Wrong Genre Savvy/Theatre

Examples of Wrong Genre Savvy characters in Theatre include:

• Rodrigo of Othello fits this on two levels. He thinks he's the rake protagonist who seduces the pretty young wife of an old man, but he's actually more like a Casanova Wannabe-type who gets conned by the conniving servant. Making things worse is that he's in a tragedy, not a comedy, and the conniving servant is Iago.
• Lampshaded in Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods — when the Baker's Wife is being seduced by Cinderella's Prince, she sings, "This is ridiculous, what am I doing here, I'm in the wrong story..."
  • The Narrator suffers from this worse. He thought he was in a classic fairy tale and his job was to tell the story from the safe side of a thick fourth wall.
• In Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Anthony thinks that he's the hero who rescues the beautiful maiden who's been locked in a tower by an evil old man. Unfortunately, he's in a Stephen Sondheim musical ...
• In the 18th century play Nathan the Wise, Nathan's servant Daya is reasonably savvy of the "Columbine" role in commedia del'arte and thus sees it as her duty to find a mate for Nathan's daughter. However, the young crusader that Daya tries to fix up with the daughter turns out to be the daughter's long-lost brother. In commedia del'arte, this kind of Contrived Coincidence is fairly common, so you could say that the guy would either be the love interest or the long-lost brother, and Daya made the wrong conclusion. There's also an aspect that although Daya knows that Nathan is a nice guy, she has antisemitic prejudices, and thus tends to act like the play she is in is The Merchant of Venice.
• Polonius in Hamlet thinks he's in a Star-Crossed Lovers comedy, where every problem is caused by unrequited love and can be solved with eavesdropping. Unfortunately for him, he's in a revenge tragedy. As with Rodrigo, he fits a commedia del'arte stock character who happens to be in a tragedy (Rodgrigo is a Captain/Miles Gloriosus type, and Polonius is the Pantalone/Dottore character).
• Deconstructed with Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet, who doesn't realise he's in a romantic comedy, and winds up derailing the plot into a tragedy with his killing of Mercutio.
• A large fraction of the characters in Little Shop of Horrors are Wrong Genre Savvy. The main character, Seymour, and his employer Mr. Mushnik, think they're in a rags-to-riches story. Seymour's love interest, Audrey, thinks she's in a romance. Orin seems to think that he's a Bastard Boyfriend, or perhaps the player character of a videogame.
• In Cromwell by Victor Hugo, Rochester, one of the men who conspires against Cromwell, thinks he's in a romance, and that his forbidden love with Cromwell's daughter will prevail. Unfortunately for him, he's in a political drama and she never noticed that he existed.
• A Doll's House has it in two levels
  • Nora sees herself as the plucky heroine of a Victorian domestic melodrama, adopting an airhead persona very in line with the heroines of those kind of plays, all to hide a morally-dubious thing she did to save her husband and family and all the crafty strategies she does to keep the house running. She sort of expects that when her husband discovers it he either forgives her magnanimously or drives her to kill herself to preserve the family's honor. When her husband instead reacts by berating her over, inadvertently revealing over his tirade that he only sees her as the ditzy woman she pretends to be, it signals to Nora that first, This Is Reality, and second, that her marriage is less worth preserving that she originally thought.
  • In a more meta way, Ibsen wrote the play as a subversion/deconstruction of the very regimented room drama popular in Norwegian theater at the time. Part of what made the play so controversial at the time was that people who went to see it expected a typical domestic drama, and received a heavy psychological drama instead.

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