This Is Fact, Not Fiction Isolation breeds a natural kind of curiosity: What exists beyond? Curiosity gives way to the imagination and fiction, to the creation and consumption of worlds that are different—safer, weirder—than the one we’re in. Sometimes we escape into worlds created for us by other people: plays, television shows, video games, novels, porn. Other times, we create these respites for ourselves: daydreams, sexual fantasies, diary entries, delusions. Perfectly Timed Photos Taken Before a Disaster peers into what happens when these realms fold into one another. What happens when a lonely, obsessed consumer commandeers the setting, characters, and emotions of an already established fictional world? Should society put brakes on individual imagination?
Perfectly Timed Photos Taken Before a Disaster
Then there’s the question of fact. Postmodern thought has encouraged us to question truth as a stable category. Truth is subjective—the product of lived experiences connected to identity, social location, and privilege. But there must be a limit to this obscuring: danger brews when fact is dismissed as fiction and fiction heralded as fact. In the United States today, ruled by a calculating manipulator of truth, we have a responsibility to investigate the limits of our imaginative appropriations and the real consequences of tearing down the wall between facts and their “alternatives.” Alternate universes and fanfiction grant us escape from the banalities and struggles of daily life, but lies and fantasies cosplaying as truth possess the dangerous potential to embolden the factual horrors of racism, white nationalism, and Islamophobia. —MICHAEL BRESLIN, PRODUCTION DRAMATURG
Thursday, November 9 at 8PM Friday, November 10 at 4PM and 8PM Saturday, November 11 at 4PM Iseman Theater, 1156 Chapel Street
The Studio Series productions are designed to be learning experiences that complement classroom work, providing a medium for students at Yale School of Drama to combine their individual talents and energies toward the staging of collaboratively created works.
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