Final Prompt: Abstract for the work to come

As we've discussed, we would like you to compose an abstract for work inspired by the work you've done and the readings you've encountered this semester. This could be a conference paper, play, publishable essay, chapter in an edited collection, some form of digital expression, etc.

Consider this a document that is meant to persuade an advisor, a conference organizer, or a granting organization, to select your project. There are guidelines for this genre widely available on the net; you might want to consult them, but mainly we are interested to see a clear articulation of your object of study, your method of studying it, and how you are intervening in your field or discipline. Creative writers should follow the protocols of creative abstracts (but what you will be talking about and how you will be talking about it are clearly still important).

Please restrict your abstract to 300 words or fewer.

These must be posted by noon on Monday to give us all time to read them prior to Tuesday's class.

Class Notes - 2012.11.27 (Derek)

2012.11.27  Class Notes

(As taken by Derek DiMatteo)

Ellen – today, discuss best practices, best methods of reviews.

Amy – we’ll break into two groups by way of breaking up the hegemony at this one table. Make small groups to engage with the review and the methodological “don’ts”.

Ellen – here are both Jones reviews.

[Class broke into two groups, one at each end of the table]

Group 2

[Talking about Black Watch review by Jones]

Jones thinks it is a culinary play and fails to address its politics. He codes his opinions in the language of the theater. Jones is operating under pressure from the newspaper, the theater community/culture/economics, and his own feelings about both the play and Scotland.

[came together]

Jennifer – reviewers seem confused about their audience and purpose (arbiter of taste, archivist). The reviewer might need to state who the audience is. These reviews tend to be full of nearly incomprehensible, elitist allusions.

Amy – when is it an ad-hominum attack benefitting only the reviewer?

Sara – this is a commercial product being done many years after its initial production. It has some problems, but it’s super cool and super fun. And it’s very coded. Shephard’s Pie is a wink and nod at Brecht—it’s made to be consumed, and is not close to Mother Courage. These things are past, though—should have been talked about in 2004. Should give it a little license now.

Andrea – hesitancy to ciritcize the play directly because it is about the military—so there is some cultural pressure.

Amy – Justin’s comment about the marketing. Related to the point of the reviews. There is a really horrible dysfunctional relationship btw NYTimes and the Theater District, considering the number of shows that paper has made or broken.

Justin – who your institution is makes the review differently important (e.g. grant writing).

Sara – anti-intellectual?

Dorothy – not anti-intellectual, but more Jones posturing above that kind of humor.

Ellen – it’s a totally inane understanding of what academic knowledge of this field amounts to.

Whitney – exclusive snarkiness. It’s isolating.

Dorothy – this is a good play for people who like bad things.

Amy – right—you have really poor taste…

Dorothy -- …I wonder what the Times thinks about Applebees.

Amy – it’s one thing to provide a vicious takedown of Spiderman on Broadway—saving people some cash. Same as with the restaurant review. The review gave me a really excellent sense of what eating in that restaurant would be like. Unlike the Jones review of Equivocation, which was just him being an asshole.

Ellen – The Weiss review had a lot in common with the Jones review in that both trying to be overly witty, just like the show. What they did/didn’t like about the show comes out stylistically. Genuine information is being conveyed in the level of style—can see better by reading several reviews by the same critic.

Dorothy – very zingy… snarky things can be made well if they have different layers of why you’re being snarky.

Ellen – the quality of that restaurant is the quality of hyperbole—that’s what he sells on TV and in his restaurants. And that comes through in the review by skewering that very hyperbole.

Sara – the reviewer takes offense that Guy is disrespecting his customers by serving them Applebees and calling it genuine. I had high expectations of you, and you gave us crap.

Ellen – the review is all about the cruel bait and switch.

Dorothy – it’s for customers that don’t want to go to Silvia’s.

Amy – [refs Whitney’s post] part of the role of the reviewer is the establishment of what gets your social standing. They see themselves as gatekeepers of high cuisine or high art.

Jennifer – Grand Forks Herald, woman reviews Olive Garden.

Amy – important distinction between derivative theatrical schlock and what is theatre. Role of reviewer is as reporter to acknowledge something happened and this is the quality and caliber of the experience I had.

Ellen – reviewers rehashed the story. What happens when the reviewer assigns praise? We are all in the business of assigning praise. Must learn to do it subtly. It is an art. The review is setting up a false paradigm for what is praise. It needs to be descriptive, mention what happened. Despite Conquergood’s first article (textocentrism) 40 years ago, still a problem. The notes they can rehash that are most stable is about the script. Demand for contextualization mentioned in Cody’s post. I’m interested to hear from those who witnessed the misogyny, etc. of that play.

