Theatre Journal

Reading Lindsay Brandon Hunter's brilliant book Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief makes me want—mischievously—to misremember and rehear the infamous tagline for MTV's The Real World as a series that discloses what happens "when people stop playing nice and start playing real." The difference between getting (or simply being) real and playing real, as well as the generatively mischievous if fraught possibilities that playing real may afford, stand at the center of Hunter's argument. That argument, laid out clearly and compellingly in the book's introduction, turns on two interrelated claims: that "the representational actions of theater and media, when operating in tandem, are predisposed to playfully shaking things up—most notably by destabilizing easy oppositions between live and recorded, real and fake, and the thing itself and its representation"; and that the sites of these playful shakings up are poised to do cultural work, including the "reconfiguring of audience and participant relationships to qualities like sincerity, honesty, and genuineness" and the interrogation of received or common "notions of identity and performed character, authenticity and artifice, and spontaneity and scriptedness" (xv).

Making good on these claims, which move freshly and refreshingly past the so-called liveness debates that helped to define performance studies as an (anti)discipline, Hunter explores, in six ensuing chapters, a suite of phenomena that have interestingly related but also crucially different relationships to theatricality's intertwining with mediatization: recorded exhibitions and live transmissions of theatre productions, experiments in intermedial theatre, reality television, and alternative-reality games (ARGs). The ambition to cover such cross-medially diverse terrain is one to which Hunter lives up impressively as a thinker who evidently knows a great deal, historically and theoretically, about each of these forms, yet in a welcome way wears that erudition lightly.

Charming if goofy mid-twentieth-century neologisms populate chapter 1, which begins with [End Page 121] Hunter's carefully researched account of the ways in which Electronovision brought a Theatrofilm version of a 1964 Broadway production of Hamlet, directed by John Gielgud and starring Richard Burton, to cinema attendees—but only for four screenings. That distribution decision, alongside artistic choices and technical innovations (and constraints), worked in the service of an ideological attempt "to mimic the ephemerality of the theater" (5), as well as the theatre's, or an ideation of theatre's, public-facing and contingent operations. Yet, as Hunter demonstrates, what properly unites this somewhat anomalous effort with recent projects like the National Theatre's NT Live Series and the Royal Shakespeare Company's Live from Stratford-upon-Avon series is their shared investment in loaded ideas of heritage and education. Pedagogically bringing the "best" (read as: best of the "West") to mass audiences is, as Hunter demonstrates with nuance, a simultaneously changeable and durable project.

Alighting on the Electronovision Hamlet effectively tees up Hunter for the work of chapter 2, where she examines the Wooster Group's "resolutely inter-medial" Hamlet of 2007, for which the 1964 recording provides rich source material (25). In the course of that examination, Hunter pays wonderfully dense and detailed attention to the performance of Wooster Group member Scott Shepherd in his role as Hamlet—or Burton? or Burton-as-Hamlet? or Burton/ Hamlet? or some other one(s) beside(s)—with the takeaway that his effort, "a serious mischief," acknowledges but also "complicates theatrical performance's preoccupation with likeness, (a)liveness, and the imaginary of inspiration" (33).

Like chapters 1 and 2, chapters 3 and 4 work in similarly cogent lockstep, although through a narrower engagement with the subset of reality television focused on putative "true love." Taking up, with advisement, that troubled and troubling notion, I will aver that I truly love Hunter's emphasis on the perhaps surprising cinematic slickness of The Hills and the perhaps equally surprising, super-savvy fan responses to the series' complex construction of the (artificed, artificial) real. At the same time, and even as I appreciate Hunter's helpfully contextualizing references to series like Big Brother, Fear Factor, and Top Chef, I wonder what this book would look and sound like, and how we would think and feel with it, if only one rather than two chapters were dedicated to an exploration of romance's fabrication in reality television. In other words: Project Runway in lieu of True Tori?

For an essentially gaming-ignorant reader like me, ARG-focused chapters 5 and 6 are the most instructive and illuminating in the book. Just as these gaming forms and their forums conjure and, in their strange and compelling way, make "real" the vivid worlds that their creators imagine for their (often multitasking, register-slipping and -sliding) users, so too does Hunter make real—palpable, impactful—a sense of such worlds, such users, and the dimensionally material and phenomenal orders in which gaming enactments, and responses to them, take place. She also (pardon the pun) realizes the sophisticated claim that one key lesson dedicated gamers learn is "the playful refusal to acknowledge 'real life' as not a game, not an investigable and potentially solvable puzzle that surrounds them at all times with hidden but meaningful patterns and clues" (99). Those of us engaged in acts of critical intellection that include predicating argumentative claims on close analyses of texts and performances could do well to absorb the same lesson, as Hunter implicitly invites us to do.

It is a labor-intensive, years-long effort to transform a dissertation into a monograph, as Hunter has done with this project. Inevitably, discourses and the political ground that they support and engender shift during such stretches of time, and none of us can think, in the age of Trumpism's ascendancy, quite the same way as we did before about the relays that obtain among truth, fiction, and the real, played or otherwise. Hunter acknowledges this dilemma head-on in Playing Real's conclusion. Although some readers may find inadequate or incomplete the conclusion's ongoing, vigorous defense of—which, to be clear, is admirably never a defensiveness about—the salutary value of mischief, I for one am grateful that Hunter continues to be its responsible advocate and celebrant. Good mischief may be—in at least some of its incarnations and as Hunter smartly intimates—a modest version of good trouble, and who would wish those versions of mischief away?