Arts & Events

"A character is a ghost that remains in the theater after you turn out the lights." 

So Christophe Lemaire of Théâtre de la Ville, assistant director for 'Six Characters in Search of an Author' and a founding member of the company, answered the question, But what is a character? ... that came up after his conversation in the Alumni House with Shannon Jackson, director of UCB's Arts Research, that preceded the second and final performance of the Pirandello modern classic--a response from the Company's own ruminations on the definitions, the meanings peculiar to this great play ... 

And from its opening moments, when a close-knit band of quaintly-dressed non-actors interrupts the beginnings of a rehearsal of Pirandello's 'The Rules of the Game' ("not a very good play," Pirandello wrote as a self-satiric note in the script of its penetrating younger sibling) by appearing suddenly onstage--a bare stage, unadorned, but with the visible lumber and sewing machines responsible for its coming adornment--and demanding they see an author, that they get some help to stage their own tragedy, a sordid family drama (or in Freud's sense, Family Romance)--the divide between theater and life, artistic fiction and what people tell each other (and think) of themselves and others is crossed and recrossed, the boundaries blurred, made distinct again, then collapsing before a dry or jubilant remark brings the mundane world back into focus, even in a professional theater, even with a living story acted out by its sufferers of inconstancy, incest, neglect, madness, accidental death and suicide.  

"What is it you want?" they are asked when they announce themselves as characters in search of an author for their story. "To live!" replies the Father, their stolid spokesman. 

So begins an intricate but quickly-traveled elaboration, both theatrical and narrative, of the travails of both characters and actors, winding through the labyrinth of incident and representation, of character and professional personality. And at points, all the apparatus of the theater, dedicated to fleshing out dreams--enormous shadows cast, the foliage of trees lowered from the flies--are put into service for the reenactment of this nightmare, a nightmare for which even the facts are in contention between the seemingly stolid, but self-serving and romanticizing Father and the sarcastic, emotional Step-Daughter, arguing out the meaning of it all and how it can be shown every step of the way, while some of the others--the Son, for instance--step back, evade ...  

'Six Characters ... ' is a phenomenal play, almost modern Baroque in its complexity and sense of asymmetrical motifs, first staged in Rome in 1921--though it receives a stormy reception, with the author himself escaping out a side entrance, it soon became an international sensation. "Along with 'Waiting for Godot,' the iconic play of the 20th Century," enthused playwright James Keller, in the audience at Zellerbach Hall.  

Like 'Godot,' it's in many ways an unusual, "serious" comedy, a shaggy dog story, ending where it began, but never ending, cyclical, aggravated and aggravating. Someone mentioned it as very catholic--and Pirandello entered the world in Sicily with his baptism, later confirmation. Here again it's very Baroque, its "M.O." explainable by a fragment by that Baroque scientist, religious thinker, humorist and critic of representational art, Blaise Pascal: "The Agony of Christ lasts till the End of Time." (The characters in Pirandello's play say: Authors die, we live on.") 

Pirandello, originally a storyteller in prose fiction and a poet, famously defined humor before ever writing a play as "a sense of the opposite ... What you find instead of what you expect to find"--and in 'Six Characters ... ' that's a constant: an actress bursting into tears as the characters hoot her effort to "be" one of them onstage; the aloof director playing all the parts, including the Step-Daughter, adorned with a scarf; the characters themselves living--not rehearsing or acting out--their tragedy for the umpty-umph time, affecting, shocking and strangely familiar, in the sense of a book or a well-rehearsed memory. 

(Nicola Chiaromonte, in a fine essay on Pirandello and Humor, asked what transformation takes place in this kind of reflective art that sees The Opposite, not negating the apparent ... and himself reflects that it directly invo9lves the artist--author, director, actor--as a kind of commentator, ruminator, observer as well, perhaps as participant--a kind of "empty or unpopulated soul," from the sense of ancient personae, the empty masks that delineated the "characters" in classical tragedy and comedy--a witness to a story or play in the making ... ) 

And after the characters have finished their display of living tragedy, the director complains that there's no way to keep rehearsing. "Another wasted day!" Then Théâtre de la Ville stages a tableau of their own, something worthy of a Bernini or a dumb show in a Jacobean masque: Gigantic shadows of the Father with his hat, the Step-Daughter and others of the characters on a drape suspended on the empty forestage, out of which comes the Step-Daughter, catching the end of the cloth, playing with it as she poses, distorting the shadows into further grotesques, sounding her sarcastic laugh ... a final, framing salute to what Lemaire called, before the show, the magic of the theater.