People want to be part of well-known, culturally significant stories, but not necessarily as actors. An important but overlooked dimension of spectatorship is participating meaningfully in a performed canonical story as an audience member, aware of one's position as such and also performing as the audience. Existing theory does not explain productions that foreground the relationship between participation and a purported authenticity to a canonical work. To date, meaningful participation has been measured by the audience's ability to affect a given story's outcome. But an audience who could change the narrative of a staged canonical text would disrupt its authenticity. Macbeth is not Shakespeare's Macbeth if the audience can save Banquo. So how can a production offer meaningful interactivity and still be authentic to a canonical work?

This dissertation maps a new critical model the author calls "enactive spectatorship." By analyzing four contemporary Shakespearean productions that are interactive and assert authenticity, the author demonstrates how specific, consistent production choices devalue narrative impact as legitimate participation and replace this currency with the production's own reward system, thereby reconfiguring what "counts" as meaningful. The rewards that drive this system incentivize audience members to enact a recognizable role, the function of which is to endorse the production as authentic. This endorsement in turn serves to affirm the producers' vision for the role of theatre in the twenty-first century.

This dissertation contributes to theatre studies by exposing the hidden economies that drive scripted events and by identifying a phenomenon that has long been part of the human response to performed stories. The project outlines four discrete but mutually informing categories of production choice, from which practitioners will be able to derive a practical guide book. And as enactive spectatorship can be seen in scenarios from Shakespeare's plays to Disney theme parks, critical theorists who consider participation in a range of contexts may find this lens helpful for revealing the agendas that often underlie interactive productions and the reward systems producers use to promote audience compliance.