Six Characters in Search of an Author

Abstract

A discussion about bricolage is presented in a one-act play, a qualitative comedy in the making. The play takes its initial shape from Pirandello’s “Six Characters in Search of an Author” but is transformed into a more academic, but occasionally comic, dialogue. The characters engage with a journal editor by weaving the ideas and often the words of academic writers into a script about bricolage as a qualitative research strategy. The characters, three of whom are Shakespearean in origin, also borrow or steal lines and bits of plot from other plays, especially “The Tempest.” The comedy ends with another comic offering, a bricolage about bricolage.