Pirandello. "Six Characters in Search of an Author" Theatre de la Ville, France, in CAl Performances Berkeley

THEATER de la VILLE  Six Characters in Search of an Author.  Luigi Pirandello, Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota, director. 

"Innovative artistry, balancing a passionate creative spirit with reverence for the original."  This  (what was absurdist, but probably has become the norm!) psychological drama “hits the stage with rare mastery”, “captivating and disturbing”.  I did not find it disturbing.  Characters telling the director how to tell their story, what their story is, talking back to "the author" as they have been "disowned" or "abandoned" certainly makes sense, if they "want a life on the stage"...the director telling them that the play will make their characters better than life, and extract the essential qualities of a situation opposes the character's argument for realism, faithfulness to fact....again on the stage the interlacing of non fictive elements with fictive interpretation. 

Performed in french with French actors and English subtitles...brilliantly done, with the nuanced finesse and style of the French...the world would be so much poorer without their culture, their seriousness about the play, and their passion!  The play finds a group of actors confronted onstage by six characters trapped in literary limbo, searching for an author to tell the story they have been written into...the actors enact each character’s role...it is all quite tragic and yet, .. very satisfying theater!  

How many people are trapped in their scripts?  Plenty! Think about it. 

"The play would ...see see successful productions in London and New York in February and October of 1922, and in Berlin and Vienna in 1024.  Pirandello's own theater company, founded in 1925, then performed in Italian throughout the major cities of Europe and North and South America.  Pirandello became one of the most respected and influential dramatists in the world by the end of the 1920's and today "Six Characters in Search of an Author" is considered one of the most influential plays in the history of world literature".  

The play involves the author, and characters as enacting the author's script, and actors enacting the characters, and so on...it layers reality on the stage, and adds dimension to theater's role in the audience's viewing life.  Brava!