47 pages • 1 hour read
Luigi Pirandello, Transl. Edward StorerSix Characters in Search of an Author
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1921A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Act 1Act Summaries & Analyses
Act 1 Summary
The play begins with the curtain up and the stage set as if the company were in the middle of a rehearsal for Luigi Pirandello’s Mixing It Up. The actors and the Manager arrive and start rehearsal.
During the rehearsal, the Prompter interrupts to point out that the Leading Man should be wearing a cook’s cap. The Leading Man protests that it is too ridiculous. The Manager responds by complaining about the low-quality comedies the company must put on because of a lack of good French comedies. He does insist that the Leading Man wears the hat, as it is a part of the symbolism of the play.
As the company resumes the run, the six characters enter from the back of the stage and interrupt rehearsal. The Manager asks what they want, and the Father states that they are searching for an author to put on their drama. The Manager says that there is no author present, as they are rehearsing a published play. The Father asks if the Manager would be their author. The Manager calls the characters mad.
The Father sees this absurdity as an attractive aspect for artists. He describes how life is more absurd and implausible than theater. The Father argues that the theatrical process tries to make life more credible and ordered.
The Manager and the company are offended by his ideas. The Manager argues that theater is noble, and their current absurdities are simply a reflection of lackluster playwriting. The Father doesn’t see the distinction he is making and instead rejoices that they agree.
The Father describes how the characters have been born as characters, which causes the company to laugh. The Father is hurt, as part of their drama causes the Mother to mourn. The Manager attempts to throw the characters out. The Leading Actor feels like they are being made fools, and the Father is astonished. He points out that actors see how characters come to life during the rehearsal process, and he questions why the Leading Actor has difficulty believing it is possible just because there is no script.
The Father describes how their author is no longer able to or no longer wants to tell their story. The Manager asks what they want, and the Father responds that they want to live in the moment through the actors.
The Manager asks for their script book, but the Father describes how the story exists only in the characters and their passion pushes them forward. The Step-Daughter interjects and alludes to her passion for her step-dad, the Father.
The Step-Daughter describes herself as an orphan before singing a xenophobic French song. Then, she angrily outlines the tragedy that awaits the characters, including the death of the Child, the Boy doing a stupid thing, and her running away. She hints at something that will happen between her and the Father. She continues to describe the Mother’s anguish at the Son’s indifference and the Son’s disapproval of his three illegitimate half-siblings and Mother.
The Mother begins to faint. When the Father goes to lift her veil so others can see her, she tries to stop him. The conflict between the Mother and the Father prompts the Manager to ask about their relationship. He is confused about how the Mother can be widowed but married to the Father and yet have younger children with another man. The Father delineates the timeline: The Mother had a lover during their marriage, who recently died. The Father dismisses the importance of these questions and describes how her drama comes from being a mother, not a wife.
The Mother blames the Father for sending her away to the other man, but the Step-Daughter contradicts this and says the Mother is looking for an excuse. She states that the Mother is trying to reassure and reconcile with the Son after abandoning him. The Step-Daughter asserts that they were happy and loved with their father, the other man. The Mother insists she isn’t lying, and the Father agrees with the Mother.
The spectacle of their disagreements interests the actors and the Manager. The Manager agrees to hear the six characters out. Hearing this, the Son speaks out. Exasperated, he warns that the Father will now describe what he calls “the Demon of Experiment” (9). The Father and the Son bicker.
The Step-Daughter accuses the Father of feeling guilty, which the Father denies. The Step-Daughter reveals that Father was going to pay her money for sexual favors. The actors are horrified, and the Son is disgusted. The Step-Daughter continues in her description of her work at Madame Pace’s brothel, focusing on the envelope with the money. The Step-Daughter seeks revenge because this encounter filled her with shame. She keeps attempting to relive and act out this traumatic moment.
The Father demands that the Manager let him speak in his own defense. He says that the Step-Daughter has left out relevant facts to make him look worse.
The Father insists that he pities and cares for the Mother, but the Mother insists that he drove her away. She worries that she won’t convince the Manager because the Father knows how to use words and she does not. The Father insists that he married her for her poorness and simplicity, but the Mother contradicts this. The Father gives up, saying he meant to do good, but nothing good came of it.
The Leading Lady interrupts and asks to continue rehearsal. The Manager wants to listen first, and a few other actors agree.
The Father continues his story about his relationship with the Mother. He describes how he once had a secretary, and this man and the Mother fell in love. While he insists the other man and the Mother did nothing improper, he still sends the Mother to be with the other man as a favor to both himself and them. He was tired of their longing looks and thought they would be happy together.
