Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

Theatre 229
the filthy beast! (She faints. They carry her quickly back,
disappearing in the darkness at the left, rear. An iron
door clangs shut. Rage and bewildered fury rush back on
YANK. He feels himself insulted in some unknown fashion
in the very heart of his pride. He roars.) God damn yuh!
(And hurls his shovel after them at the door which has
just closed. It hits the steel bulkhead with a clang and
falls clattering on the steel floor. From overhead the whistle
sounds again in a long, angry, insistent command.)
O’Neill’s forceful combination of expressionistic effects
lends this play a crude, almost superhuman power. The
use of silhouette in the staging and lighting, the “masses
of shadows everywhere,” the “tumult of noise,” the
“monotonous throbbing beat of the engines,” the “fiery
light,” the “rivulets of sooty sweat,” the chanted speeches
and coordinated movements, the “peremptory, irritating
note” of the “inexorable whistle,” the shouting of curses
and sudden exclamations, the animal imagery, and the
“horror, terror . . . of . . . unknown, abysmal brutality,
naked and shameless” all typify the extreme stylization
of early-twentieth-century expressionism. The scene
also demonstrates how O’Neill and his followers in the
American theatre turned away from realism and romanticism
in their effort to arrive at a direct presentation of
social ideology and cultural criticism.
Metatheatre: Six Characters in Search of an
Author First produced in 1921, Six Characters in
Search of an Author expresses from its famous title
onward a “metatheatrical” motif by which the theatre
itself becomes part of the content of the play production,
not merely the vehicle. Shakespeare may have
announced that “All the world’s a stage,” but in this
play Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936) explores how the
stage is also a world—and how the stage and the world,
illusion and reality, relate to and often blur with each
other. In this still-stunning play, a family of dramatic
“characters”—a father, his stepdaughter, a mother, and
her children—appear as if by magic on the “stage” of
a provincial theatre where a “new play” by Pirandello
is being rehearsed. The “characters,” claiming they
have an unfinished play in them, beg the director to
stage their lives so they may bring a satisfactory climax
to their “drama.” The audiences—the one on stage
and the actual audience watching Pirandello’s play—
must keep shifting their perceptions. Which is the real
play and which the real life? There are actors playing
actors, actors playing “characters,” and actors playing
“actors-playing-characters”; there are also scenes
when the actors playing “characters” are making fun of
the actors playing actors-playing-“characters.” It is no
The director of an ordinary play and his acting company are in the
foreground of a fantastical family that wishes to re-write the script, in
this superlative French production of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters
in Search of an Author, as staged by the Théâtre de la Ville at the
Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2014. © Richard Termine
wonder most audiences give up trying to untangle the
planes of reality Pirandello creates in this play; they are
simply too difficult to comprehend except as a dazzle of
suggestive theatricality.
Pirandello contrasts the passionate story of the
“characters”—whose drama concerns a broken family,
adultery, and the suggestion of incest—with the artifice
of the stage and its simulations. In the course of this exposition
Pirandello’s performers discuss the theatricality of
life, the life of theatricality, and the eternal confusions
between appearance and reality:
THE FATHER: What I’m inviting you to do is to quit this foolish
playing at art—this acting and pretending—and seriously
answer my question: WHO ARE YOU?
THE DIRECTOR: (amazed but irritated, to his actors) What
extraordinary impudence! This so-called character wants
to know who I am?
THE FATHER: (with calm dignity) Signore, a character may
always ask a “man” who he is. For a character has a true
life, defined by his characteristics—he is always, at the
least, a “somebody.” But a man—now, don’t take this
personally—A man is generalized beyond identity—he’s
a nobody!
THE DIRECTOR: Ah, but me, me—I am the Director! The
Producer! You understand?
THE FATHER: Signore—Think of how you used to feel about
yourself, long ago, all the illusions you used to have
about the world, and about your place in it: those illusions
were real for you then, they were quite real—But now,
with hindsight, they prove to be nothing, they are nothing
to you now but an embarrassment. Well, signore, that is
what your present reality is today—just a set of illusions
that you will discard tomorrow. Can’t you feel it? I’m not