Luigi Pirandello won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934 for his “bold and brilliant renovation of drama and the stage.” His Six Characters in Search of an Author, which dates from 1921, is an absurdist metatheatrical play about the relationship between authors and their characters. A dysfunctional family of six bursts into a rehearsal of another Pirandello play with a curious claim: they are characters who have been abandoned by their author and are seeking someone to complete their story. The theater manager is intrigued and agrees to help, but becomes vexed by the interplay of the real actors with the unrealized characters, whose literary limbo causes fiction and reality to overlap. The production is directed by Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota and performed by Théâtre de la Ville, which gave an outstanding performance of Ionesco’s Rhinocéros two seasons ago.

Performance note:
Contains adult situations. In French with English supertitles.