Six Characters in Search of an Author: Act 1 Summary & Analysis

Through his initial directions, Luigi Pirandello immediately throws away the conventions of theatrical form. The raised curtain indicates that, rather than waiting for a fictional world to reveal itself, the audience walks into a theater that has been waiting for them—without the curtain, nothing clearly separates the audience’s lives from the world of the stage. And the setting—a theater rehearsal of a different Pirandello play—raises questions about how an author can exist in a fictional world of their own creation, whether the play is supposed to be in a fictional world at all, and who the people onstage truly are: actors playing a part, actors playing actors playing a part, or perhaps merely themselves.

“Mixing it Up,” whose title refers to the role changes and inversions among actors, authors, characters, and the audience throughout this work, is not a real play (although other versions of this work have the Manager and Actors rehearse a real Pirandello play). The Manager’s ironic disdain for Pirandello—penned, of course, by Pirandello himself—foreshadows this play’s absurd twists and “glorious failure” to meet genre standards, and also shows how the Manager and Actors (both the people onstage and the characters they embody) are caught in a kind of absurd existential bind, forced to perform roles they neither chose nor necessarily enjoy. If acting merely means being one’s own puppet-master—turning oneself into what one is not and thereby imprisoning oneself in a prewritten role—then the validity of the whole enterprise falls into doubt.

Pirandello’s stage directions calling for “a tenuous light” are an explicit attempt to create ambiguity about whether the Characters are real, illusionary, both, or somewhere in between. Although the audience knows nothing about them, the six newcomers’ dispositions suggest that they are a family and that there are protracted tensions among them. While most literature starts with an innocuous status quo and then hurls its protagonists toward a climax, Pirandello’s Characters seem to have already reached their literary climax—the Manager and Actors’ play-within-a-play is rivalled by the drama that seems to have already taken place among the Characters. It notable that, in his revised version of the play, Pirandello recommends that the Characters wear masks throughout the performance, permanently sticking each of them with a particular emotion.

As the audience is likely to do, the Manager—who now stands in for this audience to some extent—initially takes the Characters literally and thinks they are looking for Pirandello (the author of “Mixing it Up”) or someone to help them fulfill some collective literary aspiration. Already, the conventional direction of authorship is inverted: rather than an author imagining a world into being, which is then actually created onstage, here the Characters appear to be demanding that their reality be turned into fiction.

The Father’s argument takes Pirandello’s meta-theater to another level: rather than just challenging the line between reality and illusion, Pirandello is now openly denouncing it onstage, forcing the actors performing Six Characters in Search of an Author to publicly discredit themselves and ridicule their profession for an audience that has come to watch them work. The notion that “life is full of infinite absurdities” suggests that audiences and readers might never get a good, concrete explanation for why and how the Characters showed up onstage: rather, the audience must simply cope with the brute fact of the Characters’ existence, no matter how absurd, just as the Characters must deal with their author’s abandonment and the Manager must now deal with the impossible-yet-undeniably-real Characters before him.

The Manager’s conventional view of life as real and art as fictional clashes with the Characters’ insistence that, although they started out as ideas in someone’s mind, they are just as real as normal people or things. In fact, the Father’s insistence that characters “live eternally” suggests that, in some way, characters are more real than normal people, more deeply embedded in the universe than humans who change, die, and disappear. The fact that characters outlive their authors shows that authors never have full control over their creations—not only do their characters have minds and “drama” of their own, but their work gets interpreted and re-signified throughout the ages, by audiences and actors alike. Turning to the Actors, the Father raises the question of whether an actor inhabits a character or a character inhabits an actor—which is the vessel, and which is the substance?

The Step-Daughter puts on a spectacle, acting out in a way that seems inappropriately juvenile for an eighteen-year-old—especially one who proclaims her sexual “passion.” Although her declarations about the family look like senseless ramblings now, they later end up making sense. This is the opposite of dramatic irony, with the Characters knowing something that their audiences—the Manager and his Actors, and the audience in the theater—do not. In fact, they directly tell these audiences what they do not know. This is thus also the opposite of verbal irony: the Step-Daughter directly says what will happen, giving away the mystery of the family’s pain and the climax of the play, but because of the extraordinary circumstances of her and the other Characters’ arrival in the theater, no one takes her at face value and everyone assumes she cannot be telling the truth. She appears to be an unreliable narrator but ultimately proves the opposite: she is merely declaring the family’s horrible but unavoidable fate.

The confused Manager has to unthink his expectations about the Characters, whom he—and likely the audience—initially believed were a conventional nuclear family (married cohabitating opposite-gender parents and their “legitimate” biological children). As throughout the play, appearances are deceiving: the existence of the family is actually predicated on the undermining of the foundational norms of family and marriage—not only the Mother’s infidelity, but the Father’s complicity in it. The Leading Lady directly announces what everyone already knows: the theater has turned on its head. The Actors have become an audience, the Characters have become actors, and the author and director seem to have given up their power.

The Son’s predictions (which later, like all the predictions in this play, prove true) again show that the audience receives the drama in reverse, trying to understand what has already happened among the Characters that makes them act like they do. His insistence that the Father will inevitably and annoyingly talk about “the Demon of the Experiment” and the Father’s own cynicism about the use of language both suggest that people’s efforts to control and improve the world always fall short—people can think or talk endlessly and not change the fundamentally random nature of life and inevitable nature of fate. As the Father himself points out, his phrase is ambiguous—it “tells us nothing.” It can mean almost anything: a vision of life as a grand experiment with no fixed answers and no clear truths to guide human action, the Father’s specific remorse about the ill-fated “experiments” he performed on his family, the way the family’s events resulted from complex circumstances, or even the way creating works of art is a constantly experimental process, based in cooperation and conflict among various forces (characters, events, actors, writers, and audiences). Finally, the Step-Sister directly points to the other event at the heart of the family’s conflict: the taboo, incestuous liaison between her and the father.

