About the book: 2006 / Luigi Pirandello, as a playwright, set as his main task the embodiment on stage of new ideas about theater as a spectacle, which required him to radically change old ideas about directing. It was during these years, developing the traditions of intellectual drama by Ibsen and especially Shaw and enriching them with the achievements of the theater of the “grotesque”, that Pirandello created his most famous philosophical plays: “Six Characters in Search of an Author” (1921), “Henry IV” (1922), “ Each in his own way" (1924), "Today we are improvising" (1930), etc. In these plays, the problem of alienation and the impossibility of human self-expression, the contradiction of “face” and “mask”, reality and dreams, the relativity of truth and etc. In the play “Six Characters in Search of an Author,” the idea of ​​making the action more theatrical forced Pirandello to turn to the technique of “theater within a theater,” which was popular back in the Renaissance. The curtain is up and there are actors on stage, busy rehearsing a new play. At this moment, six characters appear from the auditorium, illuminated by bright light: Father, Mother, Son, Stepdaughter, a 14-year-old boy and a 4-year-old girl. To separate the characters from the actors of the troupe, the playwright used the technique of improvised comedy and “put on” masks on the characters, expressing the essence of each of them: Father - remorse, Mother - suffering, Son - contempt, Stepdaughter - revenge. The characters are looking for an author who would embody them in artistic images, and offer the director to stage their drama on stage. Pirandello deliberately collides two plans: the real (actors rehearsing a play) and the unreal, fantastic (characters from an unwritten comedy). Characters created by the imagination, according to Pirandello, are as real as the actors, and even more real than life itself.