Acting the Part offers a paradigm for understanding how audiences participate in immersive theater, from physical spaces like the Globe in London to digital spaces like social virtual reality. Reading across twenty-first century productions of ancient Greek tragedies and William Shakespeare’s plays, E. B. Hunter proposes the concept of “enactivity” to describe the positionality audiences inhabit when their participation is critical to the narrative but cannot alter its intended course. This positionality is that of the archetype, the enactment of which is shaped by four production conditions: a historically resonant site, a canonical source, an immersive space, and a production-specific economy that incentivizes some behaviors and discourages others. At the heart of Acting the Part is a framework for identifying how a production’s management of these conditions gives rise to a range of archetypes, such as worshiper, sleuth, cinematographer, and others. Against the backdrop of an ever-increasing push for audience participation, Acting the Part sheds new light on the many ways in which productions shape that participation in real time.

E. B. Hunter is Assistant Professor of Drama at Washington University in St. Louis. She is coeditor of Enveloping Worlds: Toward a Discourse of Immersive Performance (2025).

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Introduction
Chapter 1—Worshipper: Historical Resonance at the New Globe in London
Chapter 2—Sleuth: The Open-world Theater of Sleep No More
Chapter 3—Patron at the Vanguard: Theater in Social VR
Chapter 4—From Cinematographer to Protagonist: Theater and Augmented Reality
Coda
Glossary
Bitter Wind Walkthrough
Bibliography