UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Acting Real: Mimesis and Media in Performance A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Theater and Performance Studies by Lindsay Brandon Hunter 2013 © Copyright by Lindsay Brandon Hunter 2013 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Acting Real: Mimesis and Media in Performance by Lindsay Brandon Hunter Doctor of Philosophy in Theater and Performance Studies University of California, Los Angeles, 2013 Professor Sue-Ellen Case, Chair 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 ii 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. iii The dissertation of Lindsay Brandon Hunter is approved. Janet O’Shea Susan Leigh Foster Joe Olivieri Sue-Ellen Case, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2013 iv This work is dedicated, with great love and gratitude, to Christopher Guilmet, who did not choose this project for himself but lived it anyhow, with enthusiasm and extraordinary generosity. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vi VITA viii INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE: Electronovision, the Wooster Group and the real-live 22 CHAPTER TWO: Consumption and production of authenticity on reality TV 108 CHAPTER THREE: Playful alternate realities and really altered players 179 WORKS CITED 253 vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am fortunate to have so many mentors, colleagues, and friends to thank for the assistance and inspiration that made this project possible. My committee chair, Sue-Ellen Case, has shared her expertise with considerable generosity, guiding me not only to a more exacting analysis of my subject matter but to a more sophisticated scholarship that owes a great deal both to her mentorship and her keen commitment to professionalizing her graduate students. My committee members, Susan Leigh Foster, Janet O’Shea, and Joe Olivieri, have each been magnanimous in their dedication to this project, and have responded to my work--as well as to occasional crises of confidence--with candor, encouragement, and wisdom. In addition, I have been enormously lucky to find mentors in Rita Raley and Brian Herrera, distinguished scholars who have championed my work and my professional ambitions unsparingly. During my time at NYU, the practical guidance of Karen Shimikawa welcomed me to the rigors of graduate study, helping to render accessible a wondrously complex world. Michael Strelow and David Douglass not only helped nurture my intellectual curiosity years ago, at Willamette University, but enthusiastically applauded my return to academia. Christopher Mott and Jacey Erwin have helped me refine my pedagogy, and Shelley Salamensky has, from my first days at UCLA, offered support and invaluable perspective on what is, at times, a tortuous and baffling process. Tedra Osell has been not only a friend and mentor, but an editor who guided me through a pivotal moment in this work’s development, for which I am sincerely grateful. vii I have received valued support for this work from UCLA’s Graduate Division, in the form of a Summer Research Mentorship Grant, and from the Collegium of University Teaching Fellows; from Northwestern University’s Summer Institute of Performance Studies; from UC Santa Barbara’s Transliteracies Project, and from the theater department at UCLA. I would also like to recognize the community of small theaters in San Francisco, Seattle, and New York which have supported my artistic practice, particularly Annex Theater and the Chicago and New York Neo-Futurists. Finally, throughout my graduate study I have been surrounded by friends and colleagues who have lent sympathy, humor, and diverse insight to the study of performance and the particular demands of graduate work and emerging scholarship. Rachel Carrico, Jamie Reynolds, Mandy McNeil, Victoria Kuper, Ailish Bracken, Will Bowling, Branden Jacobs- Jenkins, and Alex Pittman; Debra Levine and Tina Majkowski; Chantal Rodriguez, David Gorshein, Heidi Miller, and Linzi Juliano; Marcela Fuentes and Sonali Pahwa; Harmony Bench, Rosemary Candelario and Angeline Shaka; Donovan Sherman; Christine Mok; Alex Dodge and Joseph Cermatori; Chloe Johnston; Jeremy Alden Teissere; Adam Simon--each of you has offered encouragement that is only shabbily acknowledged by inclusion in this list. With great love, I also offer my gratitude for the the unstinting support of my parents, Steve and Sally Hunter, whose firm confidence in my judgment, through successes and reversals alike, has always grounded me. My husband, Christopher Guilmet, to whom this dissertation is dedicated, deserves another round of thanks for making this project possible on a daily basis. For the gift of perspective, I also thank Miles Joseph Hunter, whose arrival at first seemed to make this project nearly impossible, but in the most marvelous way imaginable. viii VITA 1997 BA, cum laude, American Studies and Theatre Willamette University Salem, OR 2007 MA, Performance Studies New York University 2007 Research Assistant to Sue-Ellen Case Department of Theater University of California, Los Angeles 2008 Research Assistant, Transliteracies Project University of California, Santa Barbara 2008-2009 Research Assistant to Sue-Ellen Case Teaching Assistant Department of Theater Summer Research Mentorship Grant University of California, Los Angeles Fellow, Summer Institute in Performance Studies Northwestern University 2010 Teaching Associate Department of Theater University of California, Los Angeles 2011 Teaching Fellow Department of Theater University of California, Los Angeles 2012 Teaching Fellow Departments of English, Theater, and Film and Television Collegium of University Teaching Fellows University of California, Los Angeles 2013 Teaching Fellow Department of Theater University of California, Los Angeles ix Presentations and Publications Review of “An Actress Prepares: Women and ‘the Method,’” by Rosemary Malague. Theatre Survey, forthcoming. Print. “Affect, Gender, and Authenticity in Reality TV.” Unsafe Realism 2.0 Working Group. American Society for Theatre Research. Nashville, TN. November 1-4, 2012. Presentation. “Can’t See Me,” “Strike Position.” 225 Plays by the New York Neo-Futurists from Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind. Ed. Joey Rizzolo. Chicago: Hope & Nonthings, 2011. Print. “Performances of Circulation: Memes, Viral Videos, and Participatory Digital Culture.” Economies of Mediated Performance Working Group. American Society for Theatre Research. Montreal, Quebec. November 17-20, 2011. Presentation. “Intimate Access: Bodies on Reality Television.” Televisuality and Embodiment Working Group. American Society for Theatre Research. Seattle, WA. November 18-21, 2010. Presentation. “How To Do Things with Neo-Futurists, or: Speech Acts and ‘Non-illusory’ Performance.” National Communication Association. San Francisco, CA. November 14-17, 2010. Presentation. “‘The rest is still unwritten’: Scripted Reality in MTV’s ‘The Hills.’” Co-chair and convener, “Media and Mimesis” panel. Association for Theatre in Higher Education Performance Studies Focus Group. Los Angeles, CA. August 3-6, 2010. Presentation. “Acting Real: Engagement with Authenticity in a Virtual Time and Place.” Unsafe Realism Working Group. American Society for Theatre Research. San Juan, Puerto Rico. November 11-15,