Six Characters in Search of an Author

Overview

About seventy pages, a drama by Luigi Pirandello, first performed in 1921. A theatre company is rehearsing when six people interrupt and announce that they are characters from an unfinished play, abandoned by the author who imagined them, and that they need someone to put their story on stage.

They tell it in pieces and in contradiction: a husband who sent his wife away, her three children by another man, and the Stepdaughter he almost bought from Madame Pace without knowing her. The actors try to perform what the characters describe and get it wrong, the characters object that no actor can be them, and the rehearsal ends in a real drowning and a gunshot that nobody can say were real.

What happens

The rehearsal interrupted. A theatre company is rehearsing an ordinary play when six people suddenly interrupt, announcing themselves as characters from an unfinished play, abandoned by the author who first imagined them without ever completing their story.

The characters’ demand. The six characters insist they need someone to actually put their story on stage, since no author has finished their narrative and they remain suspended, unable to achieve the completion only dramatic performance could give them.

The fragmented family story. The characters tell their story in pieces and contradiction, involving a husband who sent his wife away, her three children by another man, and the Stepdaughter he almost bought from Madame Pace without recognizing her.

The actors attempt performance. The theatre company’s actors try to perform what the characters describe, attempting sincere representation of the family’s disputed and painful history despite lacking any complete or coherent script to follow.

The characters object. The characters object that no actor can truly be them, insisting the actors’ performances, however skilled, cannot actually capture or convey the reality of what the characters themselves claim to have genuinely lived.

The ambiguous ending. The rehearsal ends in a real drowning and a gunshot that nobody can say were real, dissolving the stable boundary between theatrical illusion and genuine event that had structured the entire preceding action.

How to read it

Read the characters’ claim that they are more real than the actors attempting to portray them as inverting theater’s usual hierarchy between fictional creation and its human performers, staging a genuinely radical question about where dramatic reality actually resides.

Pay close attention to how the characters’ insistence that no actor can truly be them dramatizes an unbridgeable gap between lived experience and its theatrical representation, one no amount of skilled acting can actually close however sincere the attempt.

Notice how telling the story in pieces and contradiction, rather than coherent linear narrative, formally enacts how thoroughly incomplete and disputed the characters’ own reality remains even to themselves, since no single version of events commands full authority.

Consider the ending’s real drowning and gunshot that nobody can say were real as dissolving any stable boundary between theatrical illusion and genuine event, leaving audiences without reassurance that what they witnessed was safely contained within fiction’s normal protective frame.

Read this play alongside Ibsen’s Wild Duck to compare two theatrical treatments of how illusion, whether theatrical or self-deceiving, structures family relationships and how badly both plays suggest confronting hidden truth directly can actually go.

Questions it raises

• Does the characters’ claim to be more real than the actors performing them successfully invert theater’s usual hierarchy, or does this claim remain a clever theatrical conceit that cannot actually escape its own status as performed fiction within Pirandello’s own completed play?
• How does telling the family’s story in pieces and contradiction, rather than as coherent narrative, shape your understanding of what actually happened between the husband, the wife and the Stepdaughter? Does this fragmentation reflect genuine uncertainty or deliberate theatrical technique?
• What does the actors’ failure to adequately perform the characters’ story suggest about theatrical representation’s actual limits? Does the play argue that lived experience is genuinely unrepresentable, or merely that this particular rehearsal fails for specific, remediable reasons?
• How should an audience interpret the ending’s real drowning and gunshot that nobody can say were real? Does this ambiguity represent the play’s ultimate statement about art and reality’s relationship, or does it simply refuse resolution for its own sake?
• Given that the characters remain unfinished because their original author abandoned them, what does this abandonment suggest about the play’s understanding of artistic responsibility toward imagined creations once an author has begun but not completed their existence?
• What does this play’s continued influence on theatrical experimentation and metatheatrical technique suggest about the durability of Pirandello’s central innovation, characters who claim independent reality from both their author and their performers?