Seret Scott and Julian Robertson in Six Characters. Photo: Marc J. Franklin

As a middle-aged white theater critic (who coincidentally wrote an undergraduate thesis about metaphysics and metadrama in a group of works that included the Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, but we’ll get to that), I am inevitably part of the problem for Phillip Howze’s Six Figures, part of the ecosystem it wants to burn to the ground. Which makes it a hard thing to write about: A critic’s work is always “take it or leave it” to not just other members of the audience, potential and actual, but also to the artists. That’s rarely more true than here: a play of bristling, cutting, sharply pointed ideas; a play that’s interrogating form as much as inhabiting it; a play whose pieces don’t all come together for me, but I don’t know how much it matters that I think so. To appeal to any notion of my authority would be to disregard entirely the piece’s negotiation-without-resolution of a minefield of institutional power structures, from the slavery in which American history is rooted to the minstrelsy all-too-often demanded of Black artists/characters/people by white audiences, from the lazy authoritarianism of the rehearsal room to the dangerous and seductive fascism of Mussolini.

The piece draws most of its characters, all Black and identified in program and script by numbers, directly from the building in which we all sit together: the mega-institution that is Lincoln Center Theater. Each plays a handful of related narrative roles at different points as well; Howze is simultaneously giving us character “pegs” to hang the action on and questioning whether our theater institutions are even built to represent Black characters. Which is where, I think, the Pirandello comes in. (Once you call the play Six Characters, begin with a snatch of Italian opera, and throw in Mussolini, you kind of have to grapple with Pirandello, though Six Characters in Search narrowly predates Mussolini’s reign.) Pirandello’s six fugitive characters are bound to their tragic story, yet can’t find the author, director, and actors who will represent it in a way they recognize, who won’t use facile conventions as shortcuts. Pirandello questions how theater can or should present mimetic and/or emotional truths, but Howze cuts even deeper into the premise. It’s not just the artifice of theater that these characters challenge, it’s the power structures built into those conventions. 

Which is why the characters here are so mutable, so provisional. Character 1 (Julian Robertson) sometimes is a director; Character 2 (Claudia Logan) an audience member; Character 3 (Seret Scott) a custodian; Character 4 (Will Cobbs) a security guard (though this too gets a little complicated later); Character 5 (CG) a kid on a school tour–and its setting likewise is the stage on which is is performed, filled with props and scenic pieces pulled from Lincoln Center’s other shows. It’s a show that argues with, challenges, accuses, allies with, and jokes with its audience, in different proportions and in different moments, and differently depending on who you are and where you’re coming from. And one of those vectors crosses straight through the person of Character 6, an escaped slave (Seven F.B. Duncombe) who shipped herself in a packing crate straight from nineteenth-century bondage into 2024. She’s a arrow shot into the center of the piece, a core of steel that foregrounds the deepest stakes for the issues under discussion here.

The piece also pushes you to examine the expectations and premises you bring into the room with it–which, to lay mine on the table, include a deep love for the backstage play and all the dizzying possibilities of metadrama and metatheatre alongside an almost paralyzing level of anxiety about audience participation. Howze and director Dustin Wills claim both those corners almost at once; the show opens with one character extinguishing a ghost light and turning on the work lights onstage, followed by another making her entrance from the audience with an eagerness to embrace a “participation” that is in itself a metatheatrical conceit. She is not an actual audience member; we, the audience at the Claire Tow, are not (to my great relief) actually being invited to participate. (The script indicates that the opportunity to participate will be offered to audience members, who will be given a wristband like what we see on Character 2 throughout; I was not offered one, but another friend who attended the same night was.) One could of course argue that, by virtue of the play taking place in essentially real time and real space, we are still participating–Character 2 is just the one brave enough to accept the offer. (One of the cleverest moments is a scene in Act 2 set in a replica of the corridor just outside the theater, hung with the instantly recognizable LCT posters, and purporting to take place during the intermission we’ve just completed.) It’s a play that’s going to force you to be exactingly present to what’s happening in the room, but also to engage with a deep catalog of references: Snippets of Italian opera and Italian dialogue–and the full-fledged Italian monologue of a Mussolini “impersonation” delivered by the Black American director/Character 1. Aristotle’s Politics and Poetics. William Wells Brown’s The Escape, the first published play by an African American writer. And of course the aforementioned Six Characters in Search of an Author. 

Tonally, it’s a wild ride: Act 1 starts with an almost “who’s on first” level of comedy, quickly draws blood (literally), spirals into polemic, briefly forswears language altogether, shifts through a beautiful moment of utter simplicity, where the actors perform in a sort of “talent show,” displaying an act of virtuosity embedded in their bodies: step dancing, drumming, spinning a basketball–only to break back into fascism with that full-on Mussolini speech. Act 2, after the crescendo of Act 1, swerves in yet another direction: a series of tight, emotionally fraught two-person scenes: between two ex-lovers (Characters 2 and 4), trying to figure out whether to break free of this fictional world; between Character 6, the former-slave-turned-philosopher, and Character 5, the hookey-playing hater of reading; and finally between Characters 1 and 3, the director and a mother figure. After a call to emancipate this work of art, I’m not sure if we can so easily go back to filling the stage with “characters,” and the act sits uneasily poised between the impulse to just let us sit with Black people talking quietly and the impulse to keep burning shit down. Like the set (also designed by Wills) built of bare-stage details–the ghost light, the giant dust mop, the coffee mug left on the fly rail–and “old shit” from former LCT shows (the script identifies many of them specifically), the play isn’t always ready to embrace as much discomfort as its manifesto elements might dictate. (I did find myself thinking during the second act that the truly radical approach would be to bring the audience back in, open the curtain to show–as it does–the hallway we just left, and then leave us sitting staring at the empty stage/hallway, thoroughly eating itself and never bringing the actors back at all.) 

The script calls out the hypocrisy of requiring a Black director to be the associate or assistant with the white guy as the real figure of authority, but its actual white director, Dustin Wills, rises to the challenge of holding the disparate emotional registers, the labile character shifts, and the plotless mass of action together into some sort of whole. Much of Act 1 teeters on the edge of uncontrollable hysteria, Act 2 on the edge of uncontrollable sadness, and yet there’s a gentleness to the whole, a palpable nature to the feeling of community. There’s an overall simplicity to the performances, particularly those of Scott and Duncombe, who never go as broad as some of the others. Both seem to find a core of compassion in what they’re doing; Duncombe also performs with an uprightness of both posture and a diction that keep her always just a little distinct from the ensemble, on a journey of her own. 

Six Characters demands a lot of the audience, not least in drawing a line straight from Aristotle to white nationalism–or the way it implicitly aligns a Black director participating in our system with Mussolini. It will ask us to reckon with our complicity in “the most logical deduction, that white nationalism props up the arts”–but then after that, it’s also going to ask us to sit back down and engage with it like a much more traditional sort of play. I’m not sure it succeeds in corralling those warring impulses into peaceable coexistence, but then again I’m also not sure it places much value on peaceable coexistence in the first place.