Playing with Reality Denying, Manipulating, Converting, and Enhancing What Is There

This volume explores how and why we deny, or manipulate, or convert, or enhance reality. Finding it important to come to terms with reality, with what is there before us, and, with reality however defined, to live responsibly, this collection takes a truly multidisciplinary approach to examining the idea that history, the truth, facts, andthe events of the present time can be refashioned as prismatic, theatrical, something we can play with for agendas either noble or ignoble. An international team of contributors considers the issue of how and why, in dealing what is there before us, we play with reality by employing theatre, fiction, words, conspiracy theories, alternate realities, scenarios, andart itself. Chapters delve into issues of fake news, propaganda, virtual reality, theatre as real life, reality TV, and positive ways of refashioning and enhancing your own reality. Drawing on examples from film studies to sociology, from the social sciences to medicine, this volume will appeal to scholars and upper-level students in the areas of communication and media studies, comparative literature, film studies, economics, English, international affairs, journalism, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and theatre.

Introduction: On a Collection’s Title and Sub-titleSidney Homan Section I: Denying and Manipulating Reality 1.This Thing That Still Lives with Us: Requiem to DisinterestHenry Sussman 2. Feeling Good or Doing Good? Enabling Economic Exploitation through Ambiguous Bliss, Willful Ignorance, and Polarized ThinkingElizabeth Bennett 3. The Purple Rose of Late CapitalismJeffrey Di Leo 4. Onstage Cataclysm: The Play-within-the-Play in Kyd’s The Spanish TragedyFrederick Kiefer 5. How Truth Matters: Soft and Hard Theology and the Lisbon EarthquakeHarry Keyishian 6. The Church and the Art of the Cover-UpLeRoy’s Chatfield 7. The Vaccine, Public Trust, and DoubtMark Hicar 8. The Real Housewives of Ipswich: London Road, and the Relationship Between Verbatim Theatre and Structured Reality TelevisionDonna Soto-Morettini Section II: Converting Reality 9. Lord of the Fleas: Science, Monsters, and Political FraudMike Hill 10. George Washington’s Hatchet and Shakespeare’s StageFran Teague 11. Stardust and Empathy: Jacinda Ardern and the TheatreDavid O’Donnell 12. All the World’s a SimulationLawrence Quill13. The Zen of Theseus: Language and Reality from a Buddhist Philosophical PerspectiveAlan G. Wagner 14. Surviving the Fugue: Reflections on Pandemic StorytellingErica Terpening-Romeo 15. Confessions of a “Pandemicized” Homo-DialecticaRanjan Ghosh 16. Blood on the Page: Male Authors on Menstrual SexDavid Linton 17. Flashbulb Memories: Fictive Reconstructions of Lived ExperiencesChristina Tzeng and Walter Jacobs Section III: Enhancing Reality 18. The Improvisation of Meaning in Everyday LifeJerry Harp 19. Playing with Data: The Role of Fictive Narratives in ScienceMike Smolinsky 20. “No really, it was a joke!’ The Humor Excuse and the Challenge of Political Satire in Contemporary AmericaMJ Robinson 21. Imitation vs. The Real: Making the Invisible Visible Through Site-Specific TheatreBrian Rhinehart 22. Gentrifying Reality and Diversity Through Site-Specific Theater: Interrogating Ownership, Identity, and Community in Miami Motel StoriesHoracio Sierra23. Elusive Realities: On the Making of a DocumentaryCaroline Rooney 24. Authenticity and No EndNatasha Siouzouli Epilogue If the Man Go to the WaterSidney Homan

Sidney Homan is Professor of English at the University of Florida, USA, and is his university’s Teacher/Scholar of the Year. The author of 12 books and editor of seven collections of essays on Shakespeare and the modern playwrights, he is also an actor and director in professional and university theatres. His most recent books are Comedy Acting for Theatre: The Art and Craft of Performing in Comedies (2018) with the New York director Brian Rhinehart and Why the Theatre (2020). He has also written the librettos for two operas, by composer Paul Richards, The Golem of Prague and Lady Mary’s Cure.