character began as. Luigi Pirandello took this idea and wrote an ingenious play. Is reality in fact reality, or is it only what we perceive it to be? This play opens up a world of uncertainty. The concept of the play challenges the mind. I recommend.
Rating: 
Summary: Different from your normal play
Review: A play containing a play within a play. Just as the title states, 6 characters go in search of someone to tell their story and portray their life. It is cleverly well-written with the characters getting in fights with the actors who are to portray them as well as getting into arguments with the director who is to write their story. The story they tell is insignificant in relation to the set-up they provide. After hearing their story, you are left with a feeling of "is that all?" If I were approached by these 6 characters, I would turn down writing their story. Then again, the play isn't about their story, it is about them finding someone to tell their story. Pirandello stepped outside the normal barriers for playwriting and came up with an incredible play that I can only hope to see performed in my lifetime.
Rating:
Summary: Signet version...
Review: I highly recommend the Signet Classics edition of this play, translated by Eric Bentley. He provides a wonderful opening essay, as well as Pirandello's own forward. The plot, I'm sure you know, involves six characters who stumble upon a theater rehearsal. They are not so much looking for an author as a play in which to exist. Pirandello breaks the fourth wall as no other author had before him. It is a very daring and original piece. A must for any serious student of drama.
Rating:
Summary: Signet version...
Review: I highly recommend the Signet Classics edition of this play, translated by Eric Bentley. He provides a wonderful opening essay, as well as Pirandello's own forward. The plot, I'm sure you know, involves six characters who stumble upon a theater rehearsal. They are not so much looking for an author as a play in which to exist. Pirandello breaks the fourth wall as no other author had before him. It is a very daring and original piece. A must for any serious student of drama.
Rating:
Summary: What if?
Review: Luigi Pirandello kicked theatre convention out the door with "Six Characters in Search of an Author." Illusion and reality get a bit bent out of shape, as fictional characters stroll about and converse with managers and actors. It's a brilliant piece of existentialist work, and one that had a distinct effect on theatre after that.
It opens with several unnamed theatre people -- the Manager, the Leading Man, the Prompter -- rehearsing a play in an empty theatre. "During this manoeuvre, the Six CHARACTERS enter, and stop by the door at back of stage," Pirandello tells us: a florid Father, timid Mother, equally timid Boy, arrogant Son, sexy Step-Daughter and too-young-to-have-much-personality Child.
"As a matter of fact . . . we have come here in search of an author . . ." the Father tells the manager. The characters have been abandoned by their author, who "no longer wished, or was no longer able" to put them into a story. And now they want the theatre company to provide them with a vehicle that will make them immortal -- and they have to convince the Manager that they are worthy.
Pirandello dispels the unreality of the play with "Oh sir, you know well that life is full of infinite absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, since they are true." While the events of this play seems to be sort of gimmicky, Pirandello uses them with unusual grace (and not a few moments of bizarre comedy).
The characterizations are among the weirdest I've ever seen -- we have an entire family drama going on without a play/novel/film for it. Lovers, illegitimate kids, sibling rivalry and marital fights. Ironically, the Character family overshadows the "real" people on the stage. The Manager is a fun character, though, perpetually impatient and overstressed. "Pretence? Reality? To hell with it all!" the Manager cries near the end of the play.
But Pirandello's odd play "Six Characters in Search of an Author" is both pretense and reality, and it's a fun and enlightening ride while it lasts.
