When the American Conservatory Theatre performed Six Characters, it announced a showing of Hamlet, and had the characters interrupt the opening scene.

Similarly, the ART actors in the play (aside from the six characters) used their own names, often their own characters and attitudes. Feel free to substitute the names of your own actors—and improvise with them asides and witticisms more appropriate to personal experience and local history.

A problem which this approach engenders is determining the nationality of the six characters. We treated them as essentially Italian, since Pirandello conceived them that way, with Italian concepts of honor and moral codes. The exception was Madame Pace, who (for company reasons—we were one woman short) was turned into a Latino pimp named Emilio Paz. An American city has lots of Latinos, but what are formally dressed Italians doing in a theatre filled with American actors? The answer is that they come from the author’s imagination, but if your actors need more motivation (the audience doesn’t), tell them the family are immigrants newly off the boat.

Six Characters depends a lot on magic, which is to say stage tricks. Although magicians are not supposed to disclose their secrets, here are some hints about the way we solved our problems. Avoid using a curtain. The audience walking in will see what appears to be an empty stage, decorated with flats and props stored up from other shows. Downstage left there is a table and chairs, where the stage manager is setting up for rehearsal—sharpening pencils, chalking the stage, instructing a stage hand, and so forth. At the back of the stage is a loading door (a painted drop if you don’t have one) through which the characters enter.

The entrance of the actors poses no problems, and their banter and rehearsal should proceed under work lights until the director (Jeremy) complains that he needs better illumination. The scrim we used as the The King Stag backdrop began to tremble right before the entrance of the characters (use a wind machine), then went transparent. When the loading door lifted slowly, revealing the six, they were brilliantly back lit, moving from side to side in unison. It is best to follow each of the six, but especially the Father, with a special light different in quality, intensity, and color from the lighting on the rest of the stage.

For the scene in the back room of Emilio Paz’s grind house, we did the following. The Father and the Stepdaughter ask to set up the scene with furniture simulating the furniture of the room: a table (with the envelope on it), a couch, a clothes rack. The most important element is the mirror. We brought down a huge mirror from the flies, composed of a mylar material which was transparent when lights were used behind it. When Paz materialized behind the mirror, the furniture in the back room was exactly parallel to the crude props placed in front of the mirror. But the mylar was not only transparent—it actually projected an image of the actor standing in front of the mirror back into the room. Thus, when the Father and Stepdaughter sat down on the bench facing the front of the mirror, they seemed to be sitting facing us on the couch in the room; and when the Mother aimed her handbag at Paz behind the mirror, she actually seemed to have hit him in the face. Thus, scenes were played in front of and behind the mirror at once.

Pirandello uses a lot of narrative in this play. One way to make that narrative dramatic is to bring it into the present. When the Father and Stepdaughter tell of their encounter near her school when she was little, make that a scene that’s actually happening, with the Father stroking her face while she tells (in a little girl’s voice) about her reactions. Do the same thing when the Father narrates how the Stepdaughter entered his house (after the encounter in Paz’s back room) and saucily demanded money.

The most difficult—and most effective—scene in the play is the last one. Having set up the light booms to simulate trees and the blue plastic to simulate a pond and a cardboard moon, the play proceeds. The Son—finally forced to speak—faces the audience and tells the story of how he watched the little girl go near the pond. The Mother crosses sorrowfully to join him. That cross brings the spectator’s eye to focus on the little girl with the Stepdaughter standing behind her helplessly. Very slowly, the plastic on which the little girl is lying begins to descend (we used an elevator for the purpose) as the plastic fills with water, enough to drench her clothes. The Stepdaughter reaches down and, sobbing softly, brings the dripping body offstage.

As the Son continues his story, the scrim once again turns transparent to reveal a parallel reality behind the simulated stage props. The Boy is revealed standing by a real tree as a real moon casts its image on the pond at which he’s looking.