Reality is scarce these days. Everywhere you look, there’s a million-dollar heiress with a milking stool.

But the Theatre and Interpretation Center’s rendition of Luigi Pirandello’s “Six Characters in Search of an Author” asks audiences to consider that when television isn’t concerned with reality, theater is. The show is a cerebral play-within-a-play about the clash between drama and real life.

“Anyone who’s ever thought about what is real and not real can grab hold of something in this play,” says Communication senior Jay Kiecolt-Wahl, who plays the father of a family of six characters looking for a stage.

In the play, a director and his cast are about to stage the latest Pirandello play when the family barges onto the set. These discarded characters need an author to survive, and they have chosen the play’s director to live through.

“I’m just dying, I tell you, to live this scene,” explains the family’s stepdaughter, played by Communication senior Katie deBuys.

“It’s all about illusion versus reality and how important truth is in theater,” says Kyle Cobb, a Communication junior who plays the assistant stage manager.

“Six Characters” is based on the premise that characters exist in their own worlds, independent of the people who imagine them into existence. The family of characters argues that their own reality is constant and true while the world of the director and his crew changes constantly.

The idea of an actor playing an actor playing a character might make anybody’s head spin.

“It makes you rethink what our job as actors is — to entertain, to tell a story or to be journalists and use the facts to tell the best story we can,” says Cobb.

As fictional characters battle the director, actors and crew, real-life playwright Pirandello gives a voice to the infinite number of frustrated characters ruined by irresponsible actors.The cold, rational father (Kiecolt-Wahl) pushes his family into poverty and then drags them back to stage their grievances and watch their lives unravel.

If you’re searching for reality outside of reality television, the cast and crew of “Six Characters” are here for you. But please, this time, leave your big fat obnoxious fiance at home.

‘Six Characters in Search of an Author’

Where: Barber Theater, TI Center

When: Friday, Saturday and Feb. 19-21 at 7:30 p.m., Sunday and Feb. 22 at 2 p.m.

Medill junior Dan Eder is a writer for PLAY. He can be reached at [email protected].