Six Characters in Search of an Author
A company rehearsing on a bare stage is interrupted by six figures in mourning who say an author conceived them and then abandoned them, and who want their drama performed: a father, a mother who left him for another man, a stepdaughter he met by accident in a dress shop that is also a brothel. The manager agrees to try it, his actors take up the parts, and the six object that what is being performed is not what happened to them. The Rome premiere ended in uproar, and within a decade the argument had settled, that a stage can put its own machinery on trial, with Anouilh, Genet, Beckett, and Stoppard all working downstream of it.
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