Books like Pirandello's one-act plays by Luigi Pirandello

Samuel Beckett’s masterful farce, *Waiting for Godot*, first staged in 1953, examines human absurdity and the elusiveness of hope through the symbolic wait for a mysterious figure.

An American play by Edward Albee.

For students of Luigi Pirandello's life and works, this volume provides a multi-faceted view spanning the many genres in which he wrote, from poetry and essays to fiction and drama. It gives a true sense of Pirandello's remarkable sensitivity to place – from his native Sicily to Germany and Latin America – and of how his perspective was shaped by a wide range of interlocutors with varying professional backgrounds, from contemporary philosophers to fellow playwrights like Bernard Shaw, directors like Max Reinhardt and the actress Marta Abba. Diverse contributors explore the sheer genre-bending originality of Pirandello's humor, metatheatre, and fantastic tales, and reveal how profound shifts in society, culture, and politics in his time – Freud, Futurism, Fascism – conditioned not just his thought but also his meteoric rise to fame. A final section is dedicated to Pirandello's legacy in literature and drama throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

Six Characters in Search of an Author (Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore) is an Italian three-act play written by Luigi Pirandello in 1921, considered as one of the earliest examples of absurdist theatre. It’s a play within a play that deals with perceptions of reality and illusion, and plays with the ideas of identity and relative truths.

The plot features an acting company who have gathered to rehearse another play by Pirandello, when they’re interrupted by 6 “characters” who arrive in search of their author. They immediately clash with the manager who at first assumes they’re mad. But, as the play progresses, the manager slowly shifts his reality as the characters become more real than the actors.

Six Characters in Search of an Author opened in Rome at Valle di Roma and created a huge and clamorous division in the audience, forcing Pirandello to escape out the side door. But a year later it was presented in Milan to great success, before moving on to Broadway in 1922 where it ran for 136 performances.