Review: Six characters continue a long search as they barge into A Noise Within

In “Six Characters in Search of an Author,” six characters — abandoned by their author — materialize in a theater, seeking someone to tell their story.

These days, the play itself is nearly abandoned. Though its Nobel-lauded Italian author, Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936), is considered one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, his work is rarely seen or discussed outside academia anymore.

So in a sense Pirandello has joined his dispossessed characters, yearning to be heard.

If anyone would hear him nowadays, it’s the folks at the classical company A Noise Within, who just added “Six Characters” to the spring repertory in a playfully inventive adaptation by Pirandello champion Robert Brustein, directed with intellectual rigor by company artistic directors Geoff Elliott and Julia Rodriguez-Elliott. Yet even in this earnest attempt, Pirandello remains disembodied, his ideas distant and difficult to grasp.

When “Six Characters” was first staged in 1921, the world seemed to be losing its fixed points of reference. World War I had rocked the world’s political foundations, and the great theorists of the time, including Freud and Einstein, were calling everything else into question.

Pirandello wondered how we can trust anything when life insists on changing from minute to minute. “Six Characters” picks apart identity, authenticity and the very nature of reality. It wonders how, from a variety of competing viewpoints, an observer can discern the truth. And it struggles to separate the life in art from what’s merely make-believe.

The six characters interrupt a play rehearsal, making a ghostly entrance as looming, backlighted silhouettes on a vast fabric drop. Their intrusion turns into a dialectic as the eldest male character — the nominal head of household to the other five, played by Elliott — tries to convince Robertson Dean, the A Noise Within resident artist who’s leading the rehearsal, to give life to the characters’ story.

Humorous references to A Noise Within and other area theaters (interpolations by the Elliotts) inject some zing into all the braininess. “This would never happen at the Taper,” one actor grumbles. And there are fun bits of spookiness: strange sounds, mysterious blackouts and a whole set that materializes as if by magic.

Still, the philosophy mires the play’s momentum. Meanwhile, the story-within-a-story — of a coldly logical husband, a shipped-off wife, their twin families and an episode of near-incest — grows so improbably lurid that even Maury Povich’s producers would dismiss it as preposterous. How can we have a discussion about truth when the argument is built on something that feels so false?

The audience could use more cues about how to react to all of this, but the performance style — by a cast that includes A Noise Within stalwarts such as Susan Angelo and Abby Craden — doesn’t much clarify the situation. The characters, dressed head to foot in 1920s black, veer into ghoulish melodrama, and even the actors, who are portraying themselves, seem heightened and arch. So the portrayals seem to hover indecisively between real and unreal.

Perhaps the world has changed too much for us to imagine how radical “Six Characters” would have been in 1921. Perhaps we no longer have the patience for Pirandello’s intricacies of thought. Or perhaps Pirandello and his characters must simply keep wandering in search of better expression.

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“Six Characters in Search of an Author”

Where: A Noise Within, 3352 E. Foothill Blvd., Pasadena

When: In repertory through May 14

Tickets: $50-$68

Info: (626) 356-3100, Ext. 1, www.anoisewithin.org

Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes; no intermission