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Now I want to see Six Characters staged.
In this collection of three of Pirandello's plays, including his most famous work Six Characters in Search of an Author, a common question threads itself through each: what is real and what is fiction?In Six Characters in Search of an Author, a family of 'characters' invade the rehearsal of a play and demand to find an author. 'One is born to life in many forms,' the father says 'as a tree, or a stone, as water, a butterfly... or as human. And one can also be born as a character.' These characte...
A great work, perhaps the best play of the 20thC. And a standard for great art: Think you've written really well? Did the audience fight for 20 minutes at the end, divided between hostility and admiration? That's what happened 10 Maggio '21, Teatro Valle di Roma. (Interesting that around then Italy won a gold medal in the 1920 Antwerp Olympics, but the Belgian band did not know the new Italian national anthem: they played O Sole Mio--and all the stands sang along. Unfortunately, the writer Capur...
They say I was born in June. The day, the year somehow ceases to exist. I live with my mother. She stares at the wall, singing songs unnoticing my existence in the house. Is this how being an orphan feels like? I used to work at Madame Pace’s dress shop. Only it wasn’t a dress shop. It was a whore house where I used to entertain clients throughout the night. My mother was unaware of my earnings, but as if it mattered. Then, one day I fell in love. In fact, I fell in love with his eyes. The same
The theater of Luigi Pirandello relentlessly begs the question, within a theatrical context, of what is realistic and what is fictional drama. An appropriate, recent example of Pirandello's influence at work is Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, NY, a film in which the main character Caden's attempt to make a theatre about "everything" results in a sort of solipsistic confusion about what he is actually experiencing and what is merely an acted out rendition of his past (or present for that matter). K...
Pirandello, always ahead of his time.
The original metafiction. We start off with some actors and actresses, who are putting on a different Pirandello play, Mixing It Up, of which the stage manager says, “Is it my fault if France won’t send us any more good comedies, and we are reduced to putting on Pirandello’s works, where nobody understands anything and where the author plays the fool with us all?”The titular six characters consist of a disjointed family: the Mother (aka Amalia), the Father, the Step-Daughter, the Son, the Boy, a...
A farce! Six Characters in Search of an Author is a remarkable invention of genius by the Italian Nobel laureate, Luigi Pirandello, which mixes the real with the verisimilar, where a drama is acted out within a drama. In this work he explores the ambiguous nature of reality and truth.This drama is in two acts, which can be read in around ninety minutes. A director and a company of actors are in preparation for their rehearsal. Then six people or characters - a father and his family - who have al...
Pirandello is awesome. Clever, witty and marvelous. Somewhere in the world there is a picture of me next to his statue in Agrigento, Sicily, Italy.I'd like to have that picture back. I was skinny and had hair back then.Anyway, can't recommend Pirandello enough.
Masterpiece. HILARIOUS masterpiece.
I really enjoyed these plays, shame Pirandello was a fascist
I read this play years ago, and I recently put it on my reading list because it such an influential play of the 20th century. The play sets the stage for future absurdist plays of the 1950’s and forces my students to engage with a meta-theatrical work. I’m not sure I like this term “meta-“ anymore because I think that since writing was invented, literature has contained elements and structures that force the reader to realize he is engaging with artifice.
I will probably update this review after I find a chance to watch the play so that I can better reflect on the philosophical questions about stories and crafting a narrative out of life - interpretation versus reality etc (which I have been thinking about a lot recently with The Journalist and the Murderer and Supplément à la vie de Barbara Loden) - because I was a bit distracted reading this wondering how it would work on stage. Some of the Father's monologues are quite stilted reading (and may...
Three plays, all covering (in some way) people portraying people they are not, while involving other people in various ruses for various purposes. In one, six characters search for an author who can carry their stories into reality, as they struggle with their fate of being unable to be anything other than what they were written to be and having to see actors take up their identities to portray them (even as they go through the motions of their own lives). In another, a man with a head injury wa...
This is a classic of absurdist theater written in 1921... while a manager is directing another Pirandello play six characters show up without an author and only a sketchy plot. It's a bit disconcerting...BUT it makes us think about the difference between reality the unreality of drama.This is considered one of the greatest plays of the 20th century.
An absolutely original thinker in the world of playwriting. Even a century there are so many modern elements and pathways to follow that I feel he will surely be relevant and challenging for a long time to come.
