There are many ties between real life and theater thus relating the two so close that sometimes it is hard to separate the two and at other times it is easy to separate them. Theater is like real life in that there is an audience of people always watching what each other are doing, there are actors who might not know they are actors but someone is watching them, there is an unknown outcome and it is immediate. It is unlike real life in that the participants do not know they are participants, things do not happen at a particular time, and life is real and not rehearsed. This is all very evident in Six Characters in Search of an Author because in many different instances, the father, in particular, makes reference to how their situation is real because they are obviously standing there before the actors, life can be an illusion because what happens today is only a memory tomorrow, and this very situation in which they will portray to the actors and producer is more real then anything they can hold real. .
The six characters, on one side of the coin, have certain things about them that are predetermined. These are things like what they look like and how they will react to any possible situation. This allows for sound reality because the characters are there in the theater with the actors wanting to tell them about their lives.
The father is a very important character in this play. He stands out as the backbone of getting the situation underway when they first come into the theatre looking for an author. "You know very well as a man of the theatre, that life is full of all sorts of odd things which have no need at all to pretend to be real because they are actually true. but you must know better then anyone that Nature uses human imagination to lift her work to even higher levels. I want to try and show you that one can be thrust into life in many ways. It might even be as characters in a play.