Six Characters in Search of an Author: Act 2 Summary & Analysis

The Second Act abruptly begins with a series of metatheatrical references from the Step-Daughter. She brings up the title of the fictional Pirandello play from the First Act—“Mixing it Up”—and contrasts the “serious[ness]” of theater with the “comedy” of her life, but also implies that (by coming onstage) she and the Child are in a “make-believe” world rather than the a “real” one. Her reference to the fountain and the revolver in the Boy’s pocket make no sense yet, but make it clear that something sinister is in the works. The Step-Daughter’s extraordinary attention to the Child and disdain for her brother, the Boy, raises the question of whether the young Child might actually be the Step-Daughter’s (and not the Mother’s) daughter.

The Son’s sense of entrapment in the Father’s self-serving public spectacle suggests a parallel between Characters’ entrapment in a story and Actors’ entrapment in a script, on the one hand, and individuals’ entrapment in the world and powerlessness before their fates, on the other. It becomes clear that the Son cares about the family violating normative roles and scripts insofar as it affects public appearances and others’ attitudes toward him, while he does not much care about if his parents actually fulfill their supposed roles. Indeed, he actively refuses to engage with them, which is a central reason for the Mother’s continued agony. In caring more about the appearance of a normal family than actually having one, the Son reveals the way that (for Pirandello) these appearances and expectations are deceptive.

By showing how the Manager and Characters negotiate to create a more-or-less realistic set for the scene they are about to reenact, Pirandello again highlights the backstage trickery that is necessary for the stage to produce its magic. The Step-Daughter’s insistence on finding the right furniture suggests that she is committed to strictly representing the reality of her experience, or else trying to wrest control of the narrative from the Father and the Manager (which she fails to do). The decorations she and the Father request—the mirror and screen—both overtly refer to vision, perspective, and identity. The mirror points to how the Characters gain a kind of self-awareness by putting on their show in front of the public and how the Actors and Manager see their own profession reflected in the Characters. The screen points to how the Step-Daughter’s identity is hidden from the Father during their hidden sexual encounter.

The Prompter’s usual role is inverted: he goes from reading the script to writing it, just as the Manager transforms from director to audience. The Manager’s insistence that the Actors play the Characters points to the contradiction at the heart of the theater, a profession that believes truth is better reached through reenactments and distortions of reality than through reality itself. Now, with the Characters immediately available and able to author their own story, the tables are turned and acting becomes no longer necessary. But this kind of direct truth is incompatible with the Manager’s job.

The Father’s loss of confidence in the meaning of his own words points explicitly to how the Characters’ arrival confuses fiction and reality for everyone (but perhaps most of all the audience). Although earlier the Manager appeared as the defender of “reality” against the Characters’ bizarre fiction, now the Father champions “reality”: that of his and his family’s real lives over the distortions the Manager is planning for the stage. This question is left unresolved: it is unclear if actors need to share characters’ “temperaments [and] souls,” and there is no way for the audience (or the Manager or his Actors) to ever access the real “reality” behind the Characters’ experience. Rather, just as the Characters are themselves played by actors on stage, the story is only communicated through layers of testimony and retelling. As the story is contested by all the Characters, it is up to the audience to decide whom to trust.

Bringing up the will of the Characters’ author, the Father at once recognizes and throws out the ordinary theory that an author controls the meaning of the stories they write. The Manager’s comments show how in stories—whether on the page or on the stage—Characters’ fundamental identities are disguised and only ever revealed partially. The point of literature and performance is not to directly state what characters “feel [themselves] to be,” but rather to offer a window into their identities through their actions, decisions, and interactions. The Father openly defies this norm by insisting on defining himself and his story.

Although the Father’s objection is never resolved, the Manager steps in to do what he does best: to continue moving the performance forward and decide when the Characters’ and Actors’ feelings are and are not worth the time and energy. In other words, he balances out the action onstage, and partially obscures the Characters’ true identities in the process.

It becomes clear that the Manager is preparing to stage the encounter between the Father and Step-Daughter, adding another metatheatrical layer by having the Characters from the story-within-a-play stage a performance of their own past (a play-within-a-theater-within-a-play).

Madame Pace’s inexplicable appearance defies all the laws of storytelling, which is the point: indeed, her appearance is Pirandello’s way of pointing out that the theater is founded on illusions. The Actors are offended because they work so hard to make stories come to life, when the Characters do it so easily. The Father also curiously points out that “the magic of the stage” is more real than the actors who create it, a sum greater than its parts or a truth expressed by means of illusion. At the same time as the Father lampoons the Actors for being mere imitators, Madame Pace herself looks like a caricature of a madam (brothel manager), so concerned with her appearance and dedicated to “elegance” that she appears “comical.” And by calling her into existence, the Father proves his capacity to act as an author, creating something out of nothing.

Just as soon as he has authored Madame Pace’s existence, the Father loses authorial control—and as soon as she has been conjured for the stage, Madame Pace violates its rules, acting “impossibl[y]” by insisting on privacy, talking so quietly that she cannot be heard by the audience (who never learns what she and the Step-Daughter are actually saying).

The Manager struggles to square the Characters’ desire for privacy with the theater’s demand to make everything public—even though the Step-Daughter is in fact trying to bring the scene closer to the reality of what took place between her, Madame Pace, and the Father.

Madame Pace’s manipulative exploitation of the Mother and Step-Daughter contrasts with her “most comical” accent, which offers “a little comic relief” in Six Characters in Search of an Author as well as the future play the Manager is planning. Nevertheless, this is an utterly inappropriate and borderline cruel time for comic relief, because it is precisely when the audience is about to watch the horrific incest between the Father and Step-Daughter, which they already know brings the family together by destroying all of their lives in unison.

