Six Characters in Search of an Author

The play that we had to read for this week’s class session in Modern Drama was Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. The premise of this show is that six characters out of a play appear before a director and his acting troupe looking for an author to write their story. They are then confronted with the differences between how their story is intended to occur and how the director and actors interpret the story and deliver their versions of it.

I think that by doing this, Pirandello is actually making a profound point. He is pointing out the differences between the story that the author writes and the story that the audience gets. These differences occur due to things that cannot be helped when creating a performance. As shown by the clashes between the characters and the actors, an actor is not the character. They can try to interpret a character and behave how they believe the character should behave, but they never truly become the character. This causes an element of the original story to be lost and results in the audience seeing the performance to miss some of the messages that the author sends them.