The Producer asks the six visitors to explain themselves. The Boy is her fourteen-year-old brother, and their four-year-old sister is The Child. Although the eighteen-year-old Step-Daughter is dressed in mourning black, too, she has a “dashing, almost impudent” beauty. Together, they make up a forlorn family: The Father is a plump man of about fifty, while the Mother, wearing a black dress and widow’s veil, “seems crushed and terrified.” The Son, age twenty-two, appears contemptuous of the other five characters. “A tenuous light surrounds” the six characters who have appeared on the stage. When the leading man complains his costume is ridiculous, the Producer shouts, “Ridiculous? 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 Producer continues to ridicule the “abstruseness” of the play until the theater Door-Keeper announces that a party of six requests to meet with him. The play opens on a relatively empty stage where actors are arriving to rehearse a Pirandello play. Conflict emerges between reality and appearance as the characters and the stage company struggle to resolve the uncertainties that trouble not just the characters’ existence, but identity itself. While the Producer and actors are incredulous at first, they become fascinated by the characters’ plight and are drawn into their crisis. The drama centers on six characters who interrupt a play rehearsal to ask the Producer to complete their story, claiming their author never finished the play for which he created them.

Six Characters in Search of an Author is a 1921 play by the Italian writer Luigi Pirandello.

Characters in search of an author