A volume of plays from the founding architect of twentieth-century drama, including his most popular and controversial work A Penguin Classic Pirandello is brilliantly innovatory in his forms and themes, and in the combined energy, imagination and visual colours of his theatre. This volume of plays, translated from the Italian by Mark Musa, opens with Six Characters in Search of an Author, in which six characters invade the stage and demand to be included in the play. The tragedy Henry IV dramatizes the lucid madness of a man who may be King. In So It Is (If You Think So), the townspeople exercise a morbid curiosity attempting to discover “the truth” about the Ponza family. Each of these plays can lay claim to being Pirandello’s masterpiece, and in exploring the nature of human personality, each one stretches the resources of drama to their limits. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,800 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Six Characters in Search of an Author and Other Plays (Penguin Modern Classics)

Literature & Fiction

Pirandello, Luigi

Dramas & Plays

Penguin Classics

A new version of one of the most influential plays of the 20th century
 Six people arrive in a theatre during rehearsals for a play. But they are not ordinary people. They are the characters of a play that has not yet been written. Trapped inside a traumatic event from which they long to escape, they desperately need a writer to complete their story and release them. Intrigued by their situation, the director and his company of actors listen as the characters begin to describe and argue over the key events of their lives...One of the most extraordinary and mysterious plays of the 20th century, Six Characters speaks directly to an age of uncertainty: where do we come from, where are we going, how do we become what we want to be? Six Characters Looking for an Author premiered at the Young Vic Theatre, London, in February 2000.

Six Characters In Search Of An Author (Modern Plays)

Methuen Drama

Six people arrive in a theatre during rehearsals for a play. But they are not ordinary people. They are the characters of a play that has not yet been written. Trapped inside a traumatic event from which they long to escape, they desperately need a writer to complete their story and release them. Intrigued by their situation, the director invites them to act out the key events of their lives ...
Pirandello's best-known play and one of the most extraordinary and mysterious plays of the 20th century, Six Characters speaks directly to an age of uncertainty: where do we come from, where are we going, how do we become what we want to be?

Six Characters in Search of an Author (Student Editions)

Six Characters in Search of an Author (Hereford Plays)

Heinemann Educational

Winner of the Nobel Prize in 1934, Luigi Pirandello was one of the most original and powerful dramatists of his time—the playwright par excellence of the conflict between illusion and reality. His plays dramatize with force and eloquence the loneliness and isolation of the individual both from society and from himself. In Six Characters in Search of an Author, his greatest work, these themes are played out with characteristic brilliance. First performed in 1921, the play concerns six living characters—family members embroiled in their own human drama—who come to a theater and demand that the manager and his actors stage their life story. Filled with both humor and despair, Six Characters in Search of an Author is Pirandello’s most extraordinary achievement—as it explores the fundamentally absurd and tragic nature of the human condition. This Signet Classic edition includes an introduction by Eric Bentley, the widely acclaimed writer, translator, and international theater authority.

Six Characters in Search of an Author (Signet Classics)

Signet

Luigi Pirandello is widely regarded as one of the foremost innovators in twentieth-century theatre. Six Characters in Search of an Author caused a riot when it was first produced in Rome in 1921 and was banned by the Lord Chamberlain from public performance in Britain until 1928. It remains today an extraordinary and fascinating play.

Six Characters in Search of an Author/Sei Personaggi in Cerca D'Autore: (Sei Personaggi in Cerca D'Autore) : A Play Yet to Be Written

Landes, Sidney H.

Landes, William-Alan

Players Pr

Robert Brustein's highly acclaimed adaptation of Pirandello's masterpiece, a study in illusion and reality which follows a group of characters who try to fashion their life stories into acceptable drama. Plays for Performance Series.

Six Characters in Search of an Author (Plays for Performance)

Ivan R. Dee

Robert Brusteins highly acclaimed adaptation of Pirandellos masterpiece, a study in illusion and reality which follows a group of characters who try to fashion their life stories into acceptable drama. Plays for Performance Series.

Six Characters in Search of an Author (Plays for Performance Series)

Ivan R. Dee, Publisher

Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) was an Italian dramatist, novelist, and short story writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934. It was Capuana who encouraged Pirandello to dedicate himself to narrative writing. In 1893, he wrote his first important work Marta Ajala, which was published in 1901 with the title L'Esclusa. In 1894, he published his first collection of short stories, Amori Senza Amore. Pirandello intensified his collaborations with newspaper editors and other journalists in magazines such as La Critica and La Tavola Rotonda in which he would publish, in 1895, the first part of the Dialogi Tra Il Gran Me e Il Piccolo Me. In 1898, with Italo Falbo and Ugo Fleres, he founded the weekly Ariel in which he published the one-act play L'Epilogo and some novellas. In 1900, he published in Marzocco some of the most celebrated of his novellas such as Lumie di Sicilia and La Paura del Sonno.

Six Characters in Search of an Author

Dodo Pr

First performed in 1921 with Romans calling out 'Madhouse!' from the audience, "Six Characters in Search of an Author" has remained the most famous and innovative of Pirandello's plays. Often labeled a satirical tragicomedy, this play initiated the anti-illusionism movement of the early twentieth century, rejecting realism in favor of a more symbolic, dreamlike quality. When an acting company's rehearsal is interrupted by six family members who wish their life story to be enacted, the result is a masterpiece in the exploration of the nature of human personality. Both popular and controversial, this play blurred the lines of reality and illusion in unpredictable ways, ultimately influencing later playwrights like Beckett and Sartre with its bizarre blending of theatrical qualities. Such is the eloquence and depth of Pirandello's body of work that he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1934, just two years before his death, an honor worthy of a playwright whose plays had a subtle if profound impact on much of the theatre that would follow.

Digireads.com

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Pirandello, Luigi. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Pirandello, Luigi

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Pirandello, Luigi. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Six Characters in Search of an Author and Other Plays (Penguin Modern Classics)

Six Characters In Search Of An Author (Modern Plays)

Six Characters in Search of an Author (Student Editions)

Six Characters in Search of an Author (Hereford Plays)

Six Characters in Search of an Author (Signet Classics)

Six Characters in Search of an Author/Sei Personaggi in Cerca D'Autore: (Sei Personaggi in Cerca D'Autore) : A Play Yet to Be Written

Six Characters in Search of an Author (Plays for Performance)

Six Characters in Search of an Author (Plays for Performance Series)

Six Characters in Search of an Author

Six Characters in Search of an Author