Rating:
Summary: An Innovative, Iconoclastic Masterpiece
Review: Luigi Pirandello's "Six Characters in Search of an Author" premiered in Rome in 1921 to audience shouts of "Maricomio!" ("Madhouse!"). Perhaps few of the theatregoers realized that the "madhouse" they had witnessed was a watershed in the history of drama. While many of the innovations of "Six Characters" may now seem commonplace, Pirandello's innovative, iconoclastic masterpiece marked a break from traditional dramatic structures and stage settings, a break which enabled twentieth century drama to develop along self-reflective imaginative lines much different than its predecessors. As Eric Bentley, the play's translator, notes in his introduction to this edition, "this was the first play ever written in which the boards of the theatre did not symbolize and represent some other place, some other reality." "Six Characters" is set in a theatre where a director, his stage manager and a group of actors are about to rehearse another of Pirandello's plays, "The Rules of the Game". The curtain is up, the stage is empty of props and background, and the lights illuminate the bare wall at the back of the stage. It is an austere setting, a kind of theatrical analogue to the blank sheet of paper an author faces each day he sits down to write. Suddenly, this austerity, this mundane theatrical rehearsal, is interrupted by the unexpected arrival of six characters--a father, a mother, a son, a stepdaughter, a boy, and a little girl. They are six characters who have lives, who have stories to tell, but whose dramatic text has not been written. They need an author. As Pirandello says in his 1925 introduction to the play: "Every creature of fantasy and art, in order to exist, must have his drama, that is, a drama in which he may be a character and for which he is a character. This drama is the character's raison d'etre, his vital function, necessary for his existence." The play proceeds, with the six characters relating fragmentary scenes of incidents in their lives, scenes which are accompanied by commentary, quarrels, dialogue, and interaction among the characters and between the characters and the actors. A kind of theatrical hall of mirrors, the actors who view these characters become, in effect, an audience. The actors are also, however, the actors who will be called upon to play the parts of the six characters in the dramatic text which is being created in their presence. For these actors and these characters, the stage becomes more real than the world. "Six Characters in Search of an Author" is a remarkable work of imagination, both in its structure and its dialogue. It is comic and absurd, tragic and ponderous. The play is a work of original genius; the text (like its characters) is open to multiple interpretations and meanings. As one character says, in an appropriate Pirandellian bit of dialogue: "[t]herein lies the drama . . . in my awareness that each of us thinks of himself as one but that, well, it's not true, each of us is many, oh so many, according to the possibilities that are in us."
Rating:
Summary: Pirandello's classic play, the first existentialist drama
Review: Luigi Pirandello's 1921 play "Six Characters in Search of an Author" ("Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore") has the deserved reputation of being the first existentialist drama and having a profound effect on later playwrights, especially those practitioners of the Theater of the Absurd such as Samuel Beckett ("Waiting for Godot"), Eugene Ionesco ("Rhinoceros"), and Jean Genet ("The Maids"). Pirandello's writing often focuses on elements of madness, illusion and isolation, all of which are inspired by the tragic aspects of his personal life in which his wife went insane and his daugther tried to commit suicide. In 1921 during a five week period Pirandello wrote his two acknowledged masterpieces, "Six Characters in Search of an Author" and "Henry IV." While "Six Characters" was successful when it opened in Rome it was also considered scandalous. However, it soon being performed in Milan, London, New York, and Germany. Because of his great influence on modern theater, Pirandello was awareded the Noble Prize for Literature in 1934. Two years later, while in negotiations to appear in a film version of "Six Characters," he died.
The setting for "Six Characters in Search of an Author" is a rehearsal for a play (By Pirandello) that is interrupted by the arrival of six characters. Their leader, the father, tells the manager that they are looking for an author. It seems that the author who created them never finished their story and they are unrealized characters who have not yet been fully brought to life. The father insists that they are not real people but characters, and the manager and his cast can only laugh at the idea. But then they become intrigued by the bits and pieces of the story the six characters have to tell.
The father is an intellectual who married the mother, a peasant woman. However, she fell in love with his male secretary and the father, bored with his wife, encouraged her to leave. She does, leaving behind the eldest son who is embittered by the abandonment. The mother has three children with this other man but then the father starts to miss her and watches the other children grow up. This new family moves away, but after the other man dies the mother and her children return to the city. The mother gets a job at Madame Pace's dress shop, but it turns out to be a brothel where the step-daughter ends up being employed. One day the father shows up and is set up with the step-daughter. However, the mother stops them from reaching the obvious conclusion and the entire family moves in with the father and the resentful son.
