Old Play in Manhattan

Six Characters in Search of an Author (by Luigi Pirandello) remains, after some 30 years, one of the most fascinating of modern plays. As elsewhere in his work, but here with specially striking stagecraft, Pirandello wrote his own quizzical, gaily pessimistic brand of philosophic comedy. Strewing the stage with question marks, he asked--without answering--what is truth? reality? appearance? illusion? In Six Characters there seems less attempt to arrive at truth than to stress the impossibility of arriving at it.

On the surface, Six Characters suggests a half-frivolous fantasy. During a rehearsal of a Pirandello play, six characters suddenly invade the stage, insisting that they are the brain children of a playwright who never actually put them into a play. They long to "exist," and a beguiled if bewildered director lets them tell their story in the hope that it may yield an interesting script. It proves a lurid story of a woman who left her husband and child for another man, of illegitimacy and prostitution, of drowning and suicide. It is a stammered, sleazy chronicle, told by fits and starts in bits and pieces, and constantly interrupted by the director and actors. Such storytelling has, of course, a method in its badness, and actually involves great skill. Again, the operatic lives of Pirandello's sextet mean less for him than the specific nature of their aliveness. For who, he asks, have more "reality"--human beings, who exist in all their completeness but alter and die, or characters in art, selectively created but forever unalterable? Which have more essential "truth"--mere haphazard facts, or such facts touched up to achieve form and meaning? For that matter, how true are mere facts at all, since no two people ever view or interpret them alike? And to add to the blur of truth and illusion, there is the medium of the theater itself, asserting reality through make-believe.

Happily, Pirandello set out less to solve such posers than to dramatize them. The play, to be sure, lacks straight dramatic drive; not only does the frame divert attention from the picture, but where the theme is the nature of reality, the sense of reality is apt to suffer. What Six Characters does have is great mental agility and theatrical ingenuity. What in particular Director Tyrone (The Matchmaker) Guthrie has brought to the present Phoenix Theatre production is a vivid comic sense. He has royally thwacked and twitted Pirandello's posturing stagefolk, and contrived from their hamming, their cliches, their high-dudgeoned exits some explosive moments and brightly amusing scenes. But his staging enlivens the evening more than it illumines the play. There is more comic surface than ironic underpinning, and a greater sense of exclamation points than of question marks. But a substantial share of the play's fascination remains.

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