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Title: Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello ISBN: 0-486-29992-9 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 06 January, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $1.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.57 (14 reviews)
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.
Rating: 3
Summary: interesting thought experiment, blessedly brief
Comment: We're all familiar with the dramatic device of the "play within a play" from Shakespeare (for instance, the device is used in Hamlet). But Nobel Laureate Luigi Pirandello had a specific use for the concept; he wanted to demonstrate the fine line that separates reality and fiction. He did so most famously in the play Six Characters in Search of an Author.
The play opens with a theater company getting ready to begin a rehearsal. As the director tries to bring some order to the proceedings, six people walk in off of the street looking for an author. They want someone to dramatize their sordid true life story. The tale that they unfold is in fact so melodramatic that the director has his troupe start acting out the six characters and repeating their lines. Meanwhile, the six quibble with the actors' interpretations and with the reproduced dialogue and even argue with the director over whether it is possible or appropriate for anyone other than the six to play themselves.
The premise and structure of the play are amusing and thought provoking. One can only imagine how Pirandello would react to the permutations we see spun out today with reality tv and instant tv movies based on real events, even those we've all just witnessed on live tv like the OJ trial. In fact, just recently on the X-Files, Scully and Mulder were working with a police force which was being filmed for the live action show COPS. Fictional characters pretending to be on a "real" show, but the players on the "real" show are fictional for this episode... He would have loved it. But ultimately the actual content of this play seems to be totally superfluous. The ingenious set up is the whole point and so it ends up resembling one of those Saturday Night Live skits that doesn't know when enough is enough. It all makes for an interesting thought experiment but a somewhat tedious, though blessedly brief, drama.
GRADE: C+
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.
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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: 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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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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