The resolution of this is open to whatever the audience member wants to make up about the characters, as there is no final say as to what the final fate of the Helmer family will be. Yet, to accomplish this distance from the audience and thus allowing them to make the final judgment in the story the actors must distance themselves from the auditorium. This is accomplished by creating an invisible "fourth wall" as "realism often treats the boundary of the proscenium as an invisible fourth wall dividing the environment onstage from the audience. The fourth wall prevents the actors from playing to the audience and so from destroying the unity of illusion on stage" .
(W.B Worthen 582). .
Thus, the objective of a Realist play is that of a storybook: to watch but never get involved. Yet it must stay untheatrical, or at least not looked "staged" and it must stay true to the "real world" that we, as an audience can define as the world that one lives in everyday to have the appeal of our universal sympathy and understanding (W.B Worthen 582). .
Metatheater is the exact opposite of Realist Theater. As seen in Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author the characters break through this "wall" as seen in Realist plays. While Ibsen utilizes the fourth wall as a dependency for his play to gain an ending through observation and judgment, Pirandello crashes through the wall into the audience as if indicating they are part of the show itself and any conclusions that the audience will decide on will also be pertaining to themselves, or as W.B. Worthen put it: "the confrontation between the Characters and Actors explores the nature of theatrical representation itself" (701). Metatheater also likely to have a play within a play usually and there is much role-playing, as seen in Six Characters when the Actors try to role-play their idea of the Characters lives. As well, the roles within the play are somewhat imprisoning, as they are well defined and can never shake that identity that society has given them or they for themselves (W.
