| Contents |
Introduction: On a collection's title and sub-title / Sidney Homan -- This thing that still lives with us : requiem to disinterest / Henry Sussman -- Feeling good or doing good? Enabling economic exploitation through ambiguous bliss, willful ignorance, and polarized thinking / Elizabeth Bennett -- The purple rose of late capitalism / Jeffrey Di Leo -- Onstage cataclysm : the play-within-the-play in Kyd's The Spanish tragedy / Frederick Kiefer -- How truth matters : soft and hard theology and the Lisbon earthquake / Harry Keyishian -- The church and the art of the cover-up / LeRoy's Chatfield -- The vaccine, public trust, and doubt / Mark Hicar -- The real housewives of Ipswich : London Road, and the relationship between verbatim theatre and structured reality television / Donna Soto-Morettini -- Lord of the fleas : science, monsters, and political fraud / Mike Hill -- George Washington's hatchet and Shakespeare's stage / Fran Teague -- Stardust and empathy : Jacinda Ardern and the theatre / David O'Donnell -- All the world's a simulation / Lawrence Quill -- The zen of Theseus : language and reality from a Buddhist philosophical perspective / Alan G. Wagner -- Surviving the fugue : reflections on pandemic storytelling / Erica Terpening-Romeo -- Confessions of a "pandemicized" homo-dialectica / Ranjan Ghosh -- Blood on the page : male authors on menstrual sex / David Linton -- Flashbulb memories : fictive reconstructions of lived experiences / Christina Tzeng and Walter Jacobs -- The improvisation of meaning in everyday life / Jerry Harp -- Playing with data : the role of fictive narratives in science / Mike Smolinsky -- "No really, it was a joke!' The humor excuse and the challenge of political satire in contemporary America / MJ Robinson -- Imitation vs. The real : making the invisible visible through site-specific theatre / Brian Rhinehart -- Gentrifying reality and diversity through site-specific theater : interrogating ownership, identity, and community in Miami motel stories / Horacio Sierra -- Elusive realities : on the making of a documentary / Caroline Rooney -- Authenticity and no end / Natasha Siouzouli -- Epilogue. If the man go to the water / Sidney Homan. |
| Abstract |
"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 book takes a truly multi-disciplinary approach to examining the idea that history, the truth, facts, the 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, art 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"-- Provided by publisher. |
