Six Characters: Pirandello's Last Tape

Abstract

THERE CAN BE LITTLE DOUBT that Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of An Author owes its continued hold on our imagination-and its power as theatre-to the successful fusion of two orders of experience: the pain of role-playing in any life, and the painful limitations of dramatic art, particularly the crisis of post-Ibsen naturalism. The way Pirandello achieves this fusion is familiar enough and can be restated as follows. The imagined but prematurely abandoned 'characters,' who come to claim performance on the stage, feel themselves caught in the false fixity of a few moments of action; so they hope to be shown, to be re-created in the precise sense, through a different and compensating fixity: the Grecian urn perfectedness of art. But the completion and rehearsal of an unfinished play is not at all like the Grecian urn; on the contrary, it brings back the flux of life and inchoate creation, and the characters have to suffer again an awareness that exceeds their role. In effect, they react to this openness by wanting to choose the kind of play that suits them. And the two most articulate characters-the Father and the Stepmother-are torn by a desire for seemingly conflicting types of play: they want absolute fidelity to every naturalistic detail (the yellow plush of Madame Pace's sofa) while also wanting to go beyond this reduced play to express their essential inwardness: they want to be chorus, and they want to mean more than their fixed actions and words.