"Six Characters in Search of an Author" a Play by Luigi Pirandello

“Six Characters in Search of an Author” is a play written by Luigi Pirandello (1921). When I read this play I felt that it does not have a well constructed theme or story. It is all about six characters who themselves calls as characters in a play. The premise of the play is absurd. It is about the relationship between drama andmthe life. This play is constructed as a play within a play. The opening scene of the play is some people are rehearsing Pirandello’s Play “Mixing it up”. In that occasion six characters were entering with the feeling of awkwardness. The father, The mother, The stepdaughter, The son, The boy and The child are the six characters. The father explains that they are in search of an author as they have stories within them. But the angry manager responds negatively. He is in busy with his rehearsal. But the father says that life is full of absurdities and if one tries to reverse this truth then it is the madness of acting. The father says that they want an authentic author who does not denied them the stage life and the immortality. But they can’t find such an author so they bring themselves to the company in search of an author.

The stage manager thinks that they are presenting themselves as actors to be in play, but they explain that they are real characters but not actors. There is a paradox that the characters are independent of the actors who play them. One limit of impossibility has been reached when they demand actors to present them. Pirandello uses his characters and their situation to comment on the life of the theatre in the 1920s, and he also uses them to begin a series of speculations on the relationship of a public to the actors they see in the plays, the characters the actors play, and the author who creates them. The relationship between the author and his characters always implies a metaphor for the relationship between a creator and the creation. The six characters have a strong sense of themselves and their actions. They invite the manager to participate in their stories just as characters invite the audiences to become one with their narratives.

The stepdaughter explains that her mother is widowed but there arouse a confusion that there is a father. The father and The mother had one child together (The Son), but they have separated and mother has had three children by another man-The Stepdaughter, The Boy and The Child. The mother’s lover was died and The Stepdaughter became a prostitute for Madame Pace, because of financial difficulties. One day The Father turns out to be her client in the town. The mother came and informed that she is his stepdaughter and they both express their disgust and outrage. The manager gets interested in their story and he ready to perform the play. The son’s coldness to the family member is the centre issue of the play. The child will die, the boy will meet tragedy and the step daughter will flee.

In this play we can see some modernistic elements. It is an experiment with the limits of realism. Pirandello proposed, through the medium of this play, that realism has no right to assume a sovereign status in the universe of play writing. According to Luigi Pirandello, reality can no longer remain a contradictory of illusion. In the modernistic world reality can become a part and parcel of illusion and vice versa. Reality can be exchangeable with illusion. The boundary between these two is in a position to blur. This happened in the last part of the play where we can’t recognize which is real and which is illusion. At last both the manager and the father were left debating over whether the death of The Boy and The Child was reality or illusion. This philosophical search of the relation between the reality and illusion is an element of modernism. At the end of the play like the manager and actors the readers also be in a confused state that whether it is reality or illusion.