The manager agrees to produce their story and become the author for whom they have been searching. He tries to stage the scene where the father meets the step-daughter in the dress shop but both characters insist that what the actors are doing is not realistic. The manager allows them to finish out the scene instead. This sets up the basic juxtaposition of "drama" and "reality" for the rest of the play, with the key scenes in the lives of these characters providing more questions than they answer about what happened and what it means. At the point when the manager can no longer tell the difference between acting and reality he becomes fed up with the entire thing and ends the rehearsal, providing an audience that has already been challenged by these changing notions of reality with an abrupt ending to the drama.
Almost all of the characters in the play are known by their roles rather than their names, such as the Leading Man and the Second Female Lead. One of the few characters in the drama who has a name is Madame Pace, who is in charge of the dress shop that also serves as a brothel where the step-daughter works. It is perhaps this formality that serves to distance us from the production more than the strangeness of the action or the aged of the words, even though they are adapted to the modern ear. There may or may not be a real story here, but the ultimate point of this play is that the tradition of reality in the theater no longer holds true.
The radical idea here is that there is an immutability of reality for these six characters. Because they are forms, forced into performing the actions for which they were imagined, there is an inherent conflict with life. This is why the son wants to escape but cannot leave the studio and must play his role, as must the Mother and the rest of the characters. This is just as true of all the other characters besides the six, although the others are less inclined to see the truth, or at least the reality, of their own situation until the end, when the final scene of the drama seeks to dissolve the "stage" reality completely. Where Pirandello succeeds in the end is in having it both ways, for we can interpret what we have seen as being reality or as being acting. Either way, you are left to the same conclusion.
Rating:
Summary: Pirandello's Best
Review: There are actors preparing for a Pirandello play, when they get interrupted but six characters. Leading the six characters, the father steps up to inform them they are looking for an author and explains that the author hasn't fully brought them to life yet. The manager tries to kick them out when he is intrigued in the story they start describing. The play starts to take its twists when the father encourages his wife to leave him for his secretary because he has gotten bored with her over the years. The mother leaves the father with the eldest son. The mother starts a new family with the man, having three children. The father starts to miss her, and seeks out the children in order to reach her. The other man eventually moves away from the city with the family and the father loses track of them. After, the other man dies the mother returns to the city with the children. She gets a job in Madame Pace's dress shop, unaware that Madame Pace is more interested in using her daughter as a prostitute. The father arrives at the dress shop and that's where it starts to get good... The sense of tragedy and disillusion showed through in his work because of his personal experiences. In 1894, at the age of 27, he married a young woman who he never met. His parents arranged the marriage, Antonietta Portulano, the daughter of his father's business partner. Antonietta's mother had died in childbirth because of her father's insane jealousy that wouldn't allow a doctor in during the birth. Antonietta suffered a mental breakdown and became so violent that she should have been institutionalized. Pirandello kept her at home for seventeen years, terrorizing him and his three children. Their daughter was so troubled by her mother's illness that she tried to commit suicide. She failed when the old revolver failed to fire. His wife's illness played a great role in his work, contributing to the theme of madness, illusion, and isolation.
I highly enjoyed reading this story because of its turns and twists. It kept me intent because of it's abrupt turns. When the whole prostitution scene came in, I was caught off gaurd and it made the book so much more entertaining. Also, Pirandello's style of naturalism is creative but a little odd.. Luigi had a strange upbringing and a crazy wife, but his work is so warped and disillusioned that you find it very entertaining. To better understand the sporadic behavior of the characters and the novel itself, you need to read about Luigi Pirandello himself. I am one of those people who don't like to read a thousand-paged books-containing 30+pages in a chapter. This novel is short and sweet, but so good that I wanted to keep reading. For, the past year I haven't found to many novels that I've cared for, but I highly recommend reading this book. Preferably recommending to people that are open to new and random things, and if you have a bit of a twisted or normal sense of humor I guarantee you'll love it! I'm always open to any kind of novel and this one caught my attention and I actually enjoyed reading something for one!
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