Six Characters in Search of an Author

by Luigi Pirandello

Overview

Robert Brustein's highly acclaimed adaptation of Pirandello's masterpiece, a study in illusion and reality which follows a group of characters who try to fashion their life stories into acceptable drama. Plays for Performance Series.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781461699460
Publisher:	Dee, Ivan R. Publisher
Publication date:	01/01/1998
Series:	Plays for Performance Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	86
File size:	835 KB

About the Author

Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) was an Italian playwright, novelist, and poet. Born to a wealthy Sicilian family in the village of Cobh, Pirandello was raised in a household dedicated to the Garibaldian cause of Risorgimento. Educated at home as a child, he wrote his first tragedy at twelve before entering high school in Palermo, where he excelled in his studies and read the poets of nineteenth century Italy. After a tumultuous period at the University of Rome, Pirandello transferred to Bonn, where he immersed himself in the works of the German romantics. He began publishing his poems, plays, novels, and stories in earnest, appearing in some of Italy’s leading literary magazines and having his works staged in Rome. Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), an experimental absurdist drama, was viciously opposed by an outraged audience on its opening night, but has since been recognized as an essential text of Italian modernist literature. During this time, Pirandello was struggling to care for his wife Antonietta, whose deteriorating mental health forced him to place her in an asylum by 1919. In 1924, Pirandello joined the National Fascist Party, and was soon aided by Mussolini in becoming the owner and director of the Teatro d’Arte di Roma. Although his identity as a Fascist was always tenuous, he never outright abandoned the party. Despite this, he maintained the admiration of readers and critics worldwide, and was awarded the 1934 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Editorial Reviews

Ingenious...a striking re-imagining of Six Characters that heightens the play's theatricality even as it grounds it in the mundane.... It keeps faith with Pirandello's case for the peculiarly irresistible power of illusion.

The New York Times

Ingenious...a striking re-imagining of Six Characters that heightens the play's theatricality even as it grounds it in the mundane.... It keeps faith with Pirandello's case for the peculiarly irresistible power of illusion.

New York Times