Six Characters in Search of an Author by Italian dramatist Luigi Pirandello was published in 1921 in a collection of plays called Naked Masks. The play was first performed in Italian; Edward Storer translated it into English in 1922, and it was first performed in London’s West End and New York City later that year. The play’s avant-garde and meta-theatrical elements make it a precursor to the Theatre of the Absurd, and Pirandello’s work inspired dramatists including Jean-Paul Sartre, Eugène Ionesco, and Samuel Beckett. Notable for its creative use of the “play within a play” structure, Six Characters asks the audience to consider questions of authorship, identity, truth, and performance.

In 1925, Pirandello released a third edition of Six Characters that included a new preface and minor revisions to the plot. In the preface, Pirandello reveals that he is the referenced author who originally abandoned the characters, and he discusses the play’s characters, plot, and themes.

This guide uses Storer’s translation in the 1998 Dover Thrift Editions.

Content Warning: The play and this guide contain discussions of an inappropriate sexual relationship between a father and his step-daughter, the death of a child, and suicide.

Plot Summary

An acting company is rehearsing a Pirandello play one afternoon when six characters enter and ask for an author to write about them. The characters are, in fact, a family: The Father, the Mother, their 22-year-old Son, and three step-children born when the Mother cohabited with another man. The step-children include: the 18-year-old Step-Daughter, the 14-year-old Boy, and a four-year-old girl called the Child.

The Father, who is the primary spokesperson for the group, explains that they (the characters) were abandoned, partially formed, by their author. The characters want to be fully realized and have their story completed. The Manager initially assumes that these are people escaped from an asylum. However, his artistic sensibility is piqued by the incomplete story that they tell him, and he agrees that it should be realized theatrically.

Their story emerges in Act 1 with a lot of arguing between the Father and the Step-Daughter about important details. In brief, the Father and the Mother separated years ago. She then entered a relationship with the Father’s assistant, a younger man called the Secretary. They had three children together: The Step-Daughter, the Boy, and the Child. At some point, the Secretary moved the family away; he died only two months before the present.

Upon the death of the Secretary, the Mother became impoverished, so she and her children moved back to the city. The Mother began working as a dressmaker for Madame Pace, who runs a brothel. Madame Pace also gave work to the Step-Daughter as a sex worker in the brothel.

The key event in the characters’ story is this: The Father recently visited the brothel as a customer. Unwittingly, he says, he had sex with his Step-Daughter. The Step-Daughter protests that the Father knew what he was doing and that he even leered at her long ago when she was a little girl. They disagree about the facts, and they argue about morality, shame, and guilt. The characters quibble with the Manager over recreating these events on the stage, each taking a different view of truth, reality, and theater.

In Act 2, the Manager has his troupe begin acting out the characters’ story, overriding their pleas to let them do it. He wants to begin with the scene in the brothel. They commence, but the anguished Mother keeps interrupting to protest the depiction, and the Step-Daughter interrupts when she thinks the actors are doing a terrible job and misrepresenting her. The Manager agrees to let the Father and Step-Daughter each play themselves. The squabbling continues even as the scene is played out. Finally, the Mother enters the brothel and sees the Father and Step-Daughter in an embrace. Delighted with this dramatic turn of events, the Manager calls for the curtain to drop.

As Act 3 commences, a new set is revealed. There is a backdrop of a garden, a few trees, and a fountain basin: The Manager has decided that they will act out the scene at the Father’s house after the brothel scene. The characters and the Manager argue about reality, personal identity, and stage illusion.

The Step-Daughter tells the Manager that the entire action of the drama cannot take place in the garden. The Manager protests that they cannot change scenes three or four times in an act. When the Leading Lady, one of the troupe members, remarks that it makes the illusion easier to maintain, the Father has qualms with the word illusion. He argues that the characters’ lives are no less illusory than the actors’ lives.

The distant, contemptuous Son attempts to leave, saying he refuses to act in the drama, and the Step-Daughter tells him that he is unable to leave, no matter what he wants. She draws attention to the Mother, who continues sincerely imploring the Son to stay, as an example of a character willing to play their part. Troupe members begin to study the movements of the Mother and the Son, rousing the Son’s anger.

At this point, the Manager agrees to ask the actors to stop. He wants the Son and the Mother to do their scene, but the Son insists that no such scene exists. He then explains what happened in the garden, as he saw it. The Mother begins sobbing as the Son continues his story. The Son says that he entered the garden and found the four-year old Child—his step-sister—drowned in the fountain. The Boy is behind a tree, he says, with a revolver in his pocket. As the story builds, the characters begin to act out the Son’s description: The Son runs to the Child in the fountain, and the Mother follows him.

The Boy runs over, too, and he stares at the drowned Child before shooting himself with the revolver. The Mother cries out.

The Manager and the actors are confused by this scene, uncertain whether it is real or performed. Finally, the Manager dismisses the question, instead bemoaning the loss of a whole day of rehearsal.