Six Characters Looking for an Author

In what begins as a realistic play Pirandello introduces six figures who make the extraordinary claim that they are the incomplete but independent products of an artist's imagination—"characters" the artist abandoned when he couldn't find the will to complete their story. These "characters" have arrived on the stage in a random theater, during a rehearsal, to find an author themselves, someone who will give them the fullness of literary life that their original author has denied them.