Six Characters in Search of an Author

Pirandello’s work plays with the central tension in the modern theater between the desire to create a perfect illusion of extra-theatrical reality on the stage and the contrary impulse to celebrate the very illusoriness of all theater

It can be argued that with Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity arrives on stage. Called by critic Felicity Firth “the major single subversive moment in the history of modern theatre,” the play is a dizzying hall of mirrors that tests the philosophical basis of the concept of reality while exposing and renewing the operating principles of the drama.

Six Characters in Search of an Author is about the relationship between art and life. Especially it focuses upon the relationship between drama and the life. The premise of the play is absurd. In the middle of the play rehearsal, several characters appear and request that an author be present to put them into the play.