Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192.

PLAYING REAL: MIMESIS, MEDIA, AND MISCHIEF. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192.

Lindsay Brandon Hunter’s Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief offers valuable insights into the practices and problems of mediatized performances that play with and against conventional notions of “the real.” Hunter wisely eschews both the well-trod liveness debates of Performance Studies and, more challengingly, the many anxieties attendant on media’s increasingly destabilized relationship to reality. Instead, she embraces these performances’ playful construction of the real as a means to make mischief—particularly, mischief with the dominant paradigms within which such performances exist. The book proves a fruitful contribution to interdisciplinary theater and performance studies, applying its analysis in equal measure to the fields of broadcast theater (such as the well-known NT Live), reality television programming, and alternate reality games (ARGs).  

Each of these fields, as Hunter discusses, is “tethered in some way to an imaginary of the real” (xvii-xviii). Her six core chapters are neatly divided into three pairs, one for each of the creative fields under discussion, and move from performances with which theater scholars are likely to be familiar (broadcast performances in chapter one, the Wooster Group’s 2007 Hamlet in chapter two) through a deeply theatrical slice of television (reality television in chapter three and particularly “scripted reality” in chapter four) and, then, into the growing critical terrain exploring intersections of theater, performance, and game-playing (through the particular lens of ARGs in chapters five and six). Each set of chapters offers a helpfully polyvalent reading on its source material, with the initial chapters in each pair (one, three, and five) doing the work of theorizing a medium’s relationship to the real while the subsequent chapters (two, four, and six) offer deep dives into case studies that provide nuance which complicates the previous discussion. Hunter’s writing displays an impressive command of the existing scholarly literature of what might be considered three distinct fields, in particular, drawing upon the work of Sarah Bay-Cheng and Philip Auslander, to consider these mediatized performances as not distanced from, but rather engaged in the construction of, reality.  

Hunter offers fruitful provocations in her close readings and theorizing. She begins by examining the ways broadcast theater, beginning with the 1964 Electronovision capture of Richard Burton’s Hamlet, have striven to “translate” the supposedly ineluctable liveness of theater to the cinema or television screen—and in so doing, she proposes, have revealed “liveness to be less theater’s ontology than its brand” (12, original emphasis). It’s the brand of a certain kind of theater, at the very least: the well-funded, nationally acclaimed, artistically conservative institutions that can afford to finance these undertakings, such as the National Theatre in London or New York’s Metropolitan Opera. As Hunter rightly observes, these organizations are engaged not only in transmitting their performances but to didactic work that, by dictating the viewer’s focus, enforces “a particular skill of ‘reading’ theater” in accordance with the directors’ and producers’ intentions (18). Hunter suggests that through such direction, this broadcast work has the potential to disrupt, or at least inflect, the dominant norms of theatergoing (19). I wonder, however, whether in practice such disruption will come to pass or whether this medium will remain the province of artistically conservative (sometimes conservational) institutions—the ones most consistently able to muster the funds needed to create the broadcasts discussed.  

While Hunter’s second chapter focuses on the Wooster Group’s remixing of that 1964 Hamlet, the third and fourth chapters expand her horizons dramatically, taking in the realm of reality TV with a focus on the performance of romantic love. Hunter skillfully weaves together existing analyses and critiques from the field of media studies with her own theater-grounded theorizing; of particular note is her explication of “unreceived acting,” an inversion of Michael Kirby’s theory of “received acting” articulated in “On Acting and Not Acting.” Reality TV performers, Hunter suggests, may be read by their audiences as specifically not acting—even when their performances are clearly embedded in the histrionic conventions of reality television (53-54). This concept offers, I think, a useful way of reading not only reality TV performances but other performance approaches broadcast on social media platforms or live-streaming sites such as Twitch, as well. 

Hunter’s final chapters tackle alternate reality games. These games—often lengthy explorations of another world—offer exciting ground for a performance scholar, and Hunter adroitly brings both performance theorists and some notables of game studies (particularly Jane McGonigal) to bear on these performative acts of play. McGonigal’s own World Without Oil seems to offer a hopeful case study in chapter five, suggesting that ARGs can help players engage critically with the world around them. Unfortunately, this optimism is immediately undercut by chapter six’s dissection of a (somewhat sinister) 2010 game encouraging players to embrace surveillance technology when it’s in the “right hands,” Conspiracy for Good—an ARG funded in part by Nokia and featuring its then-new image recognition technology.  

The dichotomy of chapters five and six points to an unresolved tension in Hunter’s monograph: although she consistently returns to an optimistic view of the “mischief” these performances create, there seems to be almost as much evidence in favor of such disruption serving ill ends. Hunter acknowledges these concerns briefly in her epilogue, and it’s fair to say that this volume—begun before both the 2016 election of Donald Trump and the COVID-19 pandemic—is an opening salvo in the discussion of this mischief’s role in contemporary society rather than a final statement. Ultimately, Playing Real is a well-researched and valuable monograph, skillfully speaking across multiple fields to consider the ways we use theatrical artifice not only to tell stories about our reality but to construct and play with it, as well.  

Playing Real will be of greatest interest to researchers in performance and media studies, yet scholars—or classrooms—examining broadcast theater, intermedial theater, reality television, or ARGs will find it valuable. 

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