No Longer in Search of an Author, a Character Defines Herself: Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author and Eugenio Barba's Experimental Performance Methodology

No Longer in Search of an Author, a Character Defines Herself: Pirandello's Six Characters in Search ofan Author and Eugenio Barba's Experimental Performance Methodology SETH BAUMRIN Luigi Pirandello's work is unique.among early-twentieth-century playwrights, in part because of his freedom from false intellectual positions - the "isms." In his coup de theatre, Six Characters in Search ofan Author (1922), Pirandello took neither August Strindberg's theoretical stance proposing a "characterless " drama in his Foreword to Miss Julie (64) nor Bertolt Brecht's position, in his "Short Organum for the Theatre," that a character should be constructed out of opposites, as a "man standing in a valley and making a speech" whose gradually changing views echo off the mountainside only to meet and contradict each other as they reverberate (191). Both Brecht and Strindberg saw the notion of character as c1assist; Strindberg called "character" the "middle class term for the automaton" (64). For them, character was a static, prefabricated facet of the mainstream theatre apparatus that reflects the value system of the ruling class, or what has come to be known as dominant culture. Yet by thus attacking the notion of character as an agent of dominant culture, they confirm the incredible power of character as performance's mystical unifying factor. In Six Characters Pirandello demonstrates that characters are autonomous and that their organic composition stems from something other than the author, actor, or culture. This article establishes a link between Pirandello's exploration of characters and Eugenio Barba's more recent examination of the actor! character relationship. First, however, it is necessary to provide a Pirandellian context for characters and actors. It may seem ironic that Pirandello was on good terms with the ruling class. He publicly supported Mussolini, but his writing in no way reflects Fascist ideology ; in fact, it may resist such authority. The subtle metatheatricality and formalism of Pirandelio's plays are also evinced by authors in other nations under authoritarian if not totalitarian regimes, most notably Spanish dramatists Lope de Vega, Calder6n de la Barca, Ramon Valle-Inclan, Federico Garefa Lorca, and Antonio Buero Vallejo. These dramatists use what has come to be known as the Modern Drama, 44:2 (2001) 174 Barba's Perfonnance Methodology 175 "immersion effect,"adramaturgical device proposed by Spanish critic Ricardo Domenech to involve both character and spectator in the drama's illusion to the extent that they are unable to accept that it is fictional (Holt viii-ix). Although the inherent metatheatricality of Spanish drama cannot be attributed solely to national politics, Pirandello's own metatheatricality coincides with an authoritarian point in Italy's history. Thus it is possible to see the structural medium ofmetatheatricality as symptomatic ofa particular political context. As Lope de Vega did in his auto sacrementale, Acting Is Believing (Lo fingido verdadero), Pirandello uses immersion to draw spectators into the liminal territory that separates a character from the actor who plays him or her. Unfortunately, at the end ofSixCharacters in Search olanAuthor, Pirandello deserts the spectators in this no man's land. In Lope's play, this fissure is defined by Christian martyrdom. A brief explanation of Lope's play will assist with the development of the argument regarding character in Pirandello's. In Acting Is Believing Genesius, a great actor in Diocletian's Rome, sees a vision of the Trinity and converts while giving a perfonnance (before the emperor) that was initially intended to parody the baptized Christian. Because of his revelation, Genesius departs from the script and implicates himself by announcing that he is not acting but truly is a Christian. He is sentenced to death and impaled. Both an actor and a playwright, Genesius "becomes" the character of the baptized Christian, eliminating the split between character and actor and resulting in the death of both actor and playwright. A kind of theatrical energy lies within this liminal area, the boundaries of which are constructed out of the difference between character and actor. This energy - an energy oscillating between two distinct aspects of perfonnance - radiates meaning. In Six Characters, Pirandello does not explore the characters' or the actors' liminal truths except as they pertain to the conflict between literary and...