Similar to several of Pirandello’s plays, Right You Are, If You Think You Are is adapted from one of his short stories, "Signora Frola and Signor Ponza, Her Son-in-Law," which was published in 1915. The narrative revolves around the conflicting accounts of truth presented by the titular characters and immediately suggests that one of them is insane. The central theme of the play, and the curiosity of the townspeople, is to discern who is truly mad and where reality intersects with illusion. Signora Frola claims that her son-in-law lost his sanity after her daughter, his wife, passed away four years prior, and that he remarried but imagines his new wife to be his deceased wife. Conversely, Ponza asserts that Signora Frola could not cope with her daughter’s death, went mad, and only manages to cope by believing that his second wife is actually her living daughter; this, he explains, is why he is so protective of his wife. As Renate Matthei notes in her 1973 study of Pirandello, in the play, "the social identity one character constructs for themselves is constantly undermined by another, reduced to a pitifully fake existence that outsiders accept as real only out of sympathy." Neither the short story nor the play provides a definitive answer; instead, the uncertainties grow as the townspeople seek more information in their futile attempts to pin down reality using the unreliable tool of perception. Both the play and the short story exemplify Pirandello’s fascination with the delicate boundary between illusion and reality as perceived in the human mind. As he described the plot to his son in a 1916 letter, it is a "great deviltry."