Tag Archives: Luigi Pirandello

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.