Salon in "Henry IV"
The salon is decorated like the throne room of Henry IV, a Holy Roman Emperor during the Middle Ages. Act II of the play opens in another room located in the same villa, a room which connects to the salon, but which features much more modern décor. The salon turns out to be a heavily constructed fantasy which serves to feed the delusions of reality of just one person: the man who thinks he is Henry IV, dead now for several centuries. Thus the salon becomes a symbol any way in which fantasies are constructed as realities to serve the mental health of someone.
Mother
In an essay outlining the origin of his play Six Characters in Search of an Author, Pirandello explains the genesis and symbolic significance of the character of Mother from the play. She is, according to the author, a symbol of Nature personified in the figure of the mother.
Fantasy
The creative spark is symbolized for Pirandello in the figure of a maidservant who puts on a cap with bells as a prelude to the introduction of a fresh new creative idea. Pirandello has named this muse Fantasy.
Signora Ponza
Signora Ponza, the enigmatic figure at the center of the mystery of Right You Are (If You Think Are), is either Signor Ponza’s second wife or his first—the daughter of Signora Frola. The known facts insist that she can be one or she can be the other, but it would be impossible for her to be both. That she has led a life in which she has successfully presented herself as being both situates her as a symbol of the fictions everybody tells themselves in order to make life emotionally tolerable.
The Theater
The theater which is the setting for Each in His Own Way becomes a place where the illusion of the reality on the stage and the reality of the illusion being enjoyed by the audience become inseparable. The play degenerates into a free-for-all involving a scandalous interruption by a real life figure whom one of the characters is allegedly based upon. Further complicating things is a near-riot which opens after the second act curtain falls in which the actors drop their facades and appear as themselves while ticket takers and the stage manage appear to call for help and try to calm the situation down. In this commingling of reality and fiction, the theater becomes a symbolic stand-in for life outside the theater where people act upon illusion that they have accepted as reality and vice versa.
