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Six Characters in Search of an Author

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My response to this play was very similar to Christopher Chong’s. I understood the overall plot, mainly thanks to the playbill’s summary, but I could not follow the smaller details of the play. This was mainly because it was difficult to keep up with the English subtitles, but even when I could read the subtitles, I was not able to watch the characters on stage. However, even though I could not understand the entire story, it was easy to see that this was an outstanding performance, as the actors and actresses were fantastic on the stage. This play likely would have been very enjoyable if you could read the subtitles and watch the play at the same time.

In regards to whether the ending was reality or fiction, I believe the ending and deaths of the two characters were fiction. This is because for the earlier parts of the play, the majority of the roles for the characters were in their scenes. However, even when they were not acting out a scene, they had the same personality throughout the entire play, which suggests they were not really acting, but rather were being themselves. Also, when the characters were going through a scene, they never had to do a second rehearsal because they always did it perfectly the first time.

BAM BAM Six Characters in Chaos

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Professor Drabik asked us if we hated her.

The play itself was, in all honesty, very confusing, but thanks to a brief explanation by the awesome Nabila on the 4 train afterwards, everything seemed to fit itself perfectly.

I didn’t pick up the story until the actors started to mimic the characters. The French itself was probably the biggest barrier for most of us in understanding the story, but I liked it in French. I was able to understand the basics and even predict what they were going to say. Haha, Angelika and I were speaking french before we entered the theatre.

On the performance itself: The performance was on the idea of reality vs fiction. When the boy killed himself and the little girl drowned herself, was that all real? All the “characters” disappeared at the end, was this whole thing all just fictional? The show ended kind of abruptly, and I really wasn’t expecting that. I guess the cliff-hanger was the best part of the show- it is left to the viewers discretion to decide whether it was real or not, just like how the director doesn’t know, and had to call of the rehearsal.

To answer Professor Drabik’s question, we definitely don’t hate you. The performance may have gather some negative critiques from the class, but we are not entitled to like everything. If anything, we still appreciate you taking us to these performances that we probably had never heard of, and chances are, might not get the chance to go again! 🙂

 

~Christopher Chong

 

P.S. I wished the subtitles were like the ones at the Lincoln Center Met Opera House, because it was kind of hard to follow both the performance and the subtitles.

Six Characters in Search of an Author: The Play and the Place

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First off, the play: As I told Professor Drabik after the event, I survived. The play was not one of my favorite performances, despite, no doubt, being thoroughly enjoyable. What the play was, however, was absolutely mind-blowing. “Six Characters” played with the boundaries of fiction and reality. Were the characters actual people within in the context of the play or were they actual characters come to life, to finish their unwritten stories? Were the Boy and the Little Girl dead? Had they already died ? Was it their function to die? These are the questions that plagued my mind after the show and I still find it hard to completely answer them. If I were to pick a single scene that represented all of my confusion, it would have be the penultimate scene, where the Boy shoots himself. Both the Actors and the Characters crowd around him and conflicting shouts of “Reality?!” and “Fiction” can be heard from behind the curtain. The play made me question everything that was happening on the stage. In particular, the Father’s dialogue about real life being the illusion while “characters” had an actual, set reality struck a chord with me.

Now, the place: Brooklyn Academy of Music Harvey Theater. I was not a particular fan of this venue. The seating was the first thing that I noticed. The seats felt rather small and I had the distinct sense that, should I lean forward a little, I would tumble all the way down to the stage. More so than anything else, the supertitle set-up bothered me. Constantly flicking my eyes from the supertitles to the many elements on the stage made me feel as if I was missing a majority of the performance and distracted from the play itself. The stage set-up, however, was a plus. Being flat, rather than elevated, the stage seemed perfect for the kind of play that “Six Characters in Search of an Author” was.

Pirandello

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Was it really absurd?

In middle school drama class, we learn that the peak/major point of absurdist theater comes around 1950’s, so Luigi Pirandello is incredibly notable in that such play was written in his time (few decades before the actual boom). Before we go around evaluating, I would like to apologize because I am not currently feeling sane after 18 hours of staying awake (compared to 26 hours of my daily sleep, it’s too long). If I suggest something crazy, I probably mean something crazy.

Firstly, all characters in a play are voices of someone. This someone has to be real and existing somewhere in the world, even if the existence should be in the hypothetical realm, so long as the character can manage to come to existence in verisimilitude. If this rule is broken, the play would have hard time making the audiences focus. This is proven because characters supposedly represent a character, a being, a thought of an author, a thought of another being, etc. To deny this is to say that a being is not in existence when it actually is.

We’ll begin with something simple. One of the first assignments that my drama professor (Prof. Einhorn. Awesome. I miss her) gave us was the entrance of an actor. She (mis)quoted that when a (wo)man enters a room, (s)he brings his/her whole life with him/her. Prof. Einhorn taught us that good actors will tend to create reality as early as the entrance,  not only showing the moment before, but the reaction and the relationship between the character and the setting.

