47 pages • 1 hour read
Six Characters in Search of an Author
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Act 2Act Summaries & Analyses
Act 2 Summary
The play resumes with the bell that summons the acting company back to the space. The Step-Daughter cries out about no longer participating in creating the new play as she runs onstage with the Child. The Boy slowly enters behind them.
The Step-Daughter, pretending that the Child is speaking with her, worries that the Child is frightened and explains what a stage is to her. She tries to soothe the Child while also mourning her, as the Step-Daughter knows the tragic death that awaits the Child. In the drama, the fountain the Child drowns in is a cheaply constructed set piece, but for the Child, it is a real place.
The Step-Daughter notices that the Boy has a revolver and asks where he got it from. The Boy does not respond, and the Step-Daughter chides him for killing himself instead of the Father and the Son.
The Father and the Manager come on stage to take the Step-Daughter back to the office. At the same time, the Son and the Mother come back onstage.
The Mother questions why God wants her shame to be seen by others. The Son criticizes the Father for thinking these events have meaning. He believes that all the characters’ lives are linked to the shame of the Father and the Mother. The Mother hides her face.
The Father, the Step-Daughter, the Manager, and the other technicians come back on stage to set the stage for the brothel scene. The Step-Daughter insists on factual accuracy in the furniture, while the Manager says it doesn’t matter. The Manager arranges the Technicians as an audience and hands out an outline of the scene. He asks the Prompter to write the scene down in shorthand. The Manager also asks the actors to be a part of the audience and wait for parts after the run through.
When the Father hears that the actors will be taking the roles, he is confused because the characters are the characters. The Manager explains that the characters don’t act but the actors do. The father doesn’t understand because the actors aren’t the characters. He wonders why the Manager wants the actors to pretend when he has the real characters alive in front of him.
The Manager laughs at the Father’s belief that he can act and assigns parts to the actors. When he assigns the part of the Mother to the Second Lady Lead, he asks what they should call the Mother. The Father gives her real name, Amalia, but the Manager says they don’t want her real name. The Father is confused and finds the whole idea of a different name false. The Manager acquiesces on the name and continues to pass out parts.
The Step-Daughter laughs when the Leading Lady is assigned to play her. This offends the Leading Lady. The Step-Daughter explains how she cannot see herself in the Leading Lady. The Father agrees, asking the Manager to consider their personalities and souls. The Manager defends his company by praising their acting abilities with much more ambitious plays. The Father comments on the differences in appearances, but the Manager waves this away as being able to be solved with makeup. The actors will bring their voices and gestures to life. The Father is still confused why the living characters are being acted by someone else. He finds this inauthentic.
The Manager asks the Step-Daughter what she thinks of the set, and she says she does not recognize it. The Manager insists they could not possibly build an exact replica of Madam Pace’s shop but have rather made a broadly similar set.
The Manager tries to begin rehearsing the scene, but both the Leading Lady and the Step-Daughter try to take the stage. The Manager asks the Step-Daughter to perform first. The Manager asks where Madame Pace is, but the Father says she is not with them. The Father gathers the actors’ hats and mantles. He arranges them on the stage to attract Madame Pace.
Madame Pace enters, to everyone’s amazement. The actors think the characters have tricked them. The Father responds by questioning their resistance to truth and by asking which actor will play her.
Without the others’ noticing, the Step-Daughter and Madame Pace have begun the scene. They have begun re-enacting it naturally, which is done so quietly that no one can hear what is being said. The Step-Daughter refuses to speak louder because she and Madame Pace do not want the Father to hear what is being said. The Manager explains the convention of theater that they need to speak loudly enough for the audience to hear but pretend that they are speaking so that only the other can hear.
They begin the scene. Madame Pace tells the Step-Daughter that the Mother’s work is poorly done and the Step-Daughter must work for her to be paid. When Madame Pace speaks, she mixes in Spanish jargon, which shocks the Manager and makes the actors laugh. The Manager feels this dialect will serve as a comedic break from the high-tension drama.
As the scene continues, the Mother reacts violently to Madame Pace and the Step-Daughter must calm her down. She says that the Mother cannot be in the room with Madame Pace, and the Father concurs. The Manager helps the Mother sit down and restarts the scene, but Madame Pace refuses to continue with the Mother present and exits.
