First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief explores the integration and interaction of mimetic theatricality and representational media in twentieth- and twenty-first-century performance. It brings together carefully chosen sites of performance - including live broadcasts of theatrical productions, reality television, and alternate-reality gaming - in which mediatization and mimesis compete and collude to represent the real to audiences. Lindsay Brandon Hunter reads such performances as forcing confrontation between notions of authenticity, sincerity, and spontaneity and their various others: the fake, the feigned, the staged, or the rehearsed.Each site examined in Playing Real purports to show audiences something real-real theater, real housewives, real alternative scenarios-which is simultaneously visible as overtly constructed, adulterated by artifice and artificiality. The integration of mediatization and theatricality in these performances, Hunter argues, exploits the proclivities of both to conjure the real even as they risk corrupting the perception of authenticity by imbricating it with artifice and overt manipulation. Although the performances analyzed obscure boundaries separating actual from virtual, genuine from artificial, and truth from fiction, Hunter rejects the notion that these productions imperil the 'real.' She insists on uncertainty as a fertile site for productive and pleasurable mischief-including relationships to realness and authenticity among both audience and participants.

The origin and essence of the Western mime are examined in the first part of the book. Traceable to the masked roleplaying of Greek theatre, many of the sacred functions of mime in early rituals were carried into later secular performances. The second part looks at pantomime, from the shamans to modern theatrical performers such as Deburau and Marceau.

This gratifying study of a phenomenon that has imprinted itself upon the folklore of big--city life, is a joyful book focusing upon the street performers in Washington Square Park in New York City.

While documenting the complex expressions of street performance in a specific outdoor environment over a period of four years, "Drawing a Circle in a Square" gives a broad examination to the relationship between outdoor performance and urban culture.

In this book we learn that most American cities prohibit street performance, charging such entertainers with vagrancy or soliciting, the performer--joyfully, cautiously, heroically--persists.

On sidewalks throughout the country, in theaters reduced to their barest essentials, the performer juggles, blows fire, performs magic, and tells jokes, appealing both to our sense of humor and to our longing for a moment of spontaneity in our city--structured lives.

"Drawing a Circle in a Square" is the first scholarly documentation and analysis of street performance. Based primarily upon original research, it makes a contribution that is as much toward a particular subject. Promoting the study of performance as an important and valuable vehicle for inter-disciplinary research and thought, it is a model of the kinds of research being developed in the emerging field of performance studies.