[title of show] Arizona Theatre Company Play Guide 1

[title of show]
Plays about plays
MUSICALS/PLAYS
The Rehearsal
Authored anonymously in 1671, The Rehearsal is widely believed to have been written
by George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham. It is a biting criticism of the "heroic plays"
of John Dryden in which the main characters are impossibly noble, moral and, according
to Buckingham, irrelevant. The plot centers on a playwright attempting to stage a heroic
drama consisting in large part of excerpts of Dryden's actual plays, taken out of context
and made to sound absurd. Dryden got his revenge on Buckingham by writing him as a
character in his play Absalom and Achitophel, but it was not long after The Rehearsal's
success that the 'heroic play' fell out of favor with the public.
The Critic: or, a Tragedy Rehearsed
The Critic is a re-working of The Rehearsal, written in 1779 by Richard Brinsley Sheridan.
Instead of aiming his sights on the playwright, however, he turns his parody on the critics
(obviously) and their pretention and pomposity. It concerns misadventures that arise when
an author, Mr. Puff, invites Sir Fretful Plagiary and the theatre critics Dangle and Sneer to a
rehearsal of his play The Spanish Armada, Sheridan's parody of the then fashionable tragic
drama. The rehearsal is a disaster and the entire play (and the set) come apart at the seams.
Six Characters in Search of an Author
Six Characters in Search of an Author is the most famous and
celebrated play by the Italian writer Luigi Pirandello. It was first
performed in 1921 and represented a significant break from theatrical
tradition at the time. The action of the play starts out as if the
audience is seeing a rehearsal of Pirandello's Rules of the Game by
an unnamed theatre company. Shortly into the rehearsal, however,
the actors and director are interrupted by a family of six who have
entered the theatre "in search of an author." They tell the director
that they are characters invented by a writer who never finished their
story and they plead with the company to hear their tale and to write
it down so that they can live forever. The director and actors initially
take the characters to be simply insane, but as they tell their story,
the 'real life' theatre artists become engrossed in it and agree to give
it a try as a theatre piece. As the characters act out their story, and
as the theatre company attempts to recreate it with their own actors,
they discover that the story is a terrible tragedy involving prostitution,
Luigi Pirandello, breaker of
theatrical traditions with his
Six Characters in Search of
an Author
betrayal and the death of two small children. As the action builds to its tragic conclusion,
the lights in the theatre go out; when they are restored, the characters are nowhere to found.
The director ends rehearsal for the day, shaken by the unworldly events and frustrated at the
loss of a day's rehearsal.
The hyper-realism of Six Characters in Search of an Author caused an uproar at its premiere
at the Teatro Valle in Rome. Angry audience members shouted their disapproval at the
unconventional style of the play and caused the author to have to sneak out a side door of
the theatre as the crowd threatened a riot.
Arizona Theatre Company Play Guide 24