The Manager asked why he did not just fire the secretary. The Father did fire him, but he didn’t like seeing the Mother mope around the house. The Mother instead blames her emotions on grieving her infant son who had been sent to the countryside. The Father claims he did this because he wanted the Son to grow up healthy and strong and he worried that Mother wasn’t strong enough to care for a baby.
The Step-Daughter laughs at the Father’s claim. She finds it darkly ironic that the Father is trying to make a moral argument while also patronizing Madame Pace’s brothel. The Father believes that this is proof of his humanity. This contradiction in his nature, he argues, explains why he had had to suffer in his life.
The Father describes how he watched over his family until the other man took them away. He states that the Step-Daughter can support this claim. The Step-Daughter acknowledges he did by describing how he literally watched her when she was a child leaving her school. She implies a perverted impropriety in his actions. The Father objects and recontextualizes this event by suggesting he was lonely with his family sent away. He was curious to see the Mother’s new family and see if she was happy. The Step-Daughter interjects. She describes how she was curious about who this man was. When she told the Mother about the man, the Mother did not send her to school for a few days. After the Step-Daughter goes back to school, the Father gives her a straw hat with flowers.
The Manager reacts to this story by describing it as discursive and unstageable. The Father agrees, saying that this is only distant backstory and should not be staged. The drama is coming next. The Father bemoans how the now-impoverished Mother and her family returned to the city after the other man’s death without his knowing. The Father and the Mother blame each other for the lack of communication.
The Father says he gave into sexual desire and temptation despite the shame of acting upon them. He blames women for their role in tempting men with their sexuality and encouraging secrecy.
The Step-Daughter reacts by describing how she now feels that she can talk about her own shame. The Father’s language and equivocations disgust her, and she thinks his philosophy seeks to excuse his behavior. She finds his remorse insincere.
The Manager asks the characters to come to the point and give just the facts. The Father argues for the subjectivity of facts, describing how a fact needs to be contextualized by motivations and feelings.
The Father describes how the Mother returned and began to work as a modiste, or fashionable dressmaker, for Madame Pace. The Step-Daughter adds how Madame Pace’s shop looked high class, but these appearances were only a front to entice respectable women into her real business, a brothel that trafficked women for sex work. The Mother insists that she did not know that she was given a job because Madame Pace wanted to traffic the Step-Daughter.
The Manager prompts the Step-Daughter to describe the day she met the Father there. The Step-Daughter agrees because it is a scene that would be great for the play. When they describe the scene, the Father and the Step-Daughter disagree about the facts of the encounter. The Father describes how the Mother interrupted them just in time, but the Step-Daughter corrects him and says that she was too late. While the Father claims he recognized her just in time and took the whole family back to his home, the Step-Daughter calls this recollection absurd.
The Father feels that this is the core of the drama: The tense relationship between a person’s multiple identities and individual moments. The Father finds it unfair that a complex person can be reduced to one moment in their life. He blames the Step-Daughter for what he sees as a betrayal: being in a place she was not expected to be in. He criticizes her for wanting to judge him for a fleeting, unexpected moment in his life.
The Father then moves on to the positions of the other characters, first trying to describe the Son’s. The Son rejects the Father’s attempt to include him in the drama. He insists he has nothing to do with the unfolding drama because he is better than those involved. The Step-Daughter scoffs at this and describes her scorn of the Son to the Manager. She blames him for her being trafficked because he would not let the family stay with him.
The Son says the family finds it easy to blame him, but he asks the men to imagine what they would have done in his situation. He was shocked when the family moved in and claimed they were his half-siblings. In particular, he bristles at the Step-Daughter’s sense of entitlement, but the Father sees it as his obligation to give her money, though for a different reason. He feels responsible for financially supporting the Mother and her family.
When the Father describes his obligation to the Son’s mother, the Son expresses his frustration. Since he was sent away as an infant, the Son could not recognize his own mother. He insists that he will not participate in the drama and considers himself not fully developed as a character.
The Father protests, but the Son questions when the Father ever cared about him. The Father concedes, but he adds that the Son’s feelings toward his parents have dramatic potential. He then points out that the Mother is crying.
In contrast to the Son’s own perception, the Father thinks the Son is the hinge of the drama’s action. As an example, he describes how the Boy feels humiliated by and frightened of the Son. When the Father describes how the Boy rarely talks, the Manager states they’ll cut his character out, especially because boys on stage are troublesome. The Father says that the Boy and the Child will soon disappear from the drama.
The Father describes how the drama will unfold. The Mother returns to the Father’s house. The drama finishes with the death of the Child, an unspecified tragedy involving the Boy, and the fleeing of the Step-Daughter. Only the Father, the Mother, and the Son remain at the end of the play, but they are estranged from each other.
