Respone to Parabasis

Posted November 18th, 2009 by Sean Williams

Isaac has an interesting blog up about the assumption of bad faith in the theatrical blogosphere. I started posting over there, but GOOD LORD, I’m long winded.

In the writing that I do, I’m pretty upfront with the fact that I just really like the artform and generally enjoy myself regardless, but I do separate things into three four categories (roughly).

A) This wasn’t good. I save that for things that I think fundamentally disrespect the artform, for badly rehearsed, badly produced theater.

B) This didn’t work for me. Good piece of theater that *I* didn’t respond to. And I’ve used this for some of my closest working partners.

C) This was very good. Basically, I got what the company was doing, and I thought they did it well.

D) This is my kind of thing. Good, and also what I love to do myself.

It’s very difficult because we can’t write “In My Opinion” a hundred times for every damned blog entry. Now, this is easy for me because I modulate my presence just enough to be under the radar. But the divide between blogger and reviewer has to be recognized here. We’re not reporting on facts, we’re not claiming to be discussing things as they are – we are distilling the theatrical world and explaining what it means to each of us individually.

When we tell stories, we’re talking about each individual perspective, and our blogs are the same. When someone claims that your interpretation is too broad, it’s like the criticism we got for “Viral” that suicidal people don’t act like Meredith. Perhaps not ALL suicidal people do, but this one does, and perhaps your opinion doesn’t represent everyone, but it does represent *you*.