Character Analysis: Secondary Theatre Level 1

Session Design by and Reanna Cook

LEARNING OBJECTIVES
Content Standards
 Theatre Level 1 Perform 1:
o Interpret the character, setting, and essential events in a story or script that make
up the dramatic structure in a drama/theatre work.

Essential Questions
 What makes a character interesting? How can we write multidimensional characters that
enhance our plays?
 How can we write exposition that occurs naturally within the dialogue and action of our
plays?
 Why is it important that actors, directors, playwrights, and audience members understand
a character’s motivation?

Enduring Understandings
 Students will understand that a character’s action and speech are motivated by their
objective.
 Students will understand that exposition and motivation are not always explicitly stated
within a theatre text.

Key Knowledges
 Students will know that objective is defined as “a character’s pursuit of a specific goal
throughout a scene”.
 Students will know that motivation is defined as “what drives a character to say what he
says, and to do what he does”.
Skills
 Students will be able to infer information about a character, including their objective, and
backstory from the text.
 Students will be able to logically connect the series of actions or speech a character
engages in using their objective as justification.

ASSESSMENT
 Students will complete the Character Quotes Worksheet (attached) for each of the six
characters in search of an author in order to demonstrate that they can infer information
about a character, including their objective, and backstory from the text.
  Students will complete a 1-2-page written response to the follow questions, correctly
using the terms objective, and motivation at least once in their response in order to
demonstrate that they can logically connect the series of actions or speech a character
engages in using their objective as justification, and to interpret the character in a
drama/theatre work.
o What do each of the six characters want? How does that effect their behavior
throughout the play?
o Choose one of the six characters. If you were going to act that character in the
play, how would knowing what they want help you?
o Does Pirandello write interesting characters? Why or why not?

MATERIALS NEEDED
Teacher Materials
 White board or large piece of butcher paper
 Writing instrument

Student Materials
 One in Six Characters Quote List (attached)
 Character Quote Worksheet (attached)

 Pirandello, Luigi. Three Plays: Six Characters in Search of an Author ; Henry IV and
Right You Are! (If You Think so). Kessinger Publishing, 2005.
(https://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/lp/six.htm)

 Lined paper

 Writing utensil

LEARNING PLAN
Framing / Hook
1. Keep the Marker Moving
a. Students enter and sit at their desks.
b. Ask the students the following questions in order to activate their interests and
prior knowledge, writing their answers on the board. The students do not need to
raise their hands, and can shout out their ideas. The goal of this activity is for the
marker to never stop moving, except between questions.
i. What makes a character in a play, book, movie, TV show, or video game
interesting?
ii. Who are some interesting characters?
iii. What do these characters want?
 iv. How do we know what they want?
Process
1. One in Six Characters
a. Divide the students into four groups by counting off. Have the groups move to the
same working area.
b. Tell the students they will be given a list of quotes from a character in a play.
Then, they will work together to fill out a graphic organizer in which they will
make educated inferences, using evidence from the text, about a character’s
objective, motivation, and backstory.
i. Define objective as “a character’s pursuit of a specific goal throughout a
scene”.
ii. Define motivation as “what drives a character to say what he says, and to
do what he does”.
c. Hand out the One in Six Characters Quote list, giving one character to each group.
Hand out the Character Quotes Worksheet.
d. Once the worksheets are completed, the groups should take turns sharing their
findings. After each group has shared, ask them the following questions:
i. Based on the characters your classmates presented about, what do you
think this play is about?
ii. What do you think, if any, the relationships between these characters are?
2. Reading Six Characters in Search of an Author
a. Hand out a copy of the play to each student, along with 6 additional copies of the
Character Quotes worksheet.
b. Over the next 2 class periods, students will read the play round robin style. As
they read, they will fill out the Character Quotes worksheets, one for each of the
six characters.
i. Throughout the reading, the teacher should complete informal
comprehension checks by pausing the students and asking questions like
“What did that mean?” or “how could we state that in simple terms?”. This
is essentially allowing students to vocally summarize or clarify more
difficult sections in the text. The teacher should also pause the reading for
questions.

Reflection
3. Response Paper
i. Give students the following prompts. You can write them on the board or
display them on the computer and student can copy them down in their
notebooks, or you can hand out an assignment description sheet.
ii. Let them know that the next class will be dedicated to writing their
responses in the computer lab.
 One in Six Characters Quote List 1

“Is it my fault if he has grown up like this? I sent him to a wet nurse in the country, a peasant, as
she did not seem to me strong enough, though she is of humble origin. That was, anyway, the
reason I married her. Unpleasant all this may be, but how can it be helped? My mistake possibly,
but there we are! All my life I have had these confounded aspirations towards a certain moral
sanity.”

“As I say, sir, that which is a game of art for you is our sole reality. “

“That's not true. I meant to do good to them -- and to myself, I confess, at the same time. Things
had come to the point that I could not say a word to either of them without their making a mute
appeal, one to the other, with their eyes. I could see them silently asking each other how I was to
be kept in countenance, how I was to be kept quiet. And this, believe me, was just about enough
of itself to keep me in a constant rage, to exasperate me beyond measure. “
 One in Six Characters Quote List 2
“Yes, in the sun, in the sun! That is my only pleasure: to see her happy and careless in the garden
after the misery and squalor of the horrible room where we all four slept together. And I had to
sleep with her -- I, do you understand? -- with my vile contaminated body next to hers; with her
folding me fast in her loving little arms. In the garden, whenever she spied me, she would run to
take me by the hand. She didn't care for the big flowers, only the little ones; and she loved to
show me them and pet me.”

