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

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 of an 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 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 as c1assist; Strindberg called character the middle class term for the automaton (64). For them, 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 as an agent of dominant culture, they confirm the incredible power of 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! 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 Pi ran delio'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

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