The performative uses which Mark Ravenhill's Faust (Faust Is Dead) (1997) and Anna Deavere Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1993), no matter how different, have made of the televised 1992 Los Angeles riots, underwrite Hal Foster's thesis that the 1990s have been confronted with a ‘return of the real’ in art and theory, through the insistence upon a renewed grounding in actual bodies and social sites, after the 1970s paradigm of art-as-text (Foucault) and the 1980s' art-as-simulacrum (Baudrillard). As such, Ravenhill's play and Smith's docudrama permit a commentary on the terrorist attacks in New York on 11 September 2001, when two planes crashed into the World Trade Center thereby further exploding the nation's semblance of reality and the false immunity it fosters.