Six Characters in Search of an Author begins by defying the conventions of theater: when the audience enters, the curtain is raised and the stage is “as it usually is during the day time.” Some of the actors, who themselves play theater Actors, hang out on stage like they might have during their rehearsals. The Manager walks onstage and declares it is in fact time for a rehearsal—they will be working through the Second Act of a Luigi Pirandello play, Mixing it Up. (This play is fictional, but in the original text, the Actors rehearse the real Pirandello play The Rules of the Game.) The Leading Man objects to the “ridiculous” chef’s hat he is asked to wear, and the Manager declares that the play-within-a-play will turn out to be a “glorious failure.”
The Door-Keeper interrupts the rehearsal to announce that there are visitors, and a “tenuous light” announces the “fantastic reality” of the six Characters who enter the stage: the capricious middle-aged Father, the veiled and mourning Mother, the audacious and seductive teenaged Step-Daughter, the distant and surly 22-year-old Son, and a younger son and daughter who refuse to speak, the fourteen-year-old “half-frightened” Boy and the timid four-year-old Child. The Father announces that they “have come here in search of an author” and offers the confused Manager to “bring you a drama, sir.” They argue about whether the Characters are mad, or the theater itself is madness—the Father insists that he and his family were simply born Characters, but their author never put them to use by putting them in a work of art. The Characters “carry in us a drama” that they cannot wait to play out—as though to prove the point, the Step-Daughter abruptly begins acting out. She announces that she has recently been orphaned and shares a “passion” with the Father, before inexplicably singing and dancing a French song and predicting that the Mother will lose the Child, the Boy will do “the stupidest things,” and she herself will run away. Because the Son is the Mother and Father’s only legitimate child, she explains, he hates the rest of the family. In shock, the Mother faints, and when she comes to, she begins raving about the Father’s “loathsome” plan.
The Father reveals that the Mother’s previous lover—the Clerk he used to employ and the real father of the Step-Daughter, the Boy, and the Child—recently died, which is why the Mother and Daughter are dressed as though in mourning. He admits that he sent the Mother to live with the Clerk because she is “deaf, deaf, mentally deaf!” He kept and raised the Son, but eventually regained interest in his old family and began to visit them—giving the Step-Daughter gifts at school, for instance—until the Mother, Clerk, and their children moved away for good. The Clerk died two months ago, and to make ends meet, the Mother and Step-Daughter began working at the atelier of a woman named Madame Pace: the Mother sewed dresses, but the Step-Daughter worked as a prostitute. One fateful day, the Father visited the establishment—and the Step-Daughter. They disagree about whether he knew who she was, and whether the Mother managed to pre-empt their liaison or narrowly missed it. The Father explains that he took the family back in and has allowed them to live with him since, but they continue to fight endlessly. Everyone begins to bicker with the Son, who refuses to divulge his feelings and insists he is “an ‘unrealized’ character, dramatically speaking.” The Manager agrees that the Characters have the material for a drama and offers to put them in touch with an author who can write their story. But the Characters insist the Manager must be the author: he shall watch them act out their drama and “take it down […] scene by scene!” The Manager agrees, and he and the Characters go into his office for 20 minutes, leaving the Actors confused onstage and providing an intermission before Act Two.
A bell rings to mark the beginning of Act Two, and the Step-Daughter, Child, and Boy come onstage. The Step-Daughter tells the Child, her young sister, that the play is “a horrid comedy,” make-believe for everyone else but real for the little girl. She begins ranting about a fountain and then starts berating the boy, who mysteriously has a revolver in his pocket. The Father and Manager call her inside and she switches places with the Son and Mother, who debate which of them ends up suffering worse in the end. The Son bemoans the Father’s confidence that “he has got the meaning of it all” and insistence on publicly revealing the Characters’ private drama—their failure to truly be a family. Everyone comes out and starts debating the stage decorations, which the Step-Daughter wants to be exact replicas of Madame Pace’s shop. The Manager tells the Prompter to take down the Characters’ actions in shorthand and the Actors to watch the Characters so that they can play them later. The Father protests that the Characters should play themselves, since they are more real than the Actors, but the Manager insists that the Characters cannot act, and should leave it to the professionals. The Father and Step-Daughter laugh at the Actors the Manager assigns to play them, noting that the Actors do not resemble them, and then note that they have a problem: Madame Pace is not present. The Father begins “arranging the stage for her” by hanging up the Actresses’ hats and mantles, and suddenly Madame Pace herself appears in the theater and walks on stage.