The Manager agrees that their story has potential as a play. When the Manager comments upon their audacity in presenting a new play unsolicited, the Father describes how the characters are born for the stage. The Manager misunderstands, thinking he means they are actors. The Father corrects him, saying they are the role that they have been born into. The Manager demurs and then suggests that they need to find a playwright first. The Father insists the Manager is their playwright because he sees the drama in the characters’ lives. The Father wants someone to transcribe their scenes, not create a play. The Manager decides to try.
The Manager and the six characters exit together. The actors are astonished. They are confused and believe that the play will be a joke. They wonder who the characters are and whether they are mad or criminal. They criticize the Manager for thinking he could be a playwright. The actors leave the stage, but the curtains remain up. Nothing occurs for twenty minutes, acting as an intermission for the larger play.
Act 1 Analysis
The opening moments of the play are striking for an unprepared theatergoer: The stage looks “as it usually is during the day time,” so that the audience “may have the impression of an impromptu performance” (1). In other words, there are no sets, just a messy stage. The theater looks just as unprepared as it would “during rehearsals” (1). The characters then enter from various doors and aisles, breaking the theater convention called the “fourth wall,” the idea that the stage is a space of representation apart from the audience and that actors don’t acknowledge the space outside the imaginary one on the stage. Next, the people on the stage begin rehearsing a Pirandello play. All these metatheatrical elements in the play’s opening explore The (Un)reality of Theater, a mixing up of the normal conventions of illusion and reality that underpin theatrical production.
By showing the audience the mechanics of how theater is made, Pirandello emphasizes how constructed theater is. The Technicians take note of set pieces needed, costumes to be worn, and the layout of the stage. The Manager dictates the actors’ movement and the dialogue is practiced. Nothing is spontaneous and uncontrolled. This contrasts sharply with the spontaneous immediacy of the characters’ scene in Act 3. The realness and the truthfulness of theater is immediately questioned.
The entrance of the six characters of the title establishes the ambiguity of their reality. When they enter, a “tenuous light surrounds them, almost as if irradiated by them” (3). The light embodies the paradox of their “fantastic reality” (3). They are both fantastic and real, living people and characters.
The nature and purpose of theater is debated throughout the play. The Father introduces his understanding that it is a kind of “madness” (4). Life is absurd and implausible, he says, while theater works “to create credible situations” (4). Life is real, while theater “may appear true” (4). Theater is an attempt to “make seem true that which isn’t true” (4). The Manager, on the other hand, feels that acting is “noble” and “proud” (4, 5). He criticizes playwrights who make actors only “puppets to represent instead of men” (4-5). The Manager and the Father’s diametrically opposed philosophies about theater lead to many conflicts throughout the play.
The debate between truth and reality extends to the characters and the nature of theatrical characters more broadly. The Father describes the characters as “living beings more alive than those who breathe and wear clothes: beings less real perhaps, but truer!” (5). The subjectivity of truth and the difference between factual accuracy and emotional accuracy become points of conflict between the characters, especially the Father and the Step-Daughter.
The Father explains to the Manager that the characters were “born” (5), suggesting that they have a life and are not simply creations. The Father’s belief that “one is born to life in many forms” reflects his later argument about how one moment should not define him. Because of these beliefs in the life and multiplicity of the characters, the Father is confused by the actors reluctance to understand his arguments. Their profession, he suggests, should make them “accustomed to see[ing] the characters created by an author spring to life in [them]selves” (5). Pirandello draws attention to this dual idea of life: physical existence and truthful expression. The question of whether the characters are fictional or real plays with this duality. The Father’s ideas about being a character explore Authorship and the Artwork. These characters have a semi-autonomous existence apart from their author.
Not all of the six characters are as fully formed as the Father. This isn’t a description of Pirandello’s authorship but a feature of the characters that they themselves attribute to their author. The Father and the Step-Daughter are the most fully formed, and the two largely drive the play. Unlike the other characters, the Mother experiences the drama as if it were real, unaware that she is a character. She is not like the other characters who are acutely aware of their own status as characters.
Pirandello addresses this in the preface: He states that the Father and the Step-Daughter are the most fully realized characters, and this is why they dominate the play. The others haven’t been completely fleshed out yet by the “author.” The Mother, in particular, is “entirely passive” and is therefore unaware that she is a character. Thus, when the Father says that the Mother “isn’t a woman, she is a mother” (8), he isn’t merely being sexist. He is saying something precise about her ontology: She isn’t a woman, she is a character, and even more absolutely than the Father is not a man but “a father.”
Act 1 also explores the theme of Identity and Representation. The characters feel both trapped by their status as characters in need of an author to realize the play that they belong in and liberated, or at least alive, when they are realized that way and are playing their parts.
