Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) was born in southern Sicily, into a wealthy family involved in the sulfur industry. He received his elementary education at home and later earned a doctorate in philology in Bonn. As a young man, Pirandello worked with his father at the family’s sulfur mines before marrying. Major flooding of the mines in 1903 became an economic and personal disaster for the family. Pirandello started writing to earn a living. Pirandello's works include novels, hundreds of short stories, and
about 40 plays. Pirandello's tragic farces are often seen as forerunners
of the Theatre of the Absurd of the 1950s. In 1935 Pirandello received the Nobel Prize in Literature for "his bold and ingenious revival of dramatic and scenic art."
Pirandello's most famous play, Six Characters in Search of an Author (Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore) is a meta-theatrical masterpiece which invites viewers to think about the relationship between the theater and "real life."
[Performance by the Pirandello Theater of Art, Rome,
given in London in 1925: the Manager/Director with the family]
During a theater rehearsal for Pirandello's play The Role Play under an irascible director, from the auditorium suddenly six people appear who are a family and ask the theater director to perform "them." They are Father, Mother, Stepdaughter, Son, Boy and Little Girl, and were created as stage characters by an author who did not complete them. But they want to see their piece on stage, they want to "be brought to life" in a work of art.
"I'm rehearsing now! And you know very well that nobody is allowed in during the rehearsal. Who are the gentlemen? What do you want?"
The father: "We are looking for an author."
Theater director: "But there is no author here, we are not rehearsing a new play."
The stepdaughter: "All the better, sir! Then we could be your new play."
Reluctantly, the skeptical theater director and the actors agree to listen to their story.
They learn of the complete breakdown of the family. Many years before the time of the drama, the Father and Mother were married. The now adult Son is the fruit of this liaison. Wanting for his Son a strong peasant education and considering the mother - who is a little frail - unable to provide it, the father sends him from his youngest age to a boarding school far from the family house, which saddens the mother. Noticing that his wife and his secretary have fallen in love, the Father, believing to do the right thing, divorces his wife and chases them both away so that they can be together. From their union will be born first the Stepdaughter, then the Boy and the Little Girl.
The Father is secretly interested in the family that he has indirectly built, and he frequently goes to see the (then still small) Stepdaughter after school, until her parents decide to move away. The Father then loses track of them and resumes a normal life.
A few years later, following the death of the secretary, the Mother, the Stepdaughter - now 18 years old -, the Boy and the Little Girl return to the city where the Father still lives. The Father is not aware of this return. Two months later the family is still in mourning, the Mother and Stepdaughter still wearing black.
Lacking the money to support the bereaved family and seeing no benefit in reconnecting with the Father, the Mother is forced to work as a seamstress in a clothing store. Her employer, Mrs. Pace, actually uses her store as a cover for her illegal activities. She encourages the young daughters of her employees to prostitute themselves to satisfy her customers. The Stepdaughter resigns herself to this activity without informing the Mother. The Mother ends up discovering her daughter naked in the arms of a man who is none other than the Father, who apparently regularly frequents this establishment.
The Father, racked with remorse, invites the Mother and her children to come live with him. The Mother then meets the (now adult) Son who was sent away to boarding school and whom she never knew. The Son remains cold towards the Mother for whom he feels nothing and shows contempt for his stepsister and the other two children. The Stepdaughter clearly shows her resentment and disgust towards the Father whom she met under such horrific circumstances. The family climate is very heavy and particularly painful for the Mother.
However, the attempt to bring these events onto the stage as a dramatic story fails because the reality of the six characters cannot be represented by the illusionist play of the actors. The "characters" insist on recreating their tragedy as it actually happened, which causes a conflict with the opinions of the director and the actors, and in the process, the director's fixed ideas of realistic theater are called into question. Madame Pace arrives mysteriously, but - being real - speaks inaudibly. The story of the "characters" begins to overwhelm reality when the Little Girl (unsupervised by the Mother who is talking to the Son) drowns in a fountain, and the Boy then commits suicide with a pistol... The play comes to a confusing close when the Stepdaughter runs away with a cynical laugh.
Pirandello about the piece: “Without wanting to, they all express, as their deepest sorrow and grief, in order to defend themselves against the accusations of the others, what has been the need of my spirit for so many years: the impossibility of understanding each other."
This play is one of drama's most original and profound meditations on the nature of the theatrical process. As Michael Patterson says in Oxford Dictionary of Plays, the characters have already found the author who created them, they only need realization through performance. But the irony is that - at the mercy of superficial actors - such a realization is unattainable.
Today this experimental metaplay is widely read and staged. However, audience reactions to the 1921 premiere created such an uproar that Pirandello was forced to leave the theater through a side exit...
I have read Six Characters in Search of an Author in the translation by Anthony Mortimer in Oxford World's Classics (Luigi Pirandello: Three Plays). An older translation is available at Project Gutenberg.