Although this play was really enjoyable, I was utterly confused throughout the whole event. My confusion didn’t really deter me from watching it, but rather kept me on my toes. It would have made it so much easier to follow the play if the subtitles didn’t distract from watching the actual play, but glancing at the subtitles once or twice for a scene was enough to figure out the overall situation. The story itself did remind me of Inception, as Erica mentioned in her post. Like the movie “Inception”, “Six Characters in Search of an Author” had many layers of reality. There was a layer in which we exist as an audience that was watching a fictional play containing characters who are brought to life by professionally trained actors. Pirandello plays with this layer of reality by tugging at our emotions and while I was watching the play I unknowingly began to believe the story’s verisimilitude. Then the layers after this start to get all fuzzy. This is when it begins to confuse me, I don’t know whether or not to believe the characters are the creation of an author’s imagination that have come to living, or if the whole event was fictional in the layer of reality which the actors’ and actresses’ existed. But the last layer is the reality of the characters. I don’t doubt that they were living and breathing and have complex lives as the author of their story intended, but whether they actually existed in any reality besides their own is the question we are all asking. This was a thoroughly enjoyable play that got us all talking about so many aspects of theater, writing, life, so even though I was extremely confused, I enjoy this confusion because it sparked a really great conversation in class.

–Chloe Chai