Theater Preview: A Noise Within presents a surreal work that breaks the rules of the stage

By Lynne Heffley

April 6, 2016 2:55 PM PT

You are directing a rehearsal of an upcoming production at your theater, when six strangers appear on your stage … and you find, very soon, that your own reality has become a relative concept.

Welcome to Luigi Pirandello’s 1921 landmark, reality-shifting, absurdist classic, “Six Characters in Search of an Author,” where fictional characters from an abandoned play flee the pages that have trapped them in a tragic plot with no resolution.

At A Noise Within in Pasadena, where the play is running in repertory through mid-May, these displaced characters interrupt the company’s rehearsal of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” urging a staging instead of their own story of “deep anguish.” The “Our Town” Director (played by Robertson Dean), initially irritated at the interruption, is soon intrigued enough to agree, over the objections of his actors.

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But who will tell the story? The characters or the ANW actors? Whose truth will it be in the telling, and what truths will the audience perceive through the prism of theatrical conceits?

“Pirandello basically throws it all up there,” said Julia Rodriguez-Elliott, who is co-directing the production with husband and ANW Co-Producing Artistic Director Geoff Elliott. “He is challenging us with the fact that there’s not one reality, that every reality is relative to another. You’re dealing with these six actors and these six characters, who have different perceptions of the truth. And even though all of these realities don’t add up, that doesn’t mean that each of them is not valid.”

The company is using the play’s 1998 translation by Robert Brustein, founding director of Yale Repertory and the American Repertory Theater, which “tells you as a producer,” Rodriguez-Elliott said, “to please make it your own. So you have the freedom, at least in the early stages of the play, to create a world that is very much of your theater.”

Taking advantage of that freedom, the Elliotts have included topical references and some inside baseball elements for longtime ANW fans. While the Characters are identified as Father, Mother, Stepdaughter, Son, Young Son, and Little Sister; the Actors use their real names on stage. And the Elliotts put the play in the context of an “Our Town” rehearsal, because “It was the first play that Geoff and I directed as professional directors,” Rodriguez-Elliott said. The “Our Town” production is identified, too, as a retrospective kickoff to the company’s 25th anniversary season — which will happen in the 2016-17 season.

“So, it makes it very A Noise Within,” she said.

However, the challenges in staging this “meta-theatrical absurdist” play were many, said Rodriguez-Elliott. What would putting the creative process on stage look like, and “what are the things that inspire us and put us in a creative space? What do we do as artists in terms of, you know, turning a chair into a house and a table into a coffin?

“On top of that,” she said, “how do you create a world that is then also fluid and magical and transformative?”

“You have to come up with enough of a creative box to play in,” she said, “and then with the actors, you start finding your way around telling the story, and a dreamscape starts to emerge out of that. And then you start to find your own logic to the piece.

“I still find myself discovering multiple layers,” Rodriguez-Elliott said. “I’m sure that we have some of them. I’m sure that we’ve missed some. And I’m sure that we’ll discover others in the run of the show.”

A play about six characters, who break into a theater “and essentially demand that their story be told,” is a multifaceted fit with ANW’s “Breaking and Entering” theme this season, and “perhaps the most interesting element in it,” Rodriguez-Elliott noted, “is the family dynamic. It’s literary characters in literary limbo,” she said, but it’s also a family living with and seeking relief “from a major trauma.

“Yes, the scale of it is Shakespearean. You’re dealing with incest and suicide and accidental death, all these big ticket items, but the family’s pain and their journey is something that is very recognizable.”

The production itself is something of a family affair, albeit in a happier way: Geoff Elliott plays the Father, daughter and professional actor Allison Elliott, 26, plays the Step-Daughter; son Jack Elliott, age 13, plays the Young Son. (They join Dean as the Director, Abby Craden as the Mother, Rafael Goldstein as the Son, Rigel Pierce English as the Child, Susan Angelo as the Leading Actress, Abubakr Ali as the Actor, and Natalie Reiko as the Actress.)

“I recently read that Einstein saw a production of the play and went up to Pirandello afterward and said, ‘you are my brother because you have presented the theory of relativity in dramatic form,’ ” Rodriguez-Elliott said. “It’s really delicate stuff, and it’s easy for it to feel like it is some esoteric conversation,” she added, “but it really isn’t. It’s about passion, and it’s very much about what we do to each other [and how] we all have different perceptions of truth and what really happened and how it happened.”

“And the older you get,” she added, laughing, “the more these absurdist plays make sense.”

What: “Six Characters in Search of an Author”

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

When: 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday (April 10) and May 1; 2 and 8 p.m. April 16, May 7, May 14; 7:30 p.m. April 21 and May 13; 8 p.m. April 22. Ends May 14.

Tickets: from $44.

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

LYNNE HEFFLEY writers about theater and culture for Marquee.

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