Playing with Reality

Introduction: On a Collection's Title and Sub-title; Section I: Denying and Manipulating Reality; 1. This Thing That Still Lives with Us: Requiem to Disinterest; 2. Feeling Good or Doing Good? Enabling Economic Exploitation through Ambiguous Bliss, Willful Ignorance, and Polarized Thinking; 3. The Purple Rose of Late Capitalism; 4. Onstage Cataclysm: The Play-within-the-Play in Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy; 5. How Truth Matters: Soft and Hard Theology and the Lisbon Earthquake; 6. The Church and the Art of the Cover-Up; 7. The Vaccine, Public Trust, and Doubt; 8. The Real Housewives of Ipswich: London Road, and the Relationship Between Verbatim Theatre and Structured Reality Television; Section II: Converting Reality; 9. Lord of the Fleas: Science, Monsters, and Political Fraud; 10. George Washington's Hatchet and Shakespeare's Stage; 11. Stardust and Empathy: Jacinda Ardern and the Theatre; 12. All the World's a Simulation; 13. The Zen of Theseus: Language and Reality from a Buddhist Philosophical Perspective; 14. Surviving the Fugue: Reflections on Pandemic Storytelling; 15. Confessions of a "Pandemicized" Homo-Dialectica; 16. Blood on the Page: Male Authors on Menstrual Sex; 17. Flashbulb Memories: Fictive Reconstructions of Lived Experiences; Section III: Enhancing Reality; 18. The Improvisation of Meaning in Everyday Life; 19. Playing with Data: The Role of Fictive Narratives in Science; 20. "No really, it was a joke!' The Humor Excuse and the Challenge of Political Satire in Contemporary America; 21. Imitation vs. The Real: Making the Invisible Visible Through Site-Specific Theatre; 22. Gentrifying Reality and Diversity Through Site-Specific Theater: Interrogating Ownership, Identity, and Community in Miami Motel Stories; 23. Elusive Realities: On the Making of a Documentary; 24. Authenticity and No End; Epilogue; If the Man Go to the Water