Six Characters in Search of an Author

Six Characters in Search of an Author is a play by the Italian writer Luigi Pirandello, which premiered in 1921 at the Teatro Valle in Rome. It depicts a theater company in the midst of rehearsing an ordinary play when it is interrupted by six characters, a father, mother and their children, who claim to have been abandoned unfinished by an author and demand that the company help them complete and perform their own tragic family story, so that the boundary between the actors' rehearsal and the characters' unresolved drama progressively collapses. The play's first performance provoked a hostile response, with audience members reportedly shouting accusations that the production belonged in a madhouse, but its reception improved markedly after Pirandello published a foreword explaining the work's intentions in a 1925 edition. Six Characters in Search of an Author is now regarded as a landmark of modernist theater for its self-conscious examination of the relationship between authors, characters and performance, and for helping establish the metatheatrical techniques that later twentieth-century drama would extend.