The apparently budding love triangle among the Leading Lady, Leading Man, and Step-Daughter again shows how, in the theater, reality easily blurs into fiction (in which the Leading Lady and the Leading Man are a romantic pair, and in which the Step-Daughter is actually supposed to live).

While the Mother and Father were clearly a poor match from the beginning of their marriage, the audience never learns what really happened and has to decide whether or not to trust the Father’s version of events. Indeed, the Father’s propensity to blame the woman who nursed his Son for the young man’s relative weakness (rather than recent circumstances or his own parenting, for example) gives the audience a good reason to believe the Father is far from a reliable storyteller when it comes to remembering his own past. While he is doing all the explaining, it is also clear that he is telling this story—becoming his own author, in a way—in order to hide the truth, not reveal it. He wants to avoid remorse rather than express it.

While the Step-Daughter makes it sound like the Father had a perverse, pedophilic, and possibly vengeful obsession with her from early childhood, the Father portrays his behavior as an attempt to reunite the family, and in fact also an early attempt at repentance (to make amends for the sin of sending his wife away). Again, the boundaries of sexual desire and family love are contorted beyond recognition, and it is impossible to tell whether the Father’s actions are forming or destroying the normal domestic family he claims to want.

The mini-deliberation about how to turn the Characters’ supposedly-lived “drama” into a stage drama again merges the three levels of theatrical and temporal action: the audience watching events onstage (who learn that the best is yet to come), the Manager hunting for a successful future play, and the Characters reenacting their drama in the past. Life is evaluated according to its fitness for being turned into fiction, at the same time as the people who claim to have lived that life also claim to be fictional beings. Rejecting the confidence usually associated with the family in exchange for the public forum of a stage, the Father seems at once brave and dishonest: he announces his (and humankind’s) imperfection, but uses that as an excuse to avoid responsibility.

After the Clerk’s death and the destabilization of his and the Mother’s family (including the three children who are supposedly theirs, the Step-Daughter, Boy, and Child), the family falls into financial ruin and Madame Pace takes advantage of their vulnerability. This turn of fate was not uncommon in the early 20th century, because men were essentially supposed to make incomes on which their wives and families would be completely dependent. (Divorce was not even legal in Italy at the time.) This helps explain why Pirandello’s Characters (especially the Father) remain viscerally committed to the idea of the nuclear family, even while destroying it over and over again. The Father’s actions are ambiguous again: it is possible that he was fulfilling a secret and sinister plan to sleep with the Step-Daughter, out of perversion and/or revenge, and it is also possible that he merely got unlucky. In short, it is impossible to distinguish his innocence or guilt, just as it is impossible to decide whether he or the Step-Daughter is telling the truth about whether they ultimately had sex in Pace’s atelier.

Given the damage he had already caused by sleeping with (or almost sleeping with) his Step-Daughter, the Father’s attempts to make amends by supporting his now destitute former family actually worsened the situation. His theory about the multiplicity of identity, which is effectively a way of questioning if there is one “real” self that can be opposed to “fake” or “illusory” selves, allows him to dodge culpability for his actions by claiming that he has changed or is more complex than his worst actions. But his family and the play that defines his being as a Character nevertheless fixate on this singular, most evil of his selves, thereby denying him the freedom to move on and remake himself.

While the Step-Daughter and the Father drive the action (and the Boy and the Child never talk), the Son and the Mother actively resist the conversion of their collective agony into a public spectacle, perhaps much like the author who abandoned them all. If the play means overcoming the past for the Father and gaining revenge on the Father for the Step-Daughter, for the Son it means bringing undeserved public shame upon himself. In this sense, he points to the grotesque aspect of the theater, which invites the public to partake in stories of private suffering. While the Father seems to believe blood relatives owe one another support, the Son could not care less who does and does not share his parentage—rather, he looks at the rest as outsiders. (But the audience later learns that he has another reason for holding back.)

In commenting on—and predicting—his own development as a character, the Son explicitly breaks the “fourth wall,” showing the audience that the boundaries between the world of the play and the one outside it remain porous for Pirandello. The Father’s response suggests that this lack of development in the Son’s character adds yet another layer of distortion between the “real” events of the Characters’ past and the versions they recount and act out for the Manager, Actors, and audience. Beyond making the same prediction about the end of the drama as the Step-Daughter did earlier in this section, the Father also completes the Son’s earlier prediction that he would mention “the Demon of Experiment,” a concept that remains ambiguous but that he links to the Characters’ meaningless suffering, which cannot necessarily be blamed on one actor or act—one author, as it were.

Although just a few minutes before he insisted that the Characters were “mad” and could not possibly be fictional, now the Manager agrees to be the author—although he receives the story from outside himself, rather than conjuring it up from within. As he promises to turn the Characters’ lives into a text during the next section of the play, Pirandello’s Manager sets up a direct window into the process and failures of authorship. The intermission merges the time of the play (during which the Manager and Father deliberate) and that of the audience (who gets 20 minutes to make sense of what has happened so far).