Tension is the heart of theater. Drama pulses in the push-pull between reality and illusion, perception and actuality, the interplay between what’s true and how artists interpret it. It drives Quantum Theatre’s stimulating, thoughtful and highly theatrical production of ‘Six Characters Looking for a Writer,’ which opened Friday night at a former Giant Eagle produce warehouse in the Strip District. Quantum Theatre is essential theater. Headed by producing director and founder Karla Boos, the company creates theater in nontraditional spaces that Boos deems suitably harmonious with the play. Employing a minimum of props, costumes and scenery, Quantum strips away distracting nonessentials to focus on the work presented. Thus, the current offering distills Luigi Pirandello’s 1921 ‘Six Characters in Search of an Author’ – often a ponderous three-act, two-and-a-half-hour drama – into a riveting, razor-sharp and rewarding 65-minute theatrical event. A troupe of actors rehearsing the second act of ‘The Rules of the Game’ are interrupted by a family of six seeking their help. Characters from an uncompleted play, their lives were left in limbo by the playwright who abandoned them. They need the actors and director to give their drama closure and release. When the company grudgingly agrees to enact their drama, the chasm between the characters’ reality and the actors’ interpretation and the difference between actuality and dramatic necessity cause frustration and contention. ‘Your artistry is a game by which you try to get the perfect illusion or reality … but the illusion you are trying to create is our only reality,’ complains The Father. ‘This is theater. Truth is allowed to a certain point,’ the director explains at another point. Quantum’s adaptation, directed by Robert Benedetti, sets itself not in a proscenium theater, but inside a thin chalk circle drawn on the warehouse’s concrete floor and almost completely encircled by the audience. Punctuating the circle at four regularly spaced intervals are tall towers of scaffolding that elevate large-screen video monitors. Benedetti, a three-time Emmy winner with an extensive background in film and television, has collaborated with Pittsburgh Filmmakers and video director Jeff Garton to enhance the production with live and recorded video sequences. Typically when video appears onstage, its hypnotic power distracts viewers from the live action it’s intended to support. Here it adds powerful levels of depth, offering simultaneous portrayals of the multiple realities presented. In one scene, the actors sit in the audience to watch the characters onstage re-enact an incident as its reality appears on the monitors. For the audience, it’s not unlike being presented with an image reflected in a series of mirrors. The collection of slight distortions reflects and informs our understanding more completely than any single scene could on its own. An almost uniformly first-rate cast of 13 brings urgency and immediacy to the drama. Among the more prominent on the acting company side are Sally Randa’s scrappy, assertive Lead Woman; Jeff Monahan as the beleaguered director; and Jim Cook as the laid-back and jocular Lead Man. Notable performances among the characters include Penelope Lindblom’s rightfully sorrowful Mother; Erik Fredricksen’s striking and impressive Father; and Mary Kate Schellhardt’s superbly forceful Stepdaughter, whose story is at the center of the drama. John O’Neill and Abigail Stubenbort portray tragic waifs with proper solemnity. To its credit, Quantum’s streamlined adaptation revitalizes Pirandello’s classic text into a vibrant work for 21st-century audiences. The Quantum Theatre’s production of ‘Six Characters Looking for a Writer’ continues through June 24. Performances: 8 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays. Tickets: $18. 35th and Railroad streets, Strip District. Details: (412) 394-3353.

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