One approach to look at the characters in the play, and especially the “characters” is the play, to assess what they represent. But of course they represent differently, depending on who is doing the assessing. For instance, an Italian or French audience in 1923 would see this quite a bit differently than the audience at a Travis High School production in 2010. The theatrical productions in the 1970s, all about the daemon of experiment, so to speak, would be accepted differently than a contemporary production. Etc.
For instance--the production on dvd I am to show a bit of today takes the premise and moves it into a 1970’s TV studio preparing to film a show (the same show the actors produce in the stage version).The characters appear first on a static TV screen before they suddenly are on the set.
A 2008 production in England has the troupe preparing to film a documentary about a 14-year-old boy so ill he is preparing to be euthanized, and when trouble with permissions to film certain scenes comes up, the characters present themselves as valid alternatives.
In a version at Georgetown University I screened a scene or two from, the troupe is rehearsing Hamlet and the song the stepdaughter does as her kind of “audition” is “Material Girl” by Madonna. As with plays by Shakespeare or Chekhov or the Greeks, these plays lend themselves to being endlessly reimagined, endlessly updated.
Character: The Producer. Desires stability in his understanding of things, but the intervention of the characters unsettles this stability. Probably most evident in act 3, when the Father asks him: “Do you really know who you are?” (pg. 295). The implication here that his own self-vision is always changing. Desires stability, but works in illusion (but is content with a standard kind of approach to theatrical illusion).
Character: The Father. Although he is driven by and succumbs to lust, desire, his present state is that of the rationalist. Like one of the chefs beating the eggs in the beginning, he is the voice of reason. Rhetorically sound, convincing arguments about the nature of the existence of characters, actors, people in the world. Perhaps the most intent on enacting the family history, because for him the ratiocination of his actions will also come to pass. Like Oedipus, he is lured into an incestuous relationship without his knowledge, and he desires to set the record straight. Look at speech on 277 that includes the lines: “it would be a dreadful injustice of other people to judge us only by this one action as we dangle there, hanging in chains, fixed for all eternity, as if the whole of one’s personality were summed up in that single, interrupted action.”
Character: The Mother. Against the Father’s reason, is all Passion. And one might say, rather passive passion at that (except when she goes flying up at Madame Pace). “I’m not acting my suffering,” she says, showing that this single emotion is what gave birth to her in the author’s mind, and, being a fragment and not fully rounded out, she is a flat kind of character.
Character: The Step-daughter. I want to say she is the most fully imagined of the “characters,” with elements of reason and of passion. Maybe the most melodramatic victim , but also like the father wanting to explain how she became a prostitute, how she wound up in daddy’s arms. Narcissistic and exhibitionist. But perhaps most importantly, points to the primal scene as influencing all her fate (this primal scene a kind of electra complex fulfilled), but in retrospect she blames this scene for the circumstances that made it. See her accusations on the top of 292.
Character: The Son. Maybe the least thought-through by the author, thus perhaps the most anguished, articulate, hidden. Suggestions of lust for his half-sister, but also of resentment at having, really, no family.
Do you think it is true that one thing Pirandello gets at is the ease by which the audience is manipulated by the most maudlin and sentimental or scandalous stories. Yet here, in this work of meta-theater that presents all kinds of questions about the nature of theater and identity, illusion and reality, one becomes absorbed in this awful melodrama about mistaken identity and falling into sin and the kind of unmoored tragedy with which the tale concludes.