Luigi Pirandello’s 1921 play, “Six Characters In Search of an Author,” caused riots when first mounted in Rome. It has gone on the enchant audiences worldwide with its bold take on theatre. Promethean Theatre Ensemble’s production, under the direction of Joe Feliciano, carries some of the intended impact.

The play opens with a rehearsal just beginning. The actors, the stage manager and the director are on the stage ready to start mounting a silly comedy when six black clothed people enter the stage demanding to be heard. They insist that they are characters in a play who have been abandoned by their author. They seek help in telling their story that they were designed to tell. After much initial resistance and philosophical debate between the director (Ed Rutherford) and the Father (Jack McCabe), the director decides to scrap the original play and help the Six mount their story.

The director first rehearses the six characters to flush out the story than he wants his professional actors to play their characters. The Six resist because they are determined to play out the roles given to them. The line and levels between illusion and reality become blurred. “The Tragedy of a Character” drives the six to find an author who will give them the full literary life denied them by their original author. They claim to be much more “real” than the actors who try to play them.

This surreal plot stretches the boundaries of what constants theatre and reality. Are these folks real people or are they live stage characters? The play has elements of theatre of the absurd as the line between the stage and life gets blurred. The story these six characters must play out is gruesome, eerie and possible. The play pokes fun at the artificiality of the stage. This complex story is well staged and contains several compelling performances. Ed Rutherford, as the director, was terrific as was Jack McCabe, as the Father. Michelle Zlatanovski, as the stepdaughter and Susan Veronika Adler, as the Mother, were emotionally strong.

This play suffers from the early wordy philosophical debate about character, reality versus illusion and the nature of theatre. It could be Carl R. Mueller’s translation? But once the thematic structure is in place, the play develops its dramatic arch nicely as it proceeds to its shocking resolution. To say much more would spoil the story. The Promethean Theatre Ensemble’s production delivers enough to be a worthy evening of theatre.