Wrong Genre Savvy / Theatre

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• 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.
• In Don Giovanni by Mozart, Donna Elvira makes two wrong conclusions. When she's in her Love Martyr mode, she thinks she's the heroine of a romance story, destined to redeem the roguish anti-hero with her love. When she's in her Woman Scorned mode, she correctly realizes that she's in a story of an irredeemable rake's divinely-ordaned punishment, but wrongly assumes that she will be the one to punish him. Actually, she's just a tragicomic supporting character, and the real agent of the Don's punishment is a much more imposing figure.
• Done in two ways in A Doll's House:
  • In universe, Nora sees herself as the heroine of a typical Victorian domestic drama, acting in public as the cheerful and sightly airhead wife of most of those kind of plays while hiding her very crafty real personality, and she expects that her troubles with a secret not-very-legal thing she did to save her husband's life will unfold the way those drama goes (usually with the secret being revealed and the "wrongdoer" being pardoned on virtue of their good intentions or deciding on a more final way to redeem themselves). When her husband doesn't follow her expected script by instead exploding towards her and inadvertently revealing that he flat out ignored her hard work and only saw her as her superficial airhead persona, is when she realizes that This Is Reality and finally makes her turn on him.
  • In a more meta way, the play initially seems to use the five traditional archetypes of Norwegian theatre of the time, and then it goes into subverting and even deconstructing them, leaving the public who expected a typical"room family" drama receiving a rather realistic relationship drama and having no clue how the plot would unfold.
• 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. Instead, the characters, who are well aware of his existence, pull him into the story in an attempt to appease the murderous Giantess, leading to his death.
• Les Misérables: Gavroche believes that Improbable Infant Survival and Would Not Hurt A Child will keep him safe when he heads outside the barricade to loot the corpses for ammunition. Sorry kid, this ain't that kind of play....
• 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 Fetishized Abuser, or perhaps the player character of a videogame.
• In the 18th century play Nathan the Wise, Nathan's servant Daya is reasonably savvy of the "Columbine" role in Commedia dell'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 dell'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 drew 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.
• William Shakespeare:
  • Rodrigo of Othello thinks that he's the Captain character in a Commedia dell'Arte play, who seduces the pretty young wife of an old man. But he's actually more like a Casanova Wannabe-type, who is conned by the conniving servant. Making things worse is that he's in a tragedy, not a comedy, and the conniving servant is Iago.
  • Hamlet:
    • When Horatio first confronts the ghost, he asks it if 1) some good deed may be done to quiet it, 2) it comes to warn the country against some fate, or 3) it comes to tell where it buried the treasure in its life—which were all common tropes in different Elizabethan dramas and comedies, and would be perfectly plausible . . . if this were something other than a revenge tragedy.
    • Polonius, meanwhile, seems to think he's in some sort of Star-Crossed Lovers Romantic Comedy, where he, Claudius and Gertrude must get Hamlet and Ophelia together again in order to cure the Prince's madness.
  • 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.

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