Pirandello's Manager nonchalantly defers his authority to a stage direction in the printed text, in order to stop the Leading Man's complaints. Moments later, in a classic Pirandellian twist, the Manager is persuaded to act as" author" of the Characters' drama. Of course, we as audience know that the Characters, as well as the Manager, have entered the scene fully authored by the playwright, and we are enchanted with an apparent play upon this rather simple irony made possible by our vantage point as spectators. But Pirandellian dramaturgy defies such neat ontological correspondences and conflicts, and points of view are anything but stable once we have entered a Pirandello labyrinth. Within the fictive world of the play, the Manager struggles with trying to" author" characters who arrive with their histories intact, while in the world of natural discourse, the creators of the mise en scene have undergone a parallel struggle for authorship of their production. 2 The audience, left to negotiate all these layers of authorial discourse, may find it difficult to pull them apart for analysis; this phenomenon, no doubt, is part of Pirandello's plan for testing ontological boundaries: