six characters in search of an author and other plays

The Boy immediately goes behind the set’s trees and shoots himself dead with the revolver, and the curtain falls with the Actors, Manager, and audience unclear whether this is was part of the Actors’ “real” universe, or only the story told by the Characters. Astonishingly, in the play’s closing moments, the Boy stands “with eyes like a madman” next to the fountain where his sister, the Child, has drowned-possibly at the Boy’s hand, and possibly as a fateful reaction to the family’s turmoil after the Father met the Step-Daughter at Madame Pace’s brothel.

At the end of the play, it becomes clear that he will play an important part in an important scene, as the Manager coaches him on how to act and bickers with the Father and Step-Daughter about where to stage the action. The Step-Daughter continually berates the Boy, calling him a “fool,” asking why he does not speak, and predicting his death. By calling attention to the conventions of stage realism and their implications, Six Characters in Search of an Author dramatically expands the possibilities of the theater that others, such as Samuel Beckett, Eugne Ionesco, Edward Albee, and Tom Stoppard, would further exploit. They are the characters, born from the imagination of an author who has. The fourteen-year-old apparent son of the Mother and the Clerk, who is “timid half-frightened” throughout the play and, like his sister the Child, never talks. On the stage, a rehearsal is in progress when actors and director are interrupted by six mysterious figures who demand to be put into a play. Out of nowhere, they invade the stage where rehearsals for a play are underway.

Six characters in search of an author and other plays