Title: Six Characters in Search of an Author Author: Luigi Pirandello Nationality: Sicilian Period and Setting: in a theatre during present times (or 1922 if wanting to be historically accurate, but it is meant to be modern, present day) Synopsis: A cast and crew of theatre people are getting ready to rehearse a Pirandello play when they are interrupted by a group of people claiming to be "characters" whose author has refused to give them life and they are looking for someone to stage their drama. The Stage Manager is hesitant at first, thinking them to be crazy, but their story interests him enough that he agrees to give it a try. So the characters begin to act out their story for the group. First, the father sent the mother to live with a man in the house that she had become friends with and kept their son and the mother moved away and had three more children and the son was sent to a wet nurse to be raised. Eventually, the man the mother was living with died and the family moved back to the town of the father, but didn't get in touch with him. They were poor so the mother went to work as a seamstress and the step-daughter as a prostitute. One day, she is working and the father comes in and almost gets it on with the step-daughter, but the mother stops them in time. Then the step-daughter goes to him and demands that he give them money and allow them to live in the house. The son, who has moved back in at this point in time, is disgusted with this arrangement and shuns the family and disowns his mother. This drives the young boy (the step-son) to muteness and is very hard on the rest of the family, especially the mother. Then, one day, after a confrontation between the mother and the son, the son takes off across the garden and finds the little girl drowned in the fountain and sees the boy staring at her and then the boy kills himself. At the end of the enactment, the boy and little girl lie dead and the step-daughter takes off and runs away, leaving the cast and crew to figure out what was real and what was pretense. Unique Elements of Playwright's Style: His constant themes of the stability of art versus the instability of reality, the idea of theatre within the theatre, and the idea of social masks and pretense and the rejection of realities that are too hard to bear. . Six Characters in Search of an Author Author: Luigi Pirandello Nationality: Sicilian Period and Setting: in a theatre during present times (or 1922 if wanting. themes of the stability of art versus the instability of reality, the idea of theatre within the theatre, and the idea of social masks and pretense and the