Now, consider the entrance of the 6 characters. They came in their characteristic ghostly walk. REMEMBER THIS WALK. They came right in, as if they belonged there, and they moved around like characters. It was subtle, but as a once-theater-student, I was pretty impressed by the way they portrayed such hard reality. I mean to say, IF acting must come from reality, and if the actors have never seen a “character” walking on the street before, this expression is very VERY believable, as absurd as it might sound, and therefore, it is a beautiful art. There characteristic walk can be distinguished from free, realistic (usual, humanlike) walks of the other “actors.”

By now, I think it’s only natural that we pose questions on the subtitles. By the nature of the play, it is very tempting to think that the subtitle should not exist, because it is very possible for any actor to go into the reality and speak his or her reality, which, when happened, is beautifully done, except the other actors would probably have some hard time if not skilled enough (cf Respect for Acting, Hagen, the scene of improvised lines, which created reality rather than anticipation of lines). This, I do not know why it was done, because this play, out of all the others, probably should have let it happen, even if it calls for disaster. It’s a perfect disaster, and Pirandello will probably love such disaster.

The end of scene 1, I heard lots of gasps and I myself gasped, but I really wonder if we gasped at the same thing. Okay. It’s a biased statement, because I actually took classes in which I learned how nudity on stage works, but I’m really hoping that the audiences were not gasping at the nudity. I really hoped that the audiences were gasping at the mother. I don’t speak French (and my minuscule knowledge of Latin didn’t even help here….). But the way the mother created the reality around her–her horror, her disgust, her scream… It was so strong that I could feel it snap my spine, even though I could barely see her. I’m sure people down there appreciated it much more that I, but I think there was something gasp-worthy in her acting that made me so shocked, making me wonder if it was even humanly possible.

Yes, the author did a great job leading to that “scream.” Really. Pirandello led the audiences to first dive into the actors’ reality, then to the characters’ reality. As audiences follow along with the realities, it is almost as good as impossible to realize what horror the mother must have felt, that the audiences are screaming in the head already for her. Yet, the actor who played the mother did fabulous job because her reality was even more real than reality in that in reality, it might be difficult for non-expressive people to express such abomination.

Now, the garden scene was beautifully done, showing that the director is learning from the characters and stop making lame rehearsals–pretending that a show is just a pretension, and that reality half created would suffice for the sake of a rehearsal. By the second act, he did his best to portray what he could. If the director did not put effort to believe the garden, the girl could not have possibly drowned. No, the girl would be sitting on that wooden set piece. There’s no real water in that. What killed her was that the way reality was created with effort, and the way that the director actually started to respect theater.

The boy who never spoke. His gun shot scared me. I literally jumped onto Anthony and Justin. He had no voice, and by the first thing discussed on this post, he is a very queer way to voice a certain voice: without a voice. Here’s the catch: his expression, his shaking and his body language: all showed very clearly all the reality that was necessary to be shown. In fact, he probably spoke more than most other characters when he was about to shoot himself. An interesting quotation from drama class: There are only three types of scenes: Fight, negotiation, and seduction. In that moment, the boy did all three. Truly unbelievably believable decision, to the point of making me doubt that this is an absurdist.

Now, why does Lucius ramble so much.

Here’s the fun part. All characters are voices. All actors are therefore, a story teller. If that is the case, the 6 characters are voices that wished to speak, but the story was never written down. Their stories are told in different way in different literatures, all separate, but never in one place like this.

Where am I getting at? If you notice the CURTAIN CALL of the play, the actors who played the real, or those from so called “reality” (that is, the actors, director, crews) walked in like a character in that hideous and unusually beautiful “character” walk. Fiction? Reality? The cry is not just horrified director screaming about dead characters. It was the question of IDENTITY. IF -> the characters are fiction THEN -> the director himself is also fiction. If not, both are horrid, horrid reality. Whatever it is, the theater group probably decided to put them in the same boat by purposely making the actors to walk that ghostly walk to curtain call.

The horror the horror. If all characters represent some kind of voice, and if the director/actors/crews were also characters… whose voice are they representing? Do we not see the similarity between the director who claimed that we can’t put nudity/sex on stage and some of the audiences who gasped at the naked actor? Do we not see the similarity between the director and the audiences who both try to deny that the show is nothing but a made up fiction? Do we not see the similarity between the director and us, complaining about bad plays, wanting something new, something stimulating, involving drama, conflict, death, violence, love, hatred, tragedy, etc? It’s a tragedy? Whose tragedy? Whose voice is he speaking for?

Tragedies can happen around us, like all reality, like all theater based on reality, and all theater that IS reality. Theater is not obliged to be created only for the purpose of pure entertainment according to the will of the public; that wouldn’t necessarily be art. Hagen wrote that all artists are rebels of some sort and so are the actors. We often do not appreciate the reality behind theater and go to do our daily killing and drowning. Are humans cruel enough not to care?

It was indeed a frightful play, in a very pleasurable way. Frightful, because the message I got from the play was that the two characters who died are dead, and we are still debating if it’s real or fiction, as if being either one should lessen the gravity of the reality behind it.