The Maids is a self-conscious play, often drawing attention to its theatricality. Genet even wrote in his early novel Our Lady of the Flowers that if he were to write a play with female roles, he would have young boys play them, and place a placard next to the stage to call the audience's attention to their gender. Much of Genet's work focused on the themes of illusion and artificiality. For the theater, the most artificial of the three main literary forms, in that it presents scripted action on-stage as "reality," whereas textual media allow the reader to imagine the words unfolding. Another level of illusion—boys playing women—sends the artificiality to a second level. This second level of artifice somehow returns the play to a greater depth of realism. The self-conscious placard grounds the audience in their reality by forcing them to recognize the on-stage illusion.
The maids' self-consciousness often undermines their own ability to create illusion. Claire worries that someone is watching them and that something is recording their gestures. In other words, the audience and the written text of the play, respectively, and Solange declares they are performing for God in their "last act." Solange connects the illusory world even more strongly with the real world when she imagines the end of a play Madame is attending at the end of The Maids. The fantasy is first a comment on Madame's lavish, cultural lifestyle, as she departs the theater and leaves in a car with the "charming" Monsieur. But Solange also gives more revealing details in her monologue, itself a theatrical tour de force—she acts as different characters, writes virtual dialogue, and narrates the action. She says the attendant draws the red velvet curtain, and this material recalls the red velvet dress she made Claire wear at the beginning of the play, which Madame eventually gave to Claire. Just as the theater curtain is the boundary between illusion and reality, so is the dress for the maids. When she wears it, Claire is given temporary respite from her dreary reality and is transformed into aristocracy. The illusion, however, is fleeting. She could only wear the dress a short time before Madame returned, and were Claire not dead at the end, Madame would have most likely withdrawn her gift, as she did with the furs she gave to Solange. The theater curtain, too, must close at the end of a performance, and the illusion of theater ends for the audience of The Maids as the illusion has ended for the poisoned Claire. We suspect that the illusion will end for Solange soon after she realizes what she has done.