some vision of reality in dramatic form. Pirandello's work makes this self-reflective structure the basic substance of the play and uses it to raise questions as to how we can tell when reality ends and illusion begins, or the other way round. The selfhood of his characters is less an issue given that they are types and are also actors assuming selves not their own.
Pirandello mixes reality and illusion from the first as he presents what is supposed to be a producer and cast rehearsing the second act of Pirandello's own play Rules of the Game. What they are rehearsing, then, is a real play, and such rehearsals most certainly would have taken place regarding this play at some time in the past. Pirandello fictionalizes reality and thus creates a "real" moment on the stage that the audience is supposed to be allowed to be privy to, when in comes another group of people who claim to be real people looking for an author to tell their story and so dramatize reality. Yet these people are not real any more than those rehearsing the play are really rehearsing the old play rather than performing in the second play. Such descriptions can become quite complex, but at heart they all mean that no one in this play can be seen as either all real or all fictional, just as none of the events can be seen as all real or all fictional, even in the "reality" of the play.
Even in that context, are these people real or actors? The producer likes their story and wants it retold with actors playing the "real" people who just acted that story out for him. This makes them real people pretending to be actors, while the actors who t
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