UCLA

Theater, historically, has served as a site for intense debates about ontology, specifically as concerns distinctions between what is real, in Plato's sense, and what is "merely" mimetic. Similar ontological debates have attended the development of new media technologies, which are often figured as enabling shady activities like impersonation, simulation, and piracy (on the internet, after all, no one knows you're a dog, and Photoshopped images of Iranian missile tests circulate globally nearly instantly), and arousing related questions about authenticity, identity and ownership. My dissertation brings debates about realness and mimesis to three sites of twenty-first century performance: intermedial theater, specifically the Wooster Group's 2007 Hamlet and the mediatized Burton/Gielgud Hamlet it deconstructs; reality television, specifically MTV's "scripted reality" show The Hills; and alternate reality gaming, in particular the 2007 future forecasting game World Without Oil. In each of these sites I examine the ways mediatization and theatricality work, sometimes in concert and sometimes in conflict, to complicate and perform realness.

Questions of realness, authenticity and honesty have long haunted Western theater traditions, and so I use the lens of Western theatrical acting to address related questions in new media performance contexts. While only one of the dissertation's sites of analysis positions itself explicitly as theater, each is a theatrical situation that places its players in a subjunctive stance--one that depends on their acting "as if" circumstances were other than they are--and so evokes the concerns and "ontological queasiness" (Barish) that accompanies the mimetic activity of Western theater. In bringing together these disparate sites of mixed realities, I make a case for the opportunities this mixing and subjunctivity enable: mischievous interventions into supposedly stable differences between the real and its various others (the artificial, the fake, the feigned, the staged or rehearsed). An uncertain real is often described in terms of loss and threat, of radical instability that poses either overt or latent dangers. My argument, however,

prioritizes the ways in which refiguring relationships to realness might be occasion opportunity, especially the opportunity for exploration, excitement, even productive mischief.