The Brunstein Version

The A.R.T. is reviving the celebrated Robert Brustein staging of Luigi Pirandello’s revolutionary play, Six Characters in Search of an Author. Few plays have exerted so strong an influence on twentieth-century theatre, and it is not by accident that this Modernist masterpiece has become a semi-official emblem of the American Repertory Theatre. Adapted and directed by the A.R.T’s founder and artistic director, Six Characters has proved to be one of our most popular productions, as well as a uniquely appropriate blend of tempestuous melodrama and intense intellectual debate. Robert Brustein will again be tailoring the original play to the specific members of our repertory company and fitting Pirandello’s meta-theatrical circumstances to the literal facts of the Loeb Drama Center stage.

When Pirandello first introduced his disturbing sextet of troubled characters onto the European stage, he can hardly have imagined that 1921 would forever mark a point of no return in Western dramaturgy. For Pirandello invented a self-conscious dissociative technique that would come to be called il teatro dello specchio, or “the mirror theatre.” In this newly perfected instrument, Pirandello devised a way to present the illusionary world of the theatre’s fictions — those strange figments of our imaginations we call “characters” — in suspended animation face to face with the real-life, flesh-and-blood actors, directors, and stage managers whose profession it is to “portray” characters in the theatre. In conventional dramaturgy we do not bother to differentiate the conceptual mirror images of “actor” and “acted,” and before Pirandello, it was certainly not expected that a fundamentally philosophical problem such as this one would be the principal subject of an evening in the theatre. Put another way, before Pirandello no one suspected that ontological speculation could be made to be entertaining and vigorously engaging for theatre audiences.

Six Characters in Search of an Author brings the six interrelated characters of a torrid sex scandal onto the stage of an unsuspecting theatre. The arrival of the tormented characters, who suffer from the uncompleted state of their horrifying story, interrupts the company’s rehearsal of another play, thereby committing an unforgivable breach of theatre protocol. With this bold premise, Pirandello threw all the conventions of the theatre on the table for debate and redefinition. Is the urgency of suffering a higher claim than the discipline of professional work according to conventional rules? What justifies the strange art of portraying suffering in a world where intractable pain and irremediable suffering are harsh realities? What responsibility do authors bear for the life of their characters in the minds of helpless audiences? How does the stage successfully “contain” the unending woes of mankind on which its artists feed? And how does the terrible story of betrayal and incest, murder and suicide turn out in the end? Pirandello shows us that we cannot quell our grim curiosity even in the face of the agony of the victims. His ontological “mirrors” finally show us uncomfortable aspects of ourselves as voyeurs and secretive consumers of each other’s scandals and humiliations. His mirrors and transparencies also reveal to us the inner workings of the art of the drama at all its levels, from the most literal operations of running crews and company personnel to the highest degrees of metaphysical speculation devised by the author and his interpreters.

Robert Brustein’s production has unforgettably transformed the famous philosophical conundrums of this play into brilliant visual images that translate into purely plastic form the many shifting points of perception, both literal and metaphorical, interwoven in Pirandello’s play. The production, which has traveled all over the world and played to universal acclaim, has been justly celebrated for the sheer intensity of the drama it contains in the central plot of the desperately roaming “characters.” Seldom has a better balance been struck between form and content, between theme and spectacle, between vivid action and clinical analysis of the very notion of “action.” The A.R.T. takes great pride in making this unique theatrical achievement available to new audiences and to regular long-term subscribers alike, for whether this is the first time one confronts this unforgettable play, or yet another reconsideration of its infinite reflected images and ramifications, it is sure to renew one’s faith in theatre as an inexhaustible artistic and philosophical medium.