Six Characters in Search of an Author

Luigi Pirandello’s most famous play begins as a rehearsal is interrupted by six strange figures who claim to be unfinished characters abandoned by their author, and who demand that their tragic story finally be staged. As they press the acting company to give them life, the boundary between performance and reality dissolves, and questions about truth, identity and illusion pile up faster than anyone can answer them. First staged in 1921, the work scandalized its early audiences before becoming a landmark of modern theatre and a direct ancestor of the absurdist drama that followed. This free PDF and EPUB edition gathers it with two other Pirandello plays in Edward Storer’s translation.