The Step-Daughter orchestrates the transition to the Father’s entrance and gives him acting direction. The Manager interjects to say that he is the director, not her. The Father enters and the scene begins. The Step-Daughter is disgusted, and the Father asks if this is her first time or not. She answers no while the Father tries to look at her under her hat. He wants to take her hat off, but the Step-Daughter does it herself. Watching the scene, the Mother is distressed and horrified. She hides her face and cries.
The Father wants a nicer hat for the Step-Daughter and goes to get one from the rack. L’Ingenue protests that he is using the actors’ hats. The Manager tells her to stop interrupting the scene. The Step-Daughter refuses to wear the hat because she is in mourning. After the Step-Daughter speaks of forgetting her mourning dress, the Manager tells the Prompter to not write down that line and for the actors to continue as they planned.
The actors prepare and dress for the scene, and the Step-Daughter worries that the Leading Lady is not wearing black. The Leading Lady says she will wear black for the actual show. The Manager has the actors begin the scene.
The actors’ interpretation of the scene is very different from the characters’. The Father and the Step-Daughter find it difficult to recognize themselves in the performances. The Manager directs the actors and gives them notes to adjust their performances. Throughout their work, the Step-Daughter repeatedly laughs, which embarrasses and angers the Leading Lady and Leading Man. The Manager tells her she has no manners. The Father tries to defend her by saying it is strange to watch for them because the actors are not the characters. Frustrated, the Manager plans to continue rehearsals of that scene when the characters are gone.
The Manager, when trying to organize the dialogue for the scene, tells the Father to ask why the Step-Daughter in mourning. The Step-Daughter interrupts to correct the Manager and says that the Father instead made a crude sexual comment when she referenced her mourning clothes.
Despite the Step-Daughter’s insistence that it is the truth, the Manager exclaims it will cause a riot regardless of how truthful it is. The Manager rejects the Step-Daughter’s truth and reimagines the scene, which the Step-Daughter finds disgustingly over sentimental. The Manager explains how they cannot put such a scene onstage. The Step-Daughter feels that the Manager is conspiring and siding with the Father. The Manager is annoyed and explains how no one character should overwhelm the others. He must include only what is necessary and what can be acted onstage.
When the Manager points out that the Step-Daughter had more customers than the Father, the Step-Daughter reminds him that all the men are the Father and her Father represents all the men. She blames his rejection of the Mother for all her own faults. The Manager asks the Step-Daughter to watch the Father’s version, but she uses the Manager’s idea of being actable against him. When she reminds the Manager that the Father watched her as a child, the Mother begins crying.
When the Mother quiets down, the Step-Daughter asks whether the Manager wants the audience to see the truth in their drama. The Manager agrees, so the Step-Daughter asks to make the Mother leave. The Mother begs to stay. The Manager is confused, as the events already happened. The Mother describes how the events are happening now and all the time. This continuous immediacy leads to great pain for herself and her two youngest children. The Boy and the Child do not exist anymore and the Step-Daughter has run away. Seeing her again causes the Mother pain. The Father describes this as “the eternal moment” (39).
When the Father suggests that the Manager does not want to stage the scene, the Manager balks, saying the scene will be the center of the first act. The Step-Daughter says that if she must be staged fully dressed, then she must at least have her arm bare. Right before the Mother interrupts, the Step-Daughter saw a vein on her arm that carried great meaning for her.
After the Mother interrupts the scene, the Manager says the curtain will fall then. The Technicians misunderstand and drop the curtain onto the stage behind the Manager and the Father. The Manager and the Father go behind the curtain with the other characters and actors. A second break in the play occurs between the de facto second and third act.
Act 2 Analysis
While the Manager and the Father are working to author the drama offstage, the Step-Daughter performs the impending events of the drama with the Child onstage. That dichotomy expresses the mixed nature, The (Un)reality of Theater that the play explores, and so do the Step-Daughter’s explanations of the theater to the Child: The characters “play at being serious,” she says, and “act a comedy now, dead serious” (21). The Child plays “a wretched part” in “a horrid comedy” (21). While the performance will not be real for the actors playing, the action is “not quite such a joke” for the Child, for whom it is very “real” (21, 22). This foreshadows the Child’s death at the end of the play.
The Step-Daughter’s authoring of the ending culminates in her expression to alter the plot. When she sees the Boy with the revolver, she exclaims that “instead of killing [her]self,” she would “have shot” the Father and the Son (22). Despite her despair at the tragedy that happens, the Step-Daughter does not act to change the events when they start unfolding.
