Arts & Events

Cal Performances brought from Paris a production of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author staged by Théâtre de la Ville-Paris under the direction of Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota. Opening on Friday, November 7, in Zellerbach Hall, this French-language production (with English supertitles) brought to life – and I mean this in several senses of the words – this extraordinary adventure in modern theatre. Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, which incited a riot when first performed in Rome in 1921, is now credited with revolutionizing the theatre as it had been handed down from classical times, and inaugurating a modern, challengingly different notion of theatre. 

As the play starts, we see a bare stage, peopled here and there by actors re-laxing before beginning a rehearsal. Some exchange small talk; others silently read their parts. A Neapolitan song is heard in the background, though it is not clear where the music comes from. When the director enters, he immediately takes charge and commands his troops, almost in military fashion, to obey his every order. We will rehearse, he says, Act II of Luigi Pirandello’s play La Règle du Jeu/The Rules of the Game. When one actor asks a question, the director angrily replies, “Is it my fault if the French won’t send us any more good comedies, and we’re reduced to putting on Pirandello’s works, where nobody understands anything and where the author plays the fool with us all?”  

The ironic self-referential impact of this opening is still astonishing nearly a century after the play’s premiere. If it has any predecessor in Italian – or European -- drama, it would be in the two 16^th century plays, La Mandragola and Clizia, by Flor-entine Renaissance political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli. There is indeed a strong thread uniting Machiavelli and Pirandello. Both men dared to apply a hard-edged reason to the discourse of everyday affairs; and both were reviled by their contemp-oraries for what was perceived as cynicism. For all their commitment to reason, however, neither Machiavelli nor Pirandello could ever be accused of neglecting the passions that animate men in their everyday affairs. Machiavelli, in his late play, Clizia, chides himself, as an older man, for his infatuation with the young actress who plays the lead role in his play. In similar fashion, Pirandello, in Six Characters, has the Father utter the words, “What misery, what wretchedness is that of the man who is alone and disdains debasing liaisons. Not old enough to do without women, and not young enough to go and look for one without shame.” 

Here, in a nutshell, is the drama of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. Or at least this is the drama affecting the six characters, who consist of a Father, Mother and four children, two of whom – a Step-Daughter and a Son – are grown-up young adults. Led by the Father, these six characters intrude on the director’s rehearsal of Pirandello’s play La Règle du Jeu; and they insist that, as characters cast adrift by their author, who neglected to develop them beyond impressive beginning scenes, they have a passionate drama to unfold before the public. At first, the director considers them mad and tries to throw them out so he can get on with the rehearsal. However, as the Father explains the predicament that haunts them as characters in search of an author, the director becomes hooked, as it were, and decides to hear them out.  

The crux of the matter, as the father tells it, is that after many years of marriage, he tired of his wife. Noticing that she got on better with a young man he hired as his secretary than with himself, the Father invited them to go off together, which they did. Meanwhile, the Father and Mother’s baby son had been sent to live with a wet nurse in the country. When the boy was weaned, he came to live with his father, hardly knowing his mother, who now started a new family. Eventually, the Mother and the former secretary moved to another city, and the Father lost track of them. Later, when the secretary died, the Mother returned to the city where the Father lived. But she did not contact him. Being in need of money, she took a job sewing gowns for Madame Pace. This Madame Pace, however, enlisted the Mother’s young adult daughter – the Father’s Step-Daughter – to work as a prostitute in the back of her millinery shop. The Father, unaware that his ex-wife and children were back in town, went to Madame Pace’s shop for sex, and, as fate would have it, he came close, very close, to having sex, albeit un-knowingly, with his Step-Daughter. Only the sudden intrusion, by chance, of the Mother interrupted this ‘primal scene’. 

As played by the actors of Théâtre de la Ville, everything revolves around this ‘primal scene’. The Father, admirably played by Hugues Quester, is a man tormented by this cruel twist of fate, and he rebels against this one sordid moment being made to ‘characterize’ his entire life. The Step-Daughter, flirtatiously played by Valérie Dashwood, reviles the Father for his near-incest; and she also reviles her half-brother, the Son, played by Stéphane Krähenbühl, for his standoffish insistence that he is not involved in any of this and wants nothing to do with a Mother he hardly ever knew. The Mother, played by Sarah Karbasnikoff, blames the Father for everything and desperately craves affection from the Son who refuses to acknowledge her. The two young children – a teenage boy, played by Walter N’guyen, and a girl, played by Anna Spycher – are either traumatized by things they can’t understand or, in the girl’s case, are simply too young to have a sense of what happened. In the end, these two young ones become the true victims of this passion-filled drama. 

The director, energetically played by Alain Libolt, tries to make sense of this drama of six characters who seek an author. But in the end he simply complains that he has wasted a day that should have been occupied by a rehearsal. The director, in short, fails to comprehend Pirandello’s complex juxtaposition of illusion and reality, not in the play he begins rehearsing but in this play – Six Characters in Search of an Author.  

Performed in French with English supertitles, this production of Six Characters might have benefited from being given in Zellerbach’s smaller Playhouse rather than in the main auditorium. Some of the spoken dialogue was hard to catch in cavernous Zellerbach Hall; and in this wordy play the supertitles came and went so quickly it was often hard to keep up with the words. However, Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota’s directing made the action visually interesting. When the characters re-enact their ‘primal scene’ behind a screen in Madame Pace’s shop, the Father is literally caught with his pants down. Further, Demarcy-Mota’s use of occasional shadows on a screen, brilliantly illuminated by lighting designer Yves Collet, effectively brought out Pirandello’s complex interrelationship of illusion and reality. This was gripping theatre at its very best.