“You! you! I owe my life on the streets to you. Did you or did you not deny us, with your
behaviour, I won't say the intimacy of home, but even that mere hospitality which makes guests
feel at their ease? We were intruders who had come to disturb the kingdom of your legitimacy.”
 One in Six Characters Quote List 3

“It's taking place now. It happens all the time. My torment isn't a pretended one. I live and feel
every minute of my torture. Those two children there -- have you heard them speak? They can't
speak any more. They cling to me to keep up my torment actual and vivid for me. But for
themselves, they do not exist, they aren't any more.”

“I beg you, sir, to prevent this man from carrying out his plan which is loathsome to me.”

“He forced me to it, and I call God to witness it. Ask him if it isn't true. Let him speak. You are
not in a position to know anything about it.”

“And isn't my punishment the worst of all? [Then seeing from the SON's manner that he will not
bother himself about her.] My God! Why are you so cruel? Isn't it enough for one person to
support all this torment? Must you then insist on others seeing it also?”
 One in Six Characters Quote List 4

“And they want to put it on the stage! If there was at least a reason for it! He thinks he has got at
the meaning of it all. Just as if each one of us in every circumstance of life couldn't find his own
explanation of it! [Pauses.] He complains he was discovered in a place where he ought not to
have been seen, in a moment of his life which ought to have remained hidden and kept out of the
reach of that convention which he has to maintain for other people. And what about my case?
Haven't I had to reveal what no son ought ever to reveal.”

“It's easy for them to put me always in the wrong. But imagine, gentlemen, the position of a son,
whose fate it is to see arrive one day at his home a young woman of impudent bearing, a young
woman who inquires for his father, with whom who knows what business she has. This young
man has then to witness her return bolder than ever, accompanied by that child there. He is
obliged to watch her treat his father in an equivocal and confidential manner. She asks money of
him in a way that lets one suppose he must give it her, must, do you understand, because he has
every obligation to do so.”
 Character Quotes Worksheet
Student Name: Character Name:

Character Information
In this section, write what you know about the character. Include demographic information like
their age, race, gender, and social status, but also include information about their relationships,
attitudes, emotions, desires, and experiences.
Evidence Information

In this section, write what might be true about the character based on inferences about the
character. This section should be done in pencil, because new information is always presenting
itself in the text, and it might change your interpretation of the events! The item is the section of
text that is making you think that something might be the case, the inference is what you think
might have happened, or what might be true.
Item Inference
Descriptors or Impressions
What are 10 words that you would use to describe this character, or that this character makes you
think of?
1. 6.

2. 7.

3. 8.

4. 9.

5. 10.

What is this character’s objective?

 Justification
Comprehension Strategy: Students will use evidence from the text to make inferences,
“acknowledging explicitly stated messages… [and] discerning implicit meanings” (Buehl, 5),
and they will use these inferences to determine information about a character, including their
backstory, and objective.
Text: Pirandello, Luigi. Three Plays: Six Characters in Search of an Author ; Henry IV and
Right You Are! (If You Think so). Kessinger Publishing, 2005.
The text is also available here: (https://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/lp/six.htm)
Frontloading: As a frontloading activity, students will activate their interests and prior
knowledge by participating in a class discussion about interesting characters. They will be asked
to brainstorm what makes the characters interesting, and how we come to know what a
character’s objective is. This gives the students an “opportunity to reflect on their own thinking”
(Key Principles of Comprehension, September 14).
Before Reading: Before they engage with the full text, the students will be grouped, and given a
list of quotes, in addition to a graphic organizer in which they will list things they know
definitively about the character from the quotes, things they can infer, and their impressions.
This activity “assist[s] students in identifying and analyzing implicit meanings in a text
enabl[ing] them to merge clues…with their prior knowledge to construct a more complete
understanding” of a character, in addition to the text as a whole. The students will then
summarize and share their findings with the class. Then, as a class, the students brainstorm what
they think the play is about. The act of predicting helps to solidify the information in which the
inferences were based (Buehl, 6).
During Reading: While the students engage with the text, they will continue to fill out graphic
organizers of the same kind, updating their facts inferences as new information is presented. The
students use their graphic organizers to ultimately determine each character’s objective.
Throughout the reading, the facilitator should do informal checks, defining complex words, or by
asking students to synthesize and simplify more complex sections of text. However, the teacher
should not make these informal checks into drawn out analyses, as we can “overstrategize a text.
Some students just [want] to move on with the reading” (Styslinger, 59).
After Reading: In order to assess comprehension, the students will be asked to complete a 1-2-
page written response about the characters in the play. The will be asked how character analysis
could help them if they were an actor playing the part of one of the characters. This question
allows the students to reexamine the activity through a disciplinary lens, which will inevitably
aid in disciplinary literacy (Buehl, 30).
Buehl, Doug. Classroom Strategies for Interactive Learning. Stenhouse Publishers, 2020.

Porter, Christina. “Words, Words, Words: Reading Shakespeare with English Language
Learners.” The English Journal, vol. 99, no. 1, Sept. 2009, pp. 44–49.

Styslinger, Mary E., et al. “What Matters: Meeting Content Goals through Teaching Cognitive
Reading Strategies with Canonical Texts.” The English Journal, vol. 103, no. 4, Mar. 2014,
pp. 53–61.