Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello (1921)

A theatre company is slogging through a dull rehearsal when six strangers appear at the back of the house and walk down the aisle, asking to be staged. They are not actors. They are a family, unfinished, abandoned by the writer who dreamed them up and then put down his pen, and they have come to act out the scene that made them: the afternoon a Father, in a house of ill repute, reached for a girl he failed to recognise as his own Stepdaughter. Luigi Pirandello's argument is quietly terrifying. A character is realer than the actor who plays them, he insists, because a character is locked forever in the single moment that defines them, while the actor goes home and becomes someone else by supper. The Manager tries to mount the story; the characters keep interrupting to say the performance is a well-meaning lie. By the end a shot has been fired, and no one, onstage or in the seats, can tell whether the death was real or only beautifully rehearsed.