Luigi Pirandello’s play, Six Characters in Search of an Author, is first performed in 1921 at the Teatro Valle in Rome, to a very mixed reception, with shouts from the audience of “Manicomio!” (“Madhouse!”). It’s a play about six characters from a play who appear at a rehearsal after having been abandoned by their author. The Director thinks they are crazy, but he begins to listen to them and even have his actors act out their story because they have such a compelling drama to tell. I read the play many years ago in a modern theater class I took in college, but I have never seen it on stage. Pirandello himself wrote about this play within a play within his mind and yet on stage:

“Why not,” thought I, “represent this unique situation —an author refusing to accept certain characters born of his imagination, while the characters themselves obstinately refuse to be shut out from the world of art, once they have received this gift of life? These characters are already completely detached from me, and living their own lives; they speak and move; and so, in the struggle to live that they have persistently maintained against me they have become dramatic characters, characters who can move and speak of their own initiative. They already see themselves in that light; they have learnt to defend themselves against me; they will learn how to defend themselves against others. So why not let them go where the characters of a play usually go to attain full and complete life—on a stage? Let’s see what will happen then!”

French writer Anatole France won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921 “in recognition of his brilliant literary achievements, characterized as they are by a nobility of style, a profound human sympathy, grace, and a true Gallic temperament.”

Booth Tarkington’s novel Alice Adams was published in 1921 and won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1922.

The Boston Post won the Pulitzer Prize in Journalism for “its exposure of the operations of Charles Ponzi by a series of articles which finally led to his arrest.” And newspapers have been exposing Ponzi schemes ever since–usually after most of the financial damage is done. What Ponzi proved is that you can fool a lot of people for long enough to take in a lot of money, but you had better have an escape plan. Eventually, any scheme in which there is no actual valued product or labor involved will fall apart. Or as Dave Ramsey says, “Something that sounds too good to be true IS too good to be true! It’s very difficult to be conned if you’re not greedy.”

Playing mind games in a play on stage (Pirandello) can be fun, especially since you know it’s fiction. Letting somebody play games with your money isn’t fun, no matter what he promises you.