Six Characters in Search of an Author

For once in the "serious" theatre, the play is not the thing. The thing is that Boston has a permanent repertory company, and a fine one. It is gratifying that a good production of Six Characters in Search of an Author is to be found at the Wilbur; but it is greatly exciting that for several months, and, with any luck, for many years, a series of good and great plays, adventurously chosen and well performed, will be constantly on view in Boston. Congratulations to Stephen Aaron '57, John Eyre '58, and Dean Gitter '56, the managing directors of the company. Congratulations to audiences, present and future, for being in on what promises to be a damn good thing.

Pirandello's "comedy in the making" is almost ideally suited for showing off the talents of the new company, especially since the adaptation by Tyrone Guthrie and Michael Wager has gotten rid of the mustiness that clung to earlier versions. It has no star part, only a good number of important middle-sized ones. Its story--about a second-rate theatrical company whose indolent rehearsal of a lousy play is suddenly and spookily interrupted by six intense black-clad figures, claiming to be characters from an unfinished "tragedy" and demanding that the company dramatize their miserable history--this story gives scope for a series of light satirical sketches of theatrical types and for another series of heavy dramatic performances, and it practically demands a considerable degree of virtuosity in a director.

This last quality is supplied in abundance by Mr. Aaron, who handles the spookery with a deftness Houdini might not have scorned. He has a remarkable ability to keep the spectator's eye just where he wants it and his blocking is easy and effective. Both by blocking and by a contrast in acting styles, he keeps it clear that the Six Characters are part of a fundamentally different order of being than that of the troupe whose rehearsal they invade. The style he has found for the Characters is a shade overblown for my taste, but one of the Six says, "We're all a little theatrical when we're excited," and perhaps Mr. Aaron is in duty bound to substantiate this.

The performances are one and all solidly professional, although a couple of the ladies give an occasional impression of being younger than they are supposed to be. As the Director, Leading Lady, and Leading Man of Pirandello's theatrical company, Dean Gitter, Gretchen Kanne, and Wendell Clark delineate three phonies without ever a phony stroke in their performances. Mr. Gitter's role is more extensively characterized than the others, and he brings to it the right sort of pudgy excitability and pseudo-suavity. Ray Reinhardt, Dora Landey, Richard Mathews, and Helen England are the most prominent of the Characters, and they handle their long, passionate speeches with conviction. Mr. Reinhardt's and Miss Landey's roles especially are searching tests in emotional acting. They pass, as it were, with honors.

For all its virtues as a showcase for the company, however, Six Characters is not an ideal choice. The unfinished story of the Six is a dreary bourgeois "tragedy," more or less Ibsenite in tone, revolving around a scene where a man's long-lost wife (Miss England) bursts in and stops him from fornicating with a prostitute, because the prostitute is his step-daughter. I am not giving anything away in revealing this, because the Stepfather (Mr. Reinhardt) and Stepdaughter (Miss Landey) spend a good deal of time standing around chewing the fat about this scene before they ever get to playing it. Perhaps because every aspect of the plight of the Characters is so elaborately discussed, they seem not so much melodramatic as sordid--in spite of a haunting, Flying Dutchman quality in their eternal fixedness in agony. For good stretches of the long first act, before sordidity passes into ghastliness and thus takes on some interest, the effect is almost numbing.

The "tragedy" that the Characters demand be made out of their gnarled interrelationships would not be a good one, because tragedy is something more than an orchestration of the steady drip, drip of human misery. Even Pirandello, while giving their story more attention than it deserves, is more interested in their status as Characters and in their relation to the troupe of Actors upon whom they descend.

The Stepfather, who is the play's raisonneur, draws a few morals from his position inside his story, which only serve to indicate that Pirandello is in doubt about the difference between a profundity and a platitude. But the Stepfather's long speech, to the effect that the Characters are more real than the "real" actors, is subtle and intriguing, and so is the dramatic embodiment of this theme in a great entanglement of paradoxes: the Characters are really actors who pretend to be characters demanding to be acted, the Actors are really pretending to be other actors pretending to be characters, and so on. Confusing, yes, but Pirandello seems to prefer true confusion to false certainly--a defensible position.

His obsession with the illusiveness of reality, and the peculiar sort of structure generated by this obsession, give the author a chance to display his marvelous dexterity in contriving all sorts of ironies and subtleties and stage effects out of the relation between Characters and Actors. He is an expert in gimmickry--indeed, the whole play is really a gimmick, a shell game with reality as the pea. Since he is only a clever intellectual prestidigitator, Pirandello may not deserve his exalted reputation as a dramatic master. But he is a strikingly individual play-wright, and in his way a brilliant one. Repertory Boston does right by him and us; it is up to us to do right by Repertory Boston. So go and see their production of Six Characters, if you have any taste for theatrical oddity. It's cheap, it's convenient, and it's good.