Dan Mayer

Modern Lit

Six Characters in Search of an Author

The play is actually is split for the audience. The audience begins seeing a play slowly being rehearsed, they see the actors playing their roles and sitting and talking like normal people on a break. The audience see the producer and stage hands working. This is a play in the works not ready to be viewed. Then a bunch of characters looking for an author or for a bunch of actors to play their story come onto the scene. The characters don't exist as people, they live forever. They were created purely in imagination and do not really exist since they haven't been written into a script. They themselves are offering to teach the actors their story so they make become alive for the time of the play. Currently they aren't alive they aren't anything.

This is the main idea of the real play, making the nonexistent real. Playing with the thought and imagination that originally creates a play. The writer is letting the audience see a rare insight into the creative mind of a writer. After creating beautiful thoughts in their head it is an entirely different skill to be able to get them out onto paper. The characters that the audience are seeing are the equivalent of seeing into the writers head. The characters begin telling bits of their story out of order excited to start the story and get to the main points. Just like a true idea is formed with key ideas and points and the rest of an idea is to start and connect all the primary points. This method of seeing a creative vision as if it was still a thought is actually quite ingenious.

The almost ghostlike quality of the characters is quite difficult as a concept to be passed on to an audience. I think that the entire point of the play isn't really to just show the audience that characters exist outside of reality. They exist not only as something fake in front of them on the stage. They exist as almost the children of a creative minds thoughts. Luigi is showing an audience the creative process, showing them how ever play they have ever seen was created. This play is teaching everyone in the audience how to create and write their own play.

Imagine a story that isn't a story it is directions. Imagine trying to teach a group of people how to think creatively. A teacher just can't repeatedly show students of creativity or they will learn nothing, only have more ideas to copy or at best slightly manipulate. This play instead shows a play it shows how to create character development. It shows the creative process itself. It shows the changes and relationships between characters. It shows how to think of actors as people who acquire the roles of your thoughts or characters for a short time. It shows the direction process to make characters come alive and live your story. There couldn't be a better way to teach the creative process of making a play than having a play that incorporates every component of creating a play. Not only the behind the scenes with the actors, but the character development as well.

Luigi Pirandello made a interesting play not interesting based on the story it tells but interesting because of the process it shows. The method of teaching, expressing to, and involving the audience is something that is above most other forms of learning i have seen. Finding a way to remove the inner creation process and put it out in front of the audience through the use of actors as actors and actors as characters really allowed Luigi to showing the defined and real split between reality and the mind. The lifespan of the world and the immortality of thoughts and creations. This play shows a purpose of any artists work. As a way to have a change and effect on peoples lives for eternity and it was executed beautifully.