868 Pirandello, Luigi
color, than the “real” actors. The lighting of the six
characters is also different, and their expressions are
set and almost masklike (a throwback to early Greek
tragedy).
Certainly the situation of made-up characters
“coming to life” and demanding satisfaction from
their author is absurd. However, the six characters
also exhibit many similarities to what is taken as
“real life.” Like many people who have been trau-
matized, they are stuck in the experience of their
tragedy and cannot get beyond it.
Most of all, Six Characters is useful as an exercise
in extending empathy. If the readers and audience
can feel sympathy for the six characters, then per-
haps they will be better able to feel empathy for
others whom the readers and audience have “char-
acterized” or whom society has locked in a particular
“role.”
Natalie Tarenko
IdentIty in Six Characters in Search of
an Author
In Six Characters in Search of an Author, characters in
a play function as an extended metaphor for human
beings in “real” life. The identity for characters is a
part the actors are playing, just as people play a part
in “real” life.
The Six Characters of Pirandello’s play comprise
a couple who used to be married, the Father and
Mother; their Son; and the three offspring of the
Mother and the man with whom she ran off—the
Stepdaughter, the Boy, and the Little Girl. These six
characters show up at a theater during a rehearsal
one day and demand to speak with an author. They
want to have a life on stage.
These characters have been involved in traumatic
events and “cannot give up” their roles, much as “real”
people live the traumatic events in their own lives
over and over. When the Son defends his behavior
by saying that he is “not a fully developed character,”
both the literary and the actual meanings pertain.
Eventually, the initial parallels between theater
and “real” life seem to run out. For example, the
characters’ reality and identity “can’t change, because
it is already determined, like this, for ever,” while
the reality and identity of “real” people can and do
change. However, the seeming differences actually
pose deeper and more terrible parallels. What if the
reality and identity of “real” people also is “deter-
mined, like this, for ever”?
The metaphor of theater for “real” life not only
carries frightening meaning for the identity of the
“real” audience/viewer; the metaphor also makes
the concept of characters more to be empathized
with. After all, characters are fixed in their agonized
identities: While a play is a game for the actors, not
reality, the events are reality, and not a game, for the
characters.
The six characters have come back to the theater
to talk back about their lack of existence, for their
author, Pirandello, did not complete the work for
which he originally conceived them. All the theater
staff in Six Characters find it absurd that the six char-
acters have come back in this way, for no one expects
characters to talk back to authors about what the
authors have done with them. However, this talking
back is one more important parallel for “real” people:
Perhaps we can and should talk back to the authors
of our own roles and identities.
Natalie TarenkoJuStIce in Six Characters in Search of
an Author
In the play Six Characters in Search of an Author, cre-
ated, fictional characters come to a theater. This situ-
ation at first seems to be highly unrealistic. However,
these characters’ search for justice becomes more and
more moving and even reflective of aspects of reality.
Like many traumatized people and victims, the
six characters demand to be heard and to be taken
seriously. They come to the theater to tell their story,
which their author had abandoned, unfinished. In
quite traditional dramatic structure, the beginning
of Pirandello’s play functions as exposition to fill in
earlier events.
The six characters consist of the Father, his for-
mer wife, the Mother; their Son, and the wife’s three
younger children from another man, who had once
worked for the husband. The wife had gone with
the other man only at the insistence of her husband,
who wanted to end his relationship with her. Years
later, the father of the younger children died, leaving
their mother in poverty. Her eldest daughter took a
job in a dressmaker’s shop, which is really a cover for