Six Characters in Search of an Author

　　Play in three acts by Luigi Pirandello, produced and published in Italian in 1921 as Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore. Introducing Pirandello's device of the "theater within the theater," the play explores various levels of illusion and reality. It had a great impact on later playwrights, particularly such practitioners of the Theater of the Absurd as Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Jean Genet, as well as Jean Anouilh and Jean-Paul Sartre.

　　Pirandello, born in Sicily in 1867, was a well-known novelist and critic before he achieved international recognition as a playwright. His plays include The Rules of the Game, Six Characters, Henry IV and The Man with the Flower in his Mouth. He was awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934 and died in Rome in 1936.