Six Characters in Search of an Author Book

A great work, perhaps the best play of the 20thC. And a standard for great art: Think you've written really well? Did the audience fight for 20 minutes at the end, divided between hostility and admiration? That's what happened 10 Maggio '21, Teatro Valle di Roma. (Interesting that around then Italy won a gold medal in the 1920 Antwerp Olympics, but the Belgian band did not know the new Italian national anthem: they played O Sole Mio--and all the stands sang along. Unfortunately, the writer Capurro [?] had died a couple years earlier.)
The first reviewer said the issues of art vs life, and the nature of play-writing and performance are universal. It is also, of course, metadramatic, with the Son asseverating, "I am an undeveloped character."
The Capocomico (not really a "producer," but head of the troupe) treats the real lives of the people they stage as if they're invented--which brutalizes the "real" people.
As Molière tells about the task of writing comedy late in his Critique de L'Ecole des Femmes, Pirandello expresses his method late in Sei Personaggi in cerca d'autore.* The Father reflects on literature's superiority to life; a character has a life, he is always "someone," but a man, un uomo:
"un personaggio ha veramente una vita sua, segnata di caretteri suoi, per cui è sempre 'qualcuno'. Mentre un uomo-- non dico lei, adesso-- un uomo cosi in genere, può non essere 'nessuno'"(71)
Moreover, all one's lived reality today may appear an illusion tomorrow.

The Father adds that the written character is an eternal reality, immutable, so terrible or thrilling for the Capocomico to approach. The Capocomico responds, But where have you ever seen a character step out of his part and explain the part, as you just have? "Quando mai s'è visto un personaggio che, uscendo dlla su parte, si sia messo a perorarla così come fa lei, e a proporla, a spegarla. Io non l'ho mai visto!"
Illusion, the question that ends it. Is the boy's death acted?

Now, may I add, Giordano Bruno's one comedy, Candelaio, is also metadramatic--in 1582! In the last scene the Latin teacher, just beaten as he did his students, is asked to look at the audience, "Doesn't it seem you're on stage?" Yes, it does. "At what point in the drama would you like to be?" The End! "Then hold up the Plaudite sign."



*My Italian copy, Biblioteca Economica Newton, Newton Compton: Roma, 1997. And economica it was, only $1.80,
3000 lira.