At the end of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, the audience normally stares in stunned silence before it can summon the nerve to applaud. Shocked by the author's frightening denial of human "reality," they remain unsure of their own presence and totally confused by what they have seen. At the close of the Charles Playhouse production of Six Characters, which opened last Wednesday, the lapse is a little less long, the audience a little less stunned than usual. Michael Murray has fashioned a fairly effective version of the Pirandello masterpiece, but the production's faults are just numerous enough to both disconcert the viewer and dampen the power of the play.

Pirandello's dramatic skill and imagination in this one work are nearly unbelievable. The six characters of the title have had their lives suspended by their fictional author, who abandoned his play before completing their horrible story. Apparitions dressed in deathly black, they visit the evening rehearsal of a Charles stage production, looking for another author to release them from their torturing memories. Flattering the Director (Joe Ponazecki) and explaining their plight, they alternately relive the painful events of their in-escapable past and beg the cast to stage their story. Pirandello's craft reaches its height in the second act, where he switches with startling case between the horror of the character's fictional world and the cast's farcically "real" existence. Compared with the intensity and immediacy of the characters' experience, the cast seems hopelessly pale and lifeless. It becomes questionable which are the actors and which are the people; the audience, certainly, isn't very sure.

The Charles production is worth seeing just to witness the performance of Olympia Dukakis as the step-daughter. Her Mediterranean face captures beautifully the confused horror of her relationship with her step-father. Better than any of the other actors, she is able to lose herself in a memory, ignoring the astonished eyes of both the rehearsal cast and the audience. Above all, she has amazing control over her body; her stiff shivers in the hat shop red-light scene convey all the repulsiveness of her step-father's shameless sexuality.

Bland or Energetic

Beyond Miss Dukakis, however, Murray's success is due almost solely to the power of the script; most of the cast is either bland or annoyingly energetic. `Louis Zorich gives a sporadically moving, but basically uninspired, performance as the step-father. When he confounds the Director by positing the elusiveness of human reality, he sounds more like a philosophy student reciting chapter and verse than a man whose very movement is tortured by the recollection of his lechery. Even in the early moments, when taunted by his step-daughter, Zorich seems overly calm and cold.

Murray's staging often accentuates his actors' failures instead of off-setting them. For example, though Ponazecki totally misplays the part of the Director (an unbelievably difficult role), his constant movements around the stage may be more at fault than his disconcerting effiminacy. Lloyd Battista does some quite impressive acting as the son, but he is occasionally forced into ridiculous acrobatics in his nervous pacing of the stage. Above all, Murray fails to exploit the dramatic possibilities of the boy's climactic suicide. In some productions, the boy terrorizes the cast and family with his pistol while shrinking like a crazed beast from his sister's murder; Murray hides him behind a set and assumes a loud band will serve as well. The effect is slightly startling, to be sure, but grotesque rather than coldly shocking, as Pirandello must have intended.

Fortunately, by the end, the playwright triumphs over the production. The Director tries to leave after rehearsal is over, but the six characters suddenly appear and beckon him to finish their play. Just as suddenly, they disappear, and a lone spotlight shines on him. He looks into the darkness, uncertain himself of what he has seen. He retreats from his uncertainty, leaving the audience to stare silently into that same bewildering darkness--but only for a moment.