Although the Characters are supposedly only reenacting previous events, the Mother reacts to Madame Pace with an understandable rage—in fact, it seems that actors are better suited for the theater because they lack the emotions of real characters, not because they can better embody them. (The Characters’ emotions lead them to pursue personal agendas over the collective task of their performance, which they frequently throw off-track as a result.) For the Manager and the Actors, then, the Characters are only offering a “sketch” of his play-in-the-making, while for the Characters this “sketch” means reliving their trauma (and for the audience it means looking behind rather than ahead, getting a “sketch” of the Characters’ backstory).

The audience can’t experience this excruciating scene as fresh or suspenseful, given the information they already have from the Father and the Step-Daughter, as well as the Mother’s extreme reactions. Indeed, while the Mother’s reactions give life to the emotional toll of the Father and Step-Daughter’s sexual encounter, the Father and Step-Daughter themselves seem emotionless, having clearly lost the sexual interest and sense of mourning (respectively) that they are trying to reenact. This suggests that perhaps the Actors really could do better at making the scene come to life in a way that shows the audience its future emotional toll on the family.

The Manager’s intervention further spoils the scene for the audience, and the Leading Lady and Leading Man’s reenactment both forces the Characters to hold a mirror to their own actions and directly shows how the stage distorts reality. The Father cuts off the Actors just as the Manager cuts off the Characters, which furthers the parallels between these two figures (who act as, in a way, the primary “authors” of the Characters’ story throughout the play).

Playing the same role, the Step-Daughter and the Leading Lady clash over which of them embodies it legitimately. Interestingly, while the Step-Daughter’s frustrations are based on the Leading Lady’s acting, the Leading Lady complains about the Step-Daughter’s inability to behave herself like a proper audience member. The Step-Daughter denies the Leading Lady legitimate access to the truth, while the Leading Lady denies the Step-Daughter legitimate access to the theater.

The Manager’s comment about the author—who is considered, in the time and place of this play, to be always a “he”—points to the interpretive work of the stage, which never simply reflects a written “story” but always modifies and translates it to a particular performance context. This is not proof that actors do not do justice to a work, but rather that a work is not bound to the wishes and desires of its author—just as the Characters, to their dismay, find their story neither told nor interpreted the way they want it to be. Given the Father’s persistent philosophizing, it is reasonable to think this also extends to the way people can never control the consequences of their actions in general. Beyond questioning the truth of the stage, here Pirandello questions the value of truth in the first place—and also gestures to the way social norms constrain and inform what he is capable of revealing in his plays (here, the level of detail he can show about the Father and Step-Daughter’s relationship).

The Father, Step-Daughter, and Manager all fight to determine the meaning of their story: the Father wants to appear as sympathetic as possible and make a public apology (or series of excuses), the Step-Daughter wants to expose the Father’s horrific behavior and her own resultant trauma, and the Manager simply wants the story to be riveting and scandalous—but not so scandalous as to break social norms—so that people will buy theater tickets.

Now, the Father, Step-Daughter, and Manager make their conflict over authorship explicit and the Manager explains why stories must gesture at rather than directly express the truths they hope to get across—as an author, he rejects truth for the sake of balance. Yet despite claiming to occupy a neutral position, the Manager also seems to defend the Father, especially when he threatens to retaliate against the Step-Daughter for her apparent moral deficits (even though she was cheated into being a prostitute and took the work to provide for her family). This supports the Step-Daughter’s suspicions that the Father and Manager are working together, using theater to hide the truth about and make excuses for the Father’s actions.

The Step-Daughter points out the ironic contradiction in the Father’s attempt to make amends by publicly re-committing his crime. At the same time, she clearly goes too far by blaming him for “all [the faults] that follow[ed]” his crime—although she might also be making a veiled reference to an earlier, incestuous crime that set their relationship in motion.

Again, the Mother reacts to the Father and Step-Daughter as though they are really doing what they profess to be only re-enacting, and the lines between reality and performance grow even blurrier. While the Manager thinks in terms of his narrative, in which the climax “has happened already,” the Mother remains firmly rooted in her lived reality and cannot separate the Father and Step-Daughter’s “acting” from their real actions. Disturbingly, her exasperated declaration that “it happens all the time” suggests that the Father and Step-Daughter’s sexual relationship might not have ended with this initial encounter, which means that they are both lying throughout the play (and, indeed, might be intentionally working together and casting blame on each other to distract from their ongoing relationship). The Mother comments on the dramatic function of the Boy and Child, whose muteness reflects the way they are denied identity by the Father and Step-Daughter’s dominating role in the drama and violation of the foundational family taboo (as well as by the deaths that the other Characters have already predicted).

The Father seems to believe the play will give him the opportunity to perform remorse (even though he does not seem to actually feel it, but rather only rationalizes and excuses his errors away). In fact, this never happens: instead, he and the Step-Daughter merely show off their incestuous relationship even more grotesquely. The Father interprets the Mother’s pain as his own, and both re-traumatizes her and fails to recognize how he is again making her suffer for his own personal gain. For the Manager, too, the Mother’s suffering is a mere plot device—caught up in the illusions of the stage, everyone seems unable to see the Mother’s real agony.

For the first time the curtain falls, although it is emptied of its usual meaning—there is no break in the action or real transition in the play’s theme, unlike between the First and Second Acts. The Machinist’s error again collapses the different layers of drama into one: the Characters’ play-within-a-play, the future play-within-a-play that the Manager is planning, and the play that the audience is watching all merge for a moment, with the Manager’s imagination suddenly slipping out of his control and transforming into reality.