The Father challenges the confused Actors and Managers, saying they have a limited conception of truth, while the Step-Daughter and Madame Pace begin the scene, whispering inaudibly in the corner—they refuse to speak up until the Father leaves, which he does against the Manager’s protests. Madame Pace then begins telling the Step-Daughter about her coming client, but everyone breaks out in laughter: the foreign Pace speaks a comical, broken dialect of “half English, half Italian.” Again commenting simultaneously on the play itself and the play-within-a-play, the Manager declares that Pace’s speech will “put a little comic relief into the crudity of the situation.” Pace tells the Step-Daughter that an “old signore” is coming to meet her, and the Mother suddenly jumps at her, yelling, “murderess!” The Actors restrain her, and Madame Pace exits: it is now time for the Father to enter. He approaches the coy Step-Daughter, who explains that she is “in mourning.”
The Manager stops the Characters and orders the Actors to begin re-enacting the scene. The Father and Step-Daughter laugh as the Leading Lady and Leading Man fumble through their parts, and the Step-Daughter interrupts to correct what really happened—but the Manager refuses to put her and the Father’s implied sexual encounter in his version: in the theater, he insists, “truth up to a certain point, but no further.” The Step-Daughter protests that this means helping the Father camouflage his sins and insists that—with the Mother out of the room—she and the Father show what actually happened. The Mother breaks down and protests, insisting that “it’s taking place now” and that the two mute, younger children “cling to me to keep my torment actual and vivid.” The Manager declares this moment “the nucleus of the whole first act” and the Step-Daughter recounts sleeping with the Father and feeling ashamed of herself, before beginning to act it out on the stage. The Mother intervenes and the Manager, satisfied, mutters, “curtain here, curtain,” meaning that he plans to end the First Act of his play here—but the Machinist misinterprets him and actually lowers the curtain.
The final act begins with a slightly changed set that resembles a garden. The Characters sit on one side of the stage, opposite the Actors, with the Manager standing in the middle and declaring it is time to plan out the Second Act of their play. He and the Step-Daughter argue about whether they can show the events of the Characters’ life happening separately in their true settings, but he insists on combining them and staging them all in the garden. Then, the Manager and Father argue again about Characters and Actors, whether the theater is real or just a game, and ultimately about whether the Manager is a person at all—the Characters, the Father argues, are eternal and unchanging, whereas normal people change every day and constantly look at their past selves like “a mere illusion.” The Manager asks the Father to stop philosophizing and tells him it is truly ridiculous for him to think he is a Character created by an author, but the Father insists that he is not philosophizing, but merely “crying aloud the reason of my sufferings,” and that he and his family truly were “born of an author’s fantasy” and then “denied life by him.” The Manager can “give them their stage life,” and the Step-Daughter warns him against “abandon[ing]” the Characters like their author did. (The Father suggests that the Manager can “modify” some of the Characters rather than abandon them.)
Ultimately, the Characters and Manager agree that the last scene will take place in the garden—for which the stage is already set. The Manager starts coaching the Boy on how to act, and the Son tries to leave, but the Step-Daughter stops him because “he is obliged to stay here, indissolubly bound to the chain.” He refuses to act out a scene with the desperate Mother, who insists that this scene did take place. The other Characters force to threaten the Son to act, but he accuses the Father of trying to take their author’s place and even changing the story for his own convenience. The Manager asks the Son what really did happen, and the Son reluctantly begins narrating the “horrible” events—the Manager looks over and sees the Child drowned in the fountain, and the Son mentions the Boy’s “eyes like a madman’s.” Suddenly, the revolver goes off behind some trees, and the Actors drag out the Boy’s body. Shocked, they cannot decide if he is really dead or if “it’s only make believe.” The Father insists it is reality and the Manager exclaims, “to hell with it all!” as the curtain falls.
