STAGE REVIEWS : Pirandello’s ‘Characters’ at East West

On the page, Luigi Pirandello’s “Six Characters in Search of an Author” is a masterpiece of modernist self-consciousness whose only sin is that it spawned far too many paltry imitations. On the stage, Pirandello’s discourse on the limits of illusionism has to paradoxically come across as “real”--or, as more than one of the characters insists to the director after they’ve taken over his rehearsal, more real than actual life’s illusory nature.

In other words, it’s not such a terrific idea to have a curtain call, or have the actors playing the dispossessed characters visibly changing costumes during scene breaks. But there they are in Tom Donaldson’s East West Players production, and they cumulatively shatter Pirandello’s internal logic.

Talk about confusing your priorities: Donaldson’s fatally flawed casting has several young, uninspired actors in the roles of the actors about to rehearse a play--and not one of them strikes us as a credible actor. This is the trick that any staging of “Six Characters” must smoothly pull off: That we must never ponder Pirandello’s actors as characters. They’re set apart from the characters who, written off by their author, wander in to demand that their drama be played.

Ironically, the actors playing the characters sometimes tend toward actorish extremes--Lydia Look’s pregnant pauses and Method-y glances as the older illegitimate daughter, Arland Russell’s scene-stalling speechifying as the father. Yet Look and Russell--with occasional aid from Omar Shawkat as the father’s alienated legitimate son--generate most of the evening’s power as they give voice to the characters’ multilayered complaints.

Playing off of this, Stuart McLean’s director emerges as a man trying to turn an inexplicable phenomenon into a show, as any good director would do. Robert Cornthwaite’s new translation rises especially to the occasion during the aesthetic sparring matches between McLean and Russell, an articulate face-off that ends in a draw.

A draw is where Pirandello leaves matters, but that isn’t an excuse for this production’s confused muddlings. During the pre-opening action, as stage hands prepare for rehearsals, one of them barges in with a boom box blaring Nirvana. What seems to be an indicator that this will be a show with anarchic humor goes nowhere, and a closing image with poorly conceived strobe lights (J. Richard Tyson’s lights, on an uncredited set, are otherwise fine) seems fitting for a staging that has lost its way.

“Six Characters in Search of an Author,” East West Players, 4424 Santa Monica Blvd., Silver Lake, Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends April 26. $16-$18; (213) 660-0366. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.