Six Characters in Search of an Author

Written by Luigi Pirandello

Narrated by LibriVox Community

Six Characters in Search of an Author (Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore) is the most famous and celebrated play by the Italian writer Luigi Pirandello.

Pirandello, in the preface to the play, says that whenever a reader opens Dante’s Inferno, Francesca will drift down from the dark wind in her circle of Hell and tell the Pilgrim her story; and it will always be for the first time – just as the Mother in Pirandello’s play at one point makes an agonizing cry, always for the first time.

Each character sees events and the other characters differently. Their readings of reality do not match up. No one character is more correct than the other. There are as many versions of the story as there are characters in the play. Each character is in fact many characters; each has a sense of who he or she is, but each also is what the others believe he or she is.

The play suggests that we are more victims of forces we cannot control than captains of our own fate and demonstrates Pirandello's conception that in place of a continuous ego, self or "I" are states of mind, masks or personae; the temporary result of forces brought to bear on us at that moment. The self becomes an anthology of such roles or masks. Theatricalists thought life was more like theater than vice versa. As in theater, we put on and take off masks, try out various roles, and make up our lives as we go along. (Summary by Wikipedia)

CAST:
The Narrator: Elizabeth Klett
The Father: Peter Yearsley
The Mother: Ruth Golding
The Step-Daughter: Miss Avarice
The Son: mb
Madame Pace: Diana Majlinger
The Manager: Denny Sayers
The Property Man: David Lawrence
The Prompter: om123
The Door-Keeper: gobblegobble
The Machinist: Ezwa
The Leading Lady: Piper Hale
The Leading Man: bish
L’Ingénue: Bridget Tallon
Juvenile Lead: LizMourant
Actors: Miriam Esther Goldman, Availle, Lucy Perry, Sweetlilbirdy, Kalynda
Audio edited by Elizabeth Klett

• Language: English
• Publisher: LibriVox
• Release date: Aug 25, 2014

Luigi Pirandello

Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) was an Italian playwright, novelist, and poet. Born to a wealthy Sicilian family in the village of Cobh, Pirandello was raised in a household dedicated to the Garibaldian cause of Risorgimento. Educated at home as a child, he wrote his first tragedy at twelve before entering high school in Palermo, where he excelled in his studies and read the poets of nineteenth century Italy. After a tumultuous period at the University of Rome, Pirandello transferred to Bonn, where he immersed himself in the works of the German romantics. He began publishing his poems, plays, novels, and stories in earnest, appearing in some of Italy’s leading literary magazines and having his works staged in Rome. Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), an experimental absurdist drama, was viciously opposed by an outraged audience on its opening night, but has since been recognized as an essential text of Italian modernist literature. During this time, Pirandello was struggling to care for his wife Antonietta, whose deteriorating mental health forced him to place her in an asylum by 1919. In 1924, Pirandello joined the National Fascist Party, and was soon aided by Mussolini in becoming the owner and director of the Teatro d’Arte di Roma. Although his identity as a Fascist was always tenuous, he never outright abandoned the party. Despite this, he maintained the admiration of readers and critics worldwide, and was awarded the 1934 Nobel Prize for Literature.