Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief by Lindsay Brandon Hunter

Abstract

Reviewed by: Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief by Lindsay Brandon Hunter E. B. Hunter Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. By Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2021; pp. 192. As W. B. Worthen notes in his recent project to map the technicity of theatre, a great deal of contemporary scholarship tends to represent theatre "as engaged in a conflictual accommodation with the succession of performance-recording media: theatre/film, theatre/TV, theatre/digital media,"1 a characterization that does not reflect the inherent intermediality of theatrical practice. Although Worthen's project does not, of course, involve an analysis of campus politics, it is worth noting that the scholarly dichotomies he marks as erroneous could also describe the separations between departments of representational media on a great deal of campuses. In other words, courtesy appointments and exceptions aside, at the level of faculty, budget, and building allocation, theatre in academia has more often mirrored the dichotomies that characterize its scholarship than it has the intermediality of its practice. However, reorganization across these separations is becoming more common for degrees from BA/BFA through the PhD. Most recently, in 2021, UC Santa Cruz's Department of Theater Arts merged with the university's Art and Design: Games and Playable Media Program to become the Department of Performance, Play, and Design. And in 2020, Ohio State University combined its Department of Theatre with an interdisciplinary Film Studies program and a major in Moving-Image Production to become the Department of Theatre, Film, and Media Arts. A book review cannot outline the potential downsides, positive impacts, or unique circumstances that might attend such mergers. However, what can be accomplished here is a focus on one example of how the intermedial lines of inquiry likely to arise from these departmental reorganizations can manifest at the level of the field's key currency: the solo-authored monograph. Released in 2021 from Northwestern University Press, Lindsay Brandon Hunter's Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief illustrates how scholarship can thrive when theatre is considered with a broadly crossdisciplinary perspective. Given the aims and scope of Theatre Topics and the recent publication of other reviews that capably cover the book's core theoretical interventions,2 this review takes the opportunity to focus on how Playing Real might function pedagogically amid the field's recent departmental mergers. Playing Real draws together a wide spectrum of case studies, with chapters ranging from digitized conventional [End Page 112] theatre to born-digital contexts that Hunter marks as resoundingly theatricalized. Chapter 1 considers the 1964 Burton/Gielgud Electronovision Hamlet, as well as mid-2010s broadcasts from the National Theatre's NT Live and Royal Shakespeare Company's Live from Stratford-upon-Avon. Chapter 2 revisits the Electronovision Hamlet through an analysis of its legendary 2007 "reanimation" by the Wooster Group. The book then shifts from the theatrical to the theatricalized, with two chapters on various reality TV shows—those "mash-up[s] of artificial construction and supposedly authentic, spontaneous affect" (xxi). And Chapter 5 turns to alternate reality games (ARGs), which Hunter explains are "conducted across multiple media platforms . . . and employ real-world digital and material objects as artifacts that serve the games and their fantastic scenarios" (xxii). What ties together these disparate contexts, Hunter argues, is that each "has been decried as imperiling the real by setting up camp in a murky area in which the boundaries separating actual from virtual, genuine from artificial, and truth from fiction are difficult to discern" (xv). It is in this "double artificiality of theatricality rendered through representational media" that she finds "a fertile site for productive and pleasurable mischief, including the playful reconfiguring of audience and participant relationships to qualities like sincerity, honesty, and genuineness" (ibid.). Graduate seminars or faculty reading groups might find in Playing Real a demonstration of situating seemingly far-flung case studies in one's home field and using the technical and theoretical vocabulary of that field to craft one overarching argument. In an undergraduate course, the book's inclusion of contemporary, populist case studies like reality TV and ARGs would invite students across majors—perhaps in a newly merged department—to think under the umbrella...