Theatre in the Blogosphere

BY Chris Piatt

Throw another blog on the fire

In one of my favorite episodes of “The West Wing” (alas, the Sorkin years), White House Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman learns he has a fan-based Web site, LemonLyman.com. Even though our boy Josh holds one of the highest-ranking jobs in American government, he becomes wholly absorbed by messages that both praise and (in his opinion, incorrectly) criticize him. In short order, he loses his marbles, and even begins posting on the site in defense of himself.

When press secretary C.J. Cregg catches wind of the fiasco—a senior staffer slumming by posting self-defensive comments in cyberspace—she filets him in a slickly violent bit of Sorkinese.

“Let me explain something to you, this is sort of my field. The people on these sites? They’re the cast of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Now I’m telling you to open the ward room window and climb on out before they give you a pre-frontal lobotomy, and I have to smother you with a pillow.”

Hi. Welcome to Chicago theatre, 2007. Starring Amy Morton, Carolyn Defrin, Arthur Miller, Franki Valli, another Sarah Ruhl play, that girl from Destiny’s Child and Chris Jones. But none of these players could upstage the only character this year to get above-the-title billing: the blogosphere.

By its very nature (or perhaps by the nature of the people who make it), 21st-century theatre is slower to absorb cultural trends than almost any other pop medium. So it’s not a cold-water shock that the conversation about the amorality of the Internet is happening in theatre more than a decade after it happened among the rest of American intelligentsia. But late to the game or not—frankly I’m mortified to be writing this in 2007—this was the year blogs made their presence known in our community, and all but devoured the collective consciousness of Chicago theatre.

In the first two years of Time Out, our weeks revolved around a tough production schedule and keeping up with our competitors’ news cycles. Whom did they feature this week, and did they do it better than we did? What did they think of the new Goodman show, and did they say it more intelligently than we did? In short, the conversation was generally about content, ideas and the currency of those ideas.

These days, though, the thoughts on most arts journalists’ minds aren’t, “What did I think of the play, and what did my colleagues think,” but rather, “What does this blogger think about me?” Clicking “refresh” has replaced heading for the newsstand, as we wait for new comments to appear on the digital pages maintained by independent bloggers like Don Hall, Rob Kozlowski, Tony Adams and Isaac Butler, ancillary blogs of professional writers like David Cote, Rob Kendt and Kelly Kleiman, and blogs run by publishers (The Theater Loop, Time Out Chicago) and theatre companies.

The psychological grip these bloggers and their commenting minions hold on journalists can’t be underestimated. If you merely read what was printed about Chicago theatre this year, you only got the text. If you read the blogs, you also got the vital, constantly shifting subtext, postings that drilled their way into journalists’ psyches and leaked into their coverage. Meanwhile, various practitioners argued themselves blue in the face trying to make sense of it all.

In short, this year the main topic of conversation about theatre was the conversation itself, an argument about an argument that resulted in a ferment no one outside the scene could give a hoot about. (I acknowledge this not as a finger pointer but as an active participant, albeit at the mandate of my employers.)

Yet, despite its (at least for now) comparatively small readership, everyone in power fears the blogosphere for a different reason. Journalists can be scrutinized without sanction and—their source of real terror—their social station could eventually be taken by unpaid, untrained writers. Meanwhile, theatres and artists fear bloggers their P.R. machines can’t control. In this weak era for journalism, in which publicity and marketing departments are accustomed to driving news coverage, this is tantamount to Dodge City circa 1873.

From an editorial standpoint, though, my main beef with blogmania, even when I’m getting high-fived or deservedly spanked, is the largely unacknowledged matter of neglectful prose style: Most bloggers tend to write about their opinions rather than write opinion. (“I don’t care what anyone thinks of me for saying this, but…” or “Now, you have to understand where I’m coming from on this one…”) This folksy, live-journal voice theoretically invites you in with its egalitarian informality, but mostly it just wedges a remove in between the reader and the content; rather than guiding us to the idea—the writer’s very job—bloggers often block us off from it with their personalities.

All things considered, the best service theatre blogs currently offer is media upbraiding; with editorial jobs and content getting slashed everywhere, there are fewer checks and balances; we need watchdogs on our tails more than ever. (Although I would imagine Charles Isherwood, the bloggers’ #1 whipping boy, might beg to differ.) The blogosphere is where the most astringent criticism, both credited and elusively unsigned, was leveled at the city’s arts journalists for our respective agendas and loyalties, eclipsing even the letter to the editor as a public forum.

On a more personal level, though, the blogosphere was also where the House Theatre’s fabled success was publicly contested—and passionately defended—for the first time. Meanwhile, over at Steppenwolf, the one Chicago theatre bold and mature enough to allow itself to be criticized on its own blog, an unprecedented debate raged about the adequacy of The Crucible’s replacement cast after that show was decimated by August: Osage County’s Broadway transfer. Names no smaller than Martha Lavey entered the conversation, all but smashing the notion of the untouchable personality.

That Martha and Chris Jones’s editorial contributions are commingled with those of such mysterious characters as “A Concerned Theatre Artist” “Theatre Lover” and the ubiquitous “anonymous” is probably somehow highly democratic and thusly has benefits that will become clearer in retrospect than they are now.

But what disappointed me most this year—particularly among my generation and those younger—is the almost willful lack of cynicism regarding anonymity in the blogosphere. In a world where corporations are the new government and drug companies write our medical legislation, it’s strange that bloggers so eager to keep the establishment in check rarely consider that the establishment might be posting alongside them in digital guises. (That reminds me, sometime I should tell you the story about the night I saw Goody Proctor with the devil. It’s a pisser.)

Anyway. I must now return to clicking “refresh”—something I’ve been doing repeatedly while typing this—and praying that Kris Vire isn’t forced to sneak up behind me with a pillow.

Happy 2008. See you on the blogs.

Home

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