The Step-Daughter’s description of the events of the family drama sounds like predetermination: The tragedies “will” happen even though “the moment hasn’t arrived yet” (7). The fixed nature of the events frustrates and overwhelms the Step-Daughter. Despite these feelings, the Step-Daughter never tries to change the events; instead, she works to recreate them precisely and accurately.
The characters’ recollections of their backstory is the first example the audience sees of the multiple memories of the same event. The Mother remembers how the Father “forced” her to go with the other man and “forced her to give up the Son (8), while the Father and Step-Daughter dispute this. The Step-Daughter recalls how they “lived in peace and happiness” with the other man, suggesting she did in fact love the other man as the Father suggested (9). The characters continue to disagree through all the scenes, reflecting the subjectivity of memory.
As the characters describe their backstory, the subjectivity and variation in memory and storytelling become even more apparent. The Step-Daughter describes the encounter with the Father as traumatizing and morally reprehensible. The Father emphasizes how he was unwitting and how the Step-Daughter “is trying to blame” him (10). While the Father describes sending away the Son as an act of protection, the Mother feels it is an act of aggression where he “took” the Son away (12). They also disagree about whether the Mother was sent away by the Father. Her sadness is, according to the Father, because of her lover’s absence, while the Mother attributes it to the Son’s absence. Words are powerful in creating these perspectives. When telling their stories, the characters use words to create these stories. The Father begs to “speak” and “explain” before the Manager forms a judgment (10). The Mother worries she won’t be able to plead her case because the Father “knows how to talk” and she does not (10). Language creates the memory and, possibly, the truth. All these discussions about how to tell the right story about what happened are further explorations of the theme of Authorship and the Artwork.
The Father supports his understanding of his humanity by pointing to his moral “contradiction” as “proof” (12). The “incongruity” in his identity reflects the multiple versions of his self that he describes later (12). One part of him could make the moral mistake to visit a sex worker while another part could criticize the Son’s moral failings.
The Father and the Step-Daughter recount a second encounter, which allows them both to extend their interpretations and authorial revisions. The event they describe involves the Father watching the Step-Daughter leaving school. The Step-Daughter presents this as early evidence of his sexual perversion with pedophilic implications. On the other hand, the Father positions his actions as a reflection of his enduring love for his family and his loneliness. Like the other events retold by the characters, no objective truth is ever revealed.
The Son recognizes the moment as more suitable for a book than for a play when he exclaims, “Literature” (13). This highlights the differences in storytelling in different forms. The Manager reacts to their stories as a conventional playwright would. The event takes place too far back in their lives to be included in the drama and the events are not dramatically stageable. Rather than searching for objective truth, he, too, is acting as an author and is editing the story.
The Step-Daughter’s description of Madame Pace’s shop reflects the play’s interest in the differences between appearance and reality. Madame Pace’s shop “[i]n appearance” looks like a place “for the leaders of the best society” and “elegant ladies” (15). Despite these appearances, it acts as a front for her sex trafficking in her brothel. The Mother may have appeared to have been supporting her family through her work, but it is actually the Step-Daughter’s trafficking that does.
The timing of the Father and the Step-Daughter’s sexual encounter is a subtler example of authorship than the Manager’s condensation of plot in Act 3. The difference between “just” and “almost” in time is as major a choice as the setting for the drama’s ending (15). The revision of the ending ultimately has the same effect as the original, which does not extend to this variation. While the audience will never know what happened for true, one of these subject memories must be more objectively right than the other.
The Son, despite his claims at not wanting to be a part of the drama, crafts his own narrative for himself. He points to his forceful exclusion from the story to explain his reactions and motivations. He rejected his family because he could not recognize them after the Father sent him away as an infant. The author left him “unrealized” (17). Unlike the Step-Daughter and the Father, the Son creates a narrative to exclude him from the drama. But this narrative becomes a part of the drama. The Son’s “aloofness” causes him to be “cruel” and reject his family (17). The Step-Daughter feels this rejection leads to her trafficking, and she blames the Son. Despite his claim that he “doesn’t come into the affair,” he is “really the hinge of the whole action” (17).
The Manager’s reaction to the Boy’s silence reflects how he approaches storytelling as a conventional playwright would. If he does not speak, the Manager will “cut him out” because boys are a “nuisance” onstage (18). Plays are implicitly driven by dialogue, but the Manager misses the power of silence on stage. In his effort to make a dramatic play, he edits the story just as the characters do.
Despite the revisions across all the stories, some events do remain fixed. In the Father’s telling of the events of the play, he includes the same events as the Step-Daughter: The Mother and her family return to the Father’s house, the Child and the Boy die, the Step-Daughter flees, and the remaining trio remain estranged. These commonalities suggest that, despite some subjectivity, there may be core facts.
