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The complete text of Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello on booknest — 3 chapters, free to read, with notes and narration.
A theatre company is midway through a rehearsal when six strangers walk onto the stage. They introduce themselves as characters an author conceived and then abandoned, and they have come looking for someone willing to finish their story. That story — the father, the mother who left, the stepdaughter who meets her father again in a dress shop that is not a dress shop — proves so raw that the actors cannot play it. The play is never completed: it breaks apart in performance, at the point where the audience can no longer tell rehearsal from reality.