It's structurally difficult for the characters in a play to convincingly rise above their author and director when the author isn't involved in the performance, the director isn't an established character, and the actors are obligated to remain upon the stage by pragmatics (e.g. visibility to the audience), but it has been done many times before, frequently but not always by making use of story-within-a-story framing devices. Willy Wonka leaves his own play behind for the real world in the 2013 production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, for one example, and the lonely and despondent narrator of Martin and McKellar's The Drowsy Chaperone is comforted by the characters of the story he narrates, who reach out to him at the end of their play, and seem to take him into their world, or lift themselves into his.
As one of the many productions that Martin and McKellar were parodying, Prokofiev's L'amour des Trois Oranges breaks the fourth wall even more comprehensively and significantly, helping to set the stage for future metatheatrical modernist productions with an on-stage audience (or an 'audience', if you prefer) that splits into multiple quarreling factions and actually goes so far as to intervene in the plot by saving the life of the Princess that the Prince has spent so long looking for. This presentation of metatheatrical influence from beyond the fourth wall is deconstructed and subsequently inverted by the likes of Pirandello's revolutionary Sei Personaggi in Cerca d'Autore, where six fictional characters are empowered to rise to prominence in the narrative and command a director to complete their stories, to say nothing of Dehussy's infamous Stuck At Home, where the play's eccentric playwright exiles an interfering audience from his stage, only to later find himself gunned down and replaced by one of his own curmudgeonly characters.