The Step-Daughter’s fixation on the appearance of Madame Pace’s place reflects her obsession with appearances. It is also an extension of her desire to accurately represent the physical qualities of her perspective. The color of the couch, whether it be green or yellow, does not change the events of the scene. But for the Step-Daughter, accuracy in the details leads to truth.
The Father shows his lack of knowledge about theatrical conventions. He does not know what the Manager means by a rehearsal, that actors act, and so on. In this regard, the Manager contrasts sharply with the Father. As a result, the two approach storytelling and playmaking differently.
The Step-Daughter and the Manager also have contrasting approaches to theater. The Step-Daughter wants to recreate the shop exactly. The Manager states that they cannot “construct that shop of Madame Pace piece by piece” (27). His storytelling is bound by theatrical conventions. The Step-Daughter is not; she wants to put her experience on display. She doesn’t “recognize the scene” (27), which means she has not successfully put her story on display. The Manager’s constant deferral to the Father when setting the scene further suggests that her story may not be the one they are telling.
The summoning of Madame Pace mimics the magic of theater where a character is created onstage. The use of the actors’ clothing further blurs the lines between theater and reality, fiction and fact. The actors’ clothing enters the fictional drama’s world, and the idea of a character enters the actors’ physical space.
The Step-Daughter and Madame Pace begin their scene as if it were real life. They do not wait for an audience and instead converse between themselves before the Father has finished. Because they are not stage whispering, their speech is “unintelligible” (29). When asked to speak louder, they refuse because their lines “aren’t matters which can be shouted” (29). The Manager tries to explain that the Step-Daughter needs to “pretend to be alone in a room at the back of a shop where no one can hear” (30). The Step-Daughter’s failure to follow theater conventions reflects her purpose in performing the drama as accurately as possible.
Madame Pace’s mixing of languages underscores the different understandings of reality and theater between the characters and the Manager. For the Manager, it is “a little comic relief” into the larger family drama (31). But for the Mother and the Step-Daughter, it is reality. The Mother is enraged at Madame Pace’s appearance, and the Step-Daughter cowers around her. These reactions illustrate the different stakes for those involved.
The Step-Daughter and the Manager disagree about who can control the creation of the brothel scene. When the Step-Daughter tries to orchestrate the Father’s entrance and give him acting direction, the Manager interjects. He asserts his role as the Manager and takes control. His authority in the rehearsal space allows him to demand the ability to shape this scene.
The Mother’s reaction to the scene reflects how she is constantly reliving the moments of the drama. She experiences “sorrow, indignation, anxiety, and horror” (33). These feelings come out as sobs. Even though she is not actively participating in staging the scene, she still experiences it as if it were real.
The difference between the actors’ interpretation and the characters’ experience reveals the impossibility of exactly replicating life onstage. The actors’ performance is not a “parody” or in any way indicated as being a bad performance as a piece of theater (34). The Step-Daughter even describes it as “natural enough” (34). The characters react poorly because it “has such a strange effect” (36). They “want to be [the characters], but they aren’t, all the same” (36). The differing goals in staging the drama inform their approaches to staging the scene.
The disagreements about authorship and truth inform their interactions when rehearsing the scene. The Manager tries to insert a cliché line about mourning into the drama, and the Step-Daughter protests that he made a sexual comment. The Manger refuses to use that line because of theatrical decorum, and he wants to create a stageable play. While the truth matters to the Step-Daughter because she wants the reality on display, the Manager wonders “[w]hat does that matter” for (37). The Manager is creating a piece of art, which speaks to larger truths, but the Step-Daughter wants to expose the truth of her lived experience.
The focus on different characters becomes another site for their debate. The Step-Daughter worries that she will not be able to act her part because the play has turned into the “complicated ‘cerebral drama’” of the Father (37). The Manager criticizes her for wanting her character to be “too prominent and overshadow all the others” (37). His approach is based on one fact of storytelling: The author must “set out just so much as is necessary for the stage, taking the other characters into consideration, and at the same time hint at the unrevealed interior life of each” (37). She wants to tell a personal story of an individual, while he attempts to create an ensemble dramatic play.
The miscue for the curtains humorously reflects the confusion between reality and performance. Their misinterpretation of the Manager’s statement mirrors the metatheatrical techniques used to blur the start and end of the show.
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