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Title: Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello, Erice Bentley, Eric Bentley ISBN: 0-451-52688-0 Publisher: Signet Pub. Date: May, 1998 Format: Mass Market Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $5.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.57 (14 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The thin line between performance and reality
Comment: "Six Characters in Search of an Author," by Luigi Pirandello, is a really remarkable work of drama. The English version by Eric Bentley is published as a Signet Classic. The translator's introduction notes that the play premiered in Rome in 1921.
In "Six Characters," a dysfunctional family confronts a theater director and his whole company. They challenge the director to turn their story into a play--a "painful drama."
This richly ironic play deals with many issues: the relationship between life and literature; the limitation of words as tools of communication; sexual transgression; authority and art; secrecy and shame; the fractured, shifting nature of personal identity; the relationship between an author and the characters he/she creates; and more.
This is truly a play of ideas; it's a constantly shifting intellectual house of mirrors. But Pirandello never loses sight of the emotional issues of human shame, pain, and interpersonal alienation. The play is full of great lines; my favorite is spoken by the director: "There's no author here at all."
It's amazing to think that (at the time of this review) this play is more than 80 years old. When I look at the contours of popular culture in the decades since this play premiered in Rome, it seems that Pirandello was as much a cultural prophet as he was a literary genius. "Six Characters" seems to prefigure such phenomena as reality TV shows (like "An American Family" or MTV's "The Real World") and films which explore the shadowy line between fiction and reality (like "The Blair Witch Project" or "Scream 3"). After all these decades, "Six Characters" remains a fresh, compelling, and relevant theatrical masterpiece.
Rating: 5
Summary: Captivating!
Comment: "Six Characters in Search of an Author" is truly a unique play. For some readers, characters on paper are actual human beings, but once we see them portrayed by genuine living people on the stage and big/small screen, we abandon our imagination about the person the character began as. Luigi Pirandello took this idea and wrote an ingenious play. Is reality in fact reality, or is it only what we perceive it to be? This play opens up a world of uncertainty. The concept of the play challenges the mind. I recommend.
Rating: 5
Summary: Signet version...
Comment: I highly recommend the Signet Classics edition of this play, translated by Eric Bentley. He provides a wonderful opening essay, as well as Pirandello's own forward.
The plot, I'm sure you know, involves six characters who stumble upon a theater rehearsal. They are not so much looking for an author as a play in which to exist. Pirandello breaks the fourth wall as no other author had before him. It is a very daring and original piece. A must for any serious student of drama.
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Title: Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett ISBN: 0802130348 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: August, 1997 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Nine Plays of the Modern Theater by Harold Clurman ISBN: 0802150322 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: December, 1988 List Price(USD): $21.00 |
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Title: Four Major Plays: A Doll House, the Wild Duck, Hedda Gabler, the Master Builder by Henrik Johan Ibsen, Rolf Fjelde ISBN: 0451524063 Publisher: Signet Pub. Date: September, 1989 List Price(USD): $6.95 |
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Title: Chekhov: The Major Plays by Ann Dunnigan, Robert Brustein, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov ISBN: 0451527763 Publisher: Signet Pub. Date: 09 January, 2001 List Price(USD): $5.95 |
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Title: Right You Are, If You Think You Are by Luigi Pirandello ISBN: 0486295761 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 22 April, 1997 List Price(USD): $1.50 |
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