One hundred years ago, on May 10, 1921, Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936) presented the debut of his play Six Characters in Search of an Author in Rome. Opening-night reaction was surly. Some likened the atmosphere to a riot; hecklers cried out “Manicomia!”—“Madhouse.” The playwright was sent skittering away by boos. Just two years later, though, an acclaimed Parisian production established the play as a modernist sensation, and it has retained the mantle of a great play ever since. By 1925, in a preface to the published play, Pirandello was boasting that George Bernard Shaw had dubbed Six Characters “the most original and most powerful work of all the theatres ancient and modern in all nations.” Shaw hadn’t actually said that, but allowed that he had “never come across a play so original.” Pirandello, who started in the realist tradition, had already made a name for himself in short stories and novels in addition to drama, but Six Characters was so successful that by 1925 he had formed his own traveling theater company. Eric Bentley called Six Characters “the play of the century.” (Bentley himself reached his century; he died last August at the age of 103.)

Bentley’s hyperbole is more fitting as a descriptive judgment than a qualitative one: the play was a touchstone of modernism. It harnessed the energies of its time, getting into one short text a sense of collapsing authority, exhaustion with traditional forms, turning away from God, psychoanalysis, democratization, artistic self-examination, and fascination with the