The Concept of Six Characters in Search of an Author - Essay Example

It also played on Broadway in New York City in 1922. Six Characters has been classified as a satirical tragicomedy, meaning that its purpose was satire, but with elements of both comedy and tragedy. This play, as well as many of Pirandello’s other plays and novels, is also considered a forerunner of Theatre of the Absurd, an important artistic movement of the mid-twentieth century and developed by authors like Samuel Beckett and Edward Albee. There are many theatres of the Absurd in Six Characters.

Pirandello, like many later absurdists, rejected realism in drama and art and substituted it with symbolic representations on stage. According to Pirandello, the characters in Six Characters represented the creative process he went through when creating characters. It is fitting that this play’s setting is the rehearsal of another play, one that just happened to also be written by Pirandello, The Rules of the Game. Setting the setting of a play within another play is a common practice today, but not during Pirandello’s day when it was unheard of and truly absurd.

In an essay Pirandello wrote in 1925, about the process of creating Six Characters in Search of an Author, he said, “The mystery of artistic creation is the mystery of birth itself” (n.p.). He likened the creation of characters to the experience of giving birth. He rejected realism in theatre and drama, so he imagined that his characters, as a result of his creation of them, were actual living entities. The six characters in this play are physical representations of that concept. Even the Director, who goes about helping the characters find the plot of their play, is confused about the reality of the plot and by the end of the play, is unsure about if what he has experienced really happened.

The first audience’s experience seems to have imitated this character’s experience. Of course, for Pirandello, the events that occurred during Six Characters in Search of an Author really did happen because for him, what he thought up in his imagination was as real as events that occurred outside of him. The characters he created were as real to him as actual people, and that is what Six Characters attempts to demonstrate. This does not mean that he was insane, however, in spite of what its first audience thought.

It simply meant that Pirandello believed in the creative process and in the power of the characters he created, both for himself and for his audience.