When Six Characters in Search of an Author was first performed in Italy in 1921, the audience was so perplexed, angry, and provoked that a riot erupted. The provocative nature of Six Characters is easy to forget today, but it was part of a European cultural movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that actively sought to provoke. Called the avant-garde, these writers and artists were designated with the French word for the “advance troops” of a military; they understood themselves to be engaged in an assault on bourgeois values and bourgeois habits of cultural consumption. Igor Stravinsky’s ballet, Rite of Spring, ended in a riot when it premiered in Paris in 1913, and Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, a painting that was considered both deliberately hideous and an immoral, tasteless depiction of nude sex workers, nearly provoked a riot when it was unveiled in 1916. Like these other works, Six Characters deliberately undermined “normal” expectation for an evening at the theater and deliberately included scandalous and shocking material—in this case, frank discussion of an incestuous encounter between the Father and the Step-Daughter.

Six Characters resembles avant-garde visual art in another, perhaps more important way.