Six Characters in Search of an Author (Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore) A Comedy in the Making

Six characters arrive at a theatre in search of an author, demanding to be written, for their story to be told. They each have a fixed personality and wear their faces like a single mask, showing a one dimensional personality that seems only to know how to act itself as one emotion, as they have been created in an authors head but abandoned before their maturity. They interrupt the director and other actors trying to rehearse a play and after farcical disruptions they persuade the director to listen to them and to get him to tell the story of their unhappy family. What follows is a tragic and comic, a blurring of lines between reality and imitation until at the culmination any sense of reality is completely distorted. It is a fascinating play to read; I just wish I could see it on the stage.