luigi pirandello's six characters in search of an author

The audience could use more cues about how to react to all of this, but the performance style - by a cast that includes A Noise Within stalwarts such as Susan Angelo and Abby Craden - doesn’t much clarify the situation. How can we have a discussion about truth when the argument is built on something that feels so false? Meanwhile, the story-within-a-story - of a coldly logical husband, a shipped-off wife, their twin families and an episode of near-incest - grows so improbably lurid that even Maury Povich’s producers would dismiss it as preposterous. Still, the philosophy mires the play’s momentum. And there are fun bits of spookiness: strange sounds, mysterious blackouts and a whole set that materializes as if by magic. “This would never happen at the Taper,” one actor grumbles. Humorous references to A Noise Within and other area theaters (interpolations by the Elliotts) inject some zing into all the braininess. Their intrusion turns into a dialectic as the eldest male character - the nominal head of household to the other five, played by Elliott - tries to convince Robertson Dean, the A Noise Within resident artist who’s leading the rehearsal, to give life to the characters’ story. The six characters interrupt a play rehearsal, making a ghostly entrance as looming, backlighted silhouettes on a vast fabric drop. And it struggles to separate the life in art from what’s merely make-believe. It wonders how, from a variety of competing viewpoints, an observer can discern the truth.

“Six Characters” picks apart identity, authenticity and the very nature of reality. Pirandello wondered how we can trust anything when life insists on changing from minute to minute. World War I had rocked the world’s political foundations, and the great theorists of the time, including Freud and Einstein, were calling everything else into question. When “Six Characters” was first staged in 1921, the world seemed to be losing its fixed points of reference. Yet even in this earnest attempt, Pirandello remains disembodied, his ideas distant and difficult to grasp. If anyone would hear him nowadays, it’s the folks at the classical company A Noise Within, who just added “Six Characters” to the spring repertory in a playfully inventive adaptation by Pirandello champion Robert Brustein, directed with intellectual rigor by company artistic directors Geoff Elliott and Julia Rodriguez-Elliott.

Luigi pirandello's six characters in search of an author