Six Characters in Search of an Author: A Theatrical Revolution

When the show debuted in 1921 at the Teatro Valle in Rome, the audience protested the play, shouting: "Madhouse! Madhouse!". The audience was faced with something completely unprecedented, an assault on the form of bourgeois theater, a non-story in which not only the theatrical mechanism and artistic creation were put under investigation, but also the very relationship between reality and fiction. Over time, however, the Six Characters have moved from being a scandalous stone to a "classic" text, a matinee for schools, a piece of Italian literature museum. Staging this text today means moving in a mediasphere where the boundary between private life, storytelling, information, and manipulation is increasingly blurred. Not to mention that the very concept of "self" has profoundly changed, multiplying and facetting on all our devices and social accounts, in a continuous oscillation between reality and representation. Almost a hundred years later, Six Characters in Search of an Author is still the work that best investigates our relationship between life and art, real and virtual. Between meta-theatrical incursions, open rehearsals, and new guests every evening, Pirandello's work is the opportunity to confront the great question: what remains of art in the age of its digital reproducibility? Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello - the author's name in this staging has become part of the title - is a matryoshka show, so to speak, in which the meta-theatrical plane already present in the text is taken to the extreme, generating a short circuit where actors, characters, and audience coexist and mix in a unique and unrepeatable happening every evening. In fact, at each performance, among the cast actors, other people/characters will burst onto the stage as a surprise - protagonists of the theatrical panorama - who will perform a scene from the show that will then be reproduced as in an infinite reflected mirror. In a game of refractions that will use every technological means available to recreate the here and now of the show. SALA UMBERTO Via della Mercede, 50, 00187 Rome - prenotazioni@salaumberto.com ticket price from 26 euros to 16 euros available on www.salaumberto.com - www.ticketone.it duration 90 minutes without intermission. Thursday 29/02/2024 at 20:30 Friday 01/03/2024 at 21:00 Saturday 02/03/2024 at 21:00 Sunday 03/03/2024 at 17:00 Tuesday 05/03/2024 at 20:30 Wednesday 06/03/2023 at 20:30 Thursday 07/03/2024 at 20:30 Friday 08/03/2024 at 21:00 Saturday 09/03/2024 at 21:00 Sunday 10/03/2024 at 17:00