Six characters in search of an author

¶ … Characters in Search of an Author: A New Style of Theater, an Old Form of Family Dysfunction

At the beginning of the absurdist play "Six Characters in Search of an Author" by the 20th century Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello, the characters of the drama complain to a manager rehearsing another play with 'real' actors that they are incomplete and that the author must finish them before the actors can finish rehearsing the play for performance. These intruders are not actors, they are 'characters' in search of an author, a plot -- or at least the right to air what has happened to their family, which is terrible and shameful, they admit. The dysfunctional and incomplete nature of the characters, and their difficult relationships could be said to both parody the experience of writing drama as well as deconstruct family relationships that have appeared in Western drama since the ancient Greeks and Shakespeare. Over the course of the play, Pirandello's experiment in meta-theater highlights the artificial and constructed nature of relationships in fiction. In real life, no character is ever finished, people change and evolve. However, the play also contains other lessons for viewers -- the characters of a drama are much like people in therapy and vice versa. In theater and in therapy, people seek answers to life's questions and try to create more positive familial dynamics while under the guidance of a 'manager' or therapist.

The family depicted in the play is filled with broken relationships, which they subsequently enact, in fragmented and contentious fashion, over the course of the drama. There is also, critics have commented, a real lack of a desire for truth upon the part of most of the characters to resolve their conflicts. The characters seem to wish to stage their life and family history to make a case for how the family is unfair or corrupt, for a viewer, even though they say that society and their author have spurned them unfairly (Illiano 93) the Father and Mother of the original family dynamic do not love one another, so the mother, upon the urging of her husband, married the man she really loved, a clerk in her husband's office. She has three children with her new husband, and her first husband, called "The Father," develops an attraction for her daughter by her second husband, known as "The Stepdaughter." The broken, now reconstructed family seems utterly enmeshed in a negative fashion and at odds with one another. On one hand, the relationship between the Father and Mother was originally unfulfilling, but rather than strive to change it the Mother instead accepts her husband's demand that she marry a man who is still connected to her husband, just as the Father will tries to exercise his sexual frustrations upon his former wife's new daughter. The Mother cannot even bring herself to end a loveless marriage, until she is told she should by her first husband, and she returns to the Father upon her new husband's death. Despite her apparently libertine behavior, the mother is dressed in black, as if in mourning, and seems like the most moral figure of the play, unlike the Father who seems to delight in his strange desires and encourages his wife to leave him.

There is a strong sense of oedipal tension within the family dynamic. Even the simple fact that he has sent his natural Son away to live in the country suggests that he felt threatened by the boy in an oedipal fashion when the Son was born. Note how, almost as if they were in 'family therapy' through drama, all of the characters are known by their relationships with one another, not by their individual identities. However, there is also a certain irony to the apparent archetypical clarity to these labels -- the Mother and Father have urges and pasts that are far from motherly and fatherly to their loved ones and children.

The ostensible reason the Son was sent off to the country was to make him strong -- even though he was still nursing at the time, thus it is hard to see how the Father could have known the Son would grow up to be a weak man, unless he was jealous of the Mother's affection for her first child. The Son is given a wet nurse in the country, so the mother cannot nurse her own child. Unsurprisingly, given this treatment, the Son is angry at his birth parents, and also hates his new stepfamily, feeling that everyone is against him and that the world has ostracized him and treated him cruelly. He even complains to the manager that he is a frustrated character, with no real potential for development and outlet, because he stands aloof to the family, rather than feels involved within its dynamic. He seems almost a prototypical existentialist protagonist -- or like "Hamlet" in his dislike of his sexualized and divorced mother and resentment of his father.

The Stepdaughter is the most positive and proactive character of all of the protagonists. She is the most vocal about the need to stage the play. She is alienated from her family, just like the Son was cast out of the first family and works for an immoral woman named Madame Pace. Madame pace owns a shop and runs a brothel out of the back of the shop and tries to persuade the girl to go along with her scheme of selling the pretty young girl's body, which horrifies the mother when the girl tries to show this in action. The Stepdaughter, however, is merciless in her search for the truth. Even before the play begins she went to the author and asked him to finish the story. But unlike the Son she was not forcibly sent away from home, but chose to leave.

The other two children of the second marriage, the Boy and the Child, never speak, and even from the beginning of the play their silence seems to hint at the tragedy that will occur in the future. They take their place in the history of drama amongst many tragic child protagonists, like the children of Medea, murdered by their mother for their father's infidelity, or Oedipus' children in "Oedipus the King." For unspecified reasons, the Stepdaughter is cruel towards the Boy. The boy is also Hamlet-like in his attitude, always wearing black, although his sister calls him an idiot. He eventually commits suicide at the end. His sister, called the Child, accidentally drowns while playing. She is dressed in white, much like Ophelia, another character from "Hamlet" who 'accidentally on purpose' dies by drowning. Thus, despite the comedic tone of the play, tragic elements are highlighted in the persona of the child, specifically tragedies of how the relationships of adults damage the children of later generation, a common theme in Western drama.

Interestingly, the unnamed nature of the characters does not make them less realistic. In a way it heightens a certain aspect of 'realism,' namely the way that we are defined by our relationships within families, or even within a company of actors, as is the case of the first dysfunctional family dynamic the audience witnesses on stage. In fact, because the family members highlight the fact they are 'characters' and not simply part of a fictional plot where the 'realistic' and complete nature of the story is taken for granted, they seem to grow in complexity. Based or incomplete nature of the supposedly incomplete characters, theoretically the actors should be more real, but the Leading Lady and the other members of the company seem staged and artificial in nature.

Rather, the intensity of the relationships of the supposedly incomplete and pretend characters seem more like 'real' human beings as characters because of their search for completeness, and they take on a level of 'reality' in the play, even while their roles seem constructed. The relationships between them highlight the false and impermanent nature of all family relationships that can be destroyed by divorce and death. An interpretation of the play that suggests the actors "present here the people of flesh and blood, physical life" seems problematic (Herman 93). The actors are more like "fictitious figures themselves, in so far as they were conceived by the playwright for the story line" but the incomplete characters are, by the audience more likely to be seen "in terms of a non-mythical world" and accepted by the audience "not merely as plausible symbols but as real and actual human beings," and representational characters with complex psychologies. The actors instead, are "take[n] for granted" as the "symbols of art" while the Father, Mother, Stepdaughter, and family are "more real than the actors," suggesting that art seems artificially more complete than life (Illiano 4-5).

Of course, even 'real life' is art, or has elements of fiction within its schema. We all play various family roles within a dynamic, and that roles are mutable, just as the Mother changes from one man's wife to another. Pirandello's self-conscious use of the nature of theater and the way people play roles in the theater and in family life was considered revolutionary at the time. His title "Six Characters in Search of an Author" stressed the fact that the fourth wall between the audience and the actors was being broken down in the construct of the drama itself, not merely alluded to, as in a Shakespearean soliloquy or a 'play within a play device' and within a family at war traditional roles, like father/son, father/stepdaughter are broken down.