Six people are looking for an author

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Data
Title: Six people are looking for an author
Original title: Be personaggi in cerca d'autore
Genus: play
Original language: Italian
Author: Luigi Pirandello
Publishing year: 1925
Premiere: May 9, 1921
Place of premiere: Teatro Valle in Rome
people
  • People of the piece to be made:
    • The father
    • The mother
    • The stepdaughter
    • The son
    • The little boy (mute)
    • The little girl (mute)
    • Madame Pace (later conjured up)
  • The actors of the theater:
    • The director
    • First actress
    • First actor
    • Second actress
    • Young actors
    • Several actors and actresses
    • The stage manager
    • The prompter
    • The prop master
    • The stage master
    • The Secretary
    • The doorman
    • Stagehands

Six people are looking for an author is the most famous piece by the Sicilian Nobel Prize winner Luigi Pirandello . With his play, Pirandello turned against illusion theater and thus created the basis for modern drama .

content

During a theater rehearsal for Pirandello's play The Role Play ( Il giuoco delle parti ), six people suddenly appear who are a family and ask the theater director to perform "them". They were created as stage characters by their author, who however did not complete them. But they wanted to see their piece on stage, want to "live".

Theater director: I'm rehearsing now! And you know very well that nobody is allowed in during the rehearsal. Who are the gentlemen? What do you want?
The father: We are looking for an author.
Theater director: But there is no author here, we are not rehearsing a new play .
The stepdaughter: All the better, sir! Then we could be your new play.

Reluctantly, the director agrees to realize her story. He and the actors learn of the complete breakdown of the family, the victims of which are the two young children.

However, the attempt to bring these events onto the stage as a dramatic story fails because the reality of the stage characters cannot be represented by the illusionistic play of the actors.

Pirandello about the piece

Pirandello about the piece: “Without wanting to, each of them expresses in the greatest excitement in order to defend himself against the accusations of the other, as his deepest sorrow and grief, what has been the need of my spirit for so many years: the impossibility of understanding each other. "

Impact history

When it premiered in 1921 by the Compagnia di Dario Niccomedi at the Teatro Valle in Rome, the play sparked a tangible scandal before it began its triumphal march through European theaters. The audience at the premiere was split between supporters and opponents, who loudly said “Madhouse! Madhouse! ”Shouted. Pirandello and his daughter Lietta, who were present at the premiere, had to leave the theater through a side entrance to avoid the aggression of the audience. A later performance in Milan was then a great success.

Through his trilogy of theater on the theater and above all through the play Six Persons Looking for an Author , Pirandello quickly became the leading playwright of the 20th century. He revolutionized the theater and confronted the audience with a hitherto unknown perspective in which any separation between the audience and actors was abolished and with which he created the epitome of modern drama ( Péter Szondi ).

Before he published his first play at the age of 52, Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936) wrote over 237 short stories and two novels. This tremendous work is often forgotten as the Sicilian author revolutionized European theater with his great dramas and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934.

The German-language premiere took place on April 4, 1924 in Vienna in the Raimund Theater under Rudolf Beer . In this performance, the popular folk actor Karl Skraup was discovered, who worked there as a stage manager and also played the stage manager in the play.

Otto Falckenberg staged the play in the same year at the Münchner Kammerspiele , Max Reinhardt in the comedy in Berlin with Max Pallenberg as theater director and Mathias Wieman as son. Reinhardt staged the play the following year at the Kammerspiele of the Deutsches Theater Berlin, where it saw 71 performances. Reinhardt later performed the play in 1931 at the Salzburg City Theater and in 1934 at the Vienna Theater in der Josefstadt with Hans Thimig as theater director.

In 1981 Klaus Michael Grüber staged the play in a famous performance at the Free Volksbühne Berlin with Angela Winkler (daughter), Peter Roggisch (father), Libgart Schwarz (actress), Axel Wagner (actor), Michael König (son) and the director of the house, Kurt Huebner , as theater director, where the play began in a dramatically plausible manner in darkness and disorder and the audience protested: "Be ashamed of yourself, Mr. Huebner!"

Edits

  • 1959: Opera by Hugo Weisgall, libretto based on Pirandello by Denis Johnston

Film adaptations