Just as the title indicates, this short drama revolves around six fictional characters who walk out of an unfinished play and into the real world. This fictional family arrives unexpectedly on the stage of an unnamed director and his theater company, who are in the middle of rehearsals. The characters demand that the manager abandon his current project in favor of putting on their play, so that they can work out the ending to their unfinished story. The first act of Pirandello's play consists of the characters' attempts to persuade the manager to put on their play. Throughout, the family drops hints about the content of their story - one which involves adultery, incest, prostitution, and general dysfunction - which so fascinates the manager that he allows himself to be beguiled into staging their play. When the time comes to perform, the family gets into arguments with the acting company, and here the major themes of the play are brought out - the question of authorship, the blurred boundaries between truth and reality, the instability of language, and ultimately the definition of literature itself. The ending of the play is strangely affecting. I say "strangely" because IMO none of the characters are likeable in the conventional sense, yet in working out the story, one becomes attached to them in an odd way.

I don't know much about the author, Luigi Pirandello, other than that he is Italian (and the work was originally written in Italian) and that he preceded the theater of the absurd movement. I've heard that when this play debuted, it was not well-received by the audience (some of whom accused Pirandello of madness), though more recent audiences have been more forgiving.

I read this work for class, and in conjunction with Aristotle's Poetics, so from the beginning, I framed the play as a tragedy. I really appreciated the play much more than I would have if I hadn't read the Aristotle. One can see how the ending is both a devastating surprise and yet also inevitable...which, for Aristotle, is one of the marks of a true tragedy. One of the high points of the play is that you can see Pirandello poking fun at himself, which gives the work a badly-needed sense of humor. Personally, I did not *like* the play as much as I'd wanted to, mainly because I did not relate to any of the characters, but it is intellectually very interesting. Hopefully, some of you guys will enjoy it more than I did.