play response pirandellos 6 char in search of an author

Title: Six Characters in Search of an Author
Author: Luigi Pirandello
Nationality: Sicilian
Period and Setting: in a theatre during present times (or 1922 if wanting to be historically
accurate, but it is meant to be modern, present day)
Synopsis: A cast and crew of theatre people are getting ready to rehearse a Pirandello play when
they are interrupted by a group of people claiming to be "characters" whose author has refused to
give them life and they are looking for someone to stage their drama. The Stage Manager is
hesitant at first, thinking them to be crazy, but their story interests him enough that he agrees to
give it a try. So the characters begin to act out their story for the group. First, the father sent the
mother to live with a man in the house that she had become friends with and kept their son and the
mother moved away and had three more children and the son was sent to a wet nurse to be raised.
Eventually, the man the mother was living with died and the family moved back to the town of the
father, but didn't get in touch with him. They were poor so the mother went to work as a
seamstress and the step-daughter as a prostitute. One day, she is working and the father comes in
and almost gets it on with the step-daughter, but the mother stops them in time. Then the
step-daughter goes to him and demands that he give them money and allow them to live in the
house. The son, who has moved back in at this point in time, is disgusted with this arrangement
and shuns the family and disowns his mother. This drives the young boy (the step-son) to
muteness and is very hard on the rest of the family, especially the mother. Then, one day, after a
confrontation between the mother and the son, the son takes off across the garden and finds the
little girl drowned in the fountain and sees the boy staring at her and then the boy kills himself. At
the end of the enactment, the boy and little girl lie dead and the step-daughter takes off and runs
away, leaving the cast and crew to figure out what was real and what was pretense.
Unique Elements of Playwright's Style: His constant themes of the stability of art versus the
instability of reality, the idea of theatre within the theatre, and the idea of social masks and
pretense and the rejection of realities that are too hard to bear.