Insecurity: Perils and Products of Theatres of the Real

What real? Which truth? Whose story? In an age of posttruth and postreality, how do we identify what is real? Does the real remain outside representation, even as acting, language, and symbolism try to represent it? Is the desire for truth and authenticity a product of natural law and binding ethics independent of politics and society? Or is it something else? A real that is not so distinguishable from a simulation? Should we just give up and live in a mise en abyme of media, news cycles, citations, and selves? As Hamlet attests, our perceptual consent enables theatre to turn the real into a fiction and perhaps a fiction into something real.