The Curtain Symbol Analysis

In most normal plays, the curtain is an unremarkable piece of equipment, useful only to mark the opening and closing of dramatic action to which it is irrelevant. The curtain between the audience and the actors clearly demarcates the line between fiction and reality—when it raises at the beginning of a performance, it invites the audience into a fantasy world, and when it lowers at a show’s conclusion, it dismisses the audience to return to their lives.

But, given his interest in upending dramatic norms and challenging the conventional division between life and fiction, Pirandello does away with this normal use of the curtain for staging, and instead turns the curtain into an integral part of the play itself. The audience can first sense something is awry when they enter the theater and encounter the curtain raised, revealing “the stage as it usually is during the day time.” The world of the audience and the world of the play start out merged, and remain that way throughout the show. During the 20-minute intermission after the First Act, the curtain also remains up and the audience’s time merges with the play’s.

The curtain becomes even more significant after the Step-Daughter and Father act out their sexual liaison at Madame Pace’s atelier for the Manager and the Actors. Delighted with the Characters’ scene, the Manager yells out “curtain here, curtain” in order to suggest that the scene would be the end of his future play’s Act One. But the Machinist misunderstands the Manager and actually lowers the curtain. This abruptly ends the Second Act of Six Characters in Search of an Author, which flows directly into the third. Here, through the Manager, Pirandello explicitly points out the conventional use of the curtain and then defies it, having the curtain fall in his own play—and separate the audience’s world from the drama’s—only by accident. Overall, then, the curtain in Six Characters represents Pirandello’s exploration of metatheatrical elements in the play, and his attempts to tear down the divide between actors and audience, between theater and “real life.”