Amy – how do we review without being in an ideological camp? Conservative in a certain way, but most plays are not. Where’s the line between articulating an ideological positioning of the play and making an ideological argument?

Dorothy – impossible for intelligent reviewers to avoid their ideological position in the reviews.

Ellen – his comparison to the mining business, not defending freedom. Not entirely in accordance with what BW was trying to engage in its initial performance; if that’s what it has been filtered down to, that’s alarming. Speaks to what happens when a play is several production-generations old. Jones is trying to not say something that is ideologically dangerous.

Notes - 11.27.12 - Jess

Notes – 11.27.12

·      Ellen – I thought this was very fruitful; I hoped that we could think a little bit about what it means to review a long-seen performance; it’s an important way to think about writing about performance; I was interested to see what your thoughts on those productions look like through the mists of time; Let’s try and work out in reverse the best practices/methods for reviewing, by taking up the flaws of specific reviews and on a broad cultural level;

·      Amy – let’s break into two groups;

·      Jennifer – We talked about the quandary of the reviewer, because their audiences aren’t clear; the reviewer might need to explain who the audience for this show should be;

·      Dorothy – it was less of “it’s great for all ages”, but to maybe mention a graphic sex scene.

·      Jennifer – These reviews don’t necessarily fulfill these, and they are full of elitist, incomprehensible allusions

·      Amy – we touched on the “snark” factor, and how it might relate back to the viral restaurant review; when is it okay and when is it an ad hominem attack benefitting no one but the reviewer? establishing or maintaining the authority of the reviewer but not having the entire review say “I have the authority because I hold the knowledge.”

·      Derek – I wrote down some things we talked about; Jones thinks “Black Watch” is a culinary play, he utilizes very theatre-specific terms, uses his own feelings about the play and Scotland;

·      Ellen – we had a more measured discussion of what was being said, but not fully articulated;

·      Sara – I was saying that I appreciated Jones’ contextualization of the play as a consumer-product that has past it’s moment, but that it doesn’t mean it’s not super fun to watch; it’s very coded; we talked about the shepherd’s pie non sequiteur - - - perhaps it’s a coded message that addressed some of Cody’s concerns about the politics of the play; I think there was a certain subtle inclination to say “This play is way past talking about those issues”; there was a winking acknowledgement that this is now a consumer product and not a piece of “theatre”

·      Andrea – about the cultural pressure on the reviewer, we kind of sensed some hesitancy to criticize the play because it’s about the military;

·      Amy – Let’s talk about the marketing, and that falls under the heading of the point of these reviews; there seems to be a horrible dysfunctional relationship between reviewers and the theatre on a business level; something is not working; after reading Justin’s review, I felt that something needed to change

·      Justin – we’re looking at a smaller non-profit theatre’s review and trying to compare that to a Broadway show’s review, that’s going to drive audiences into the theatre; when I worked for a small theatre, we wanted good reviews to send to grant givers to say “We’re awesome!”

·      Jenna – I worked at Victory Gardens and mined reviews to find selling points

·      Justin – you make a sheet of positive sound bytes of good reviews; performance review is not an option we included in our audience surveys; “from a friend” and “loyal subscriber” were the most popular choices; the audience at ‘Black Watch’ seems to be at least half full of people who saw it 18 months ago; performance reviews don’t necessarily capture the performance; if they’re reviewing a small theatre, they’re not going to want to hurt the little guy

·      Sara – I found it funny that the reviewer remarked that the best audience was actually us, and how wrong he was! are they taking a shot at us? An anti-intellectual comment? A mis-characterization?

·      Dorothy – we did talk about that and something that was brought up was that it’s more of Jones’ posturing above that kind of humor; “Yeah, I thought that stuff was funny….once.”

·      Ellen – It’s an inane understanding of what academic knowledge in this fields constitute; you’ve completely misunderstood who we are.

·      Whitney – the exclusive snarkiness closes out the people who should be seeing it, in his opinion; his review paints a bad picture of it for people like us

·      Sara – It’s so middle-brow, bourgeois

·      Dorothy – it’s a good play for people who like bad things!

·      Amy – You have horrible taste and are snobby!

·      Dorothy – I feel that comes up a lot in bad reviews – this is terrible! But if you had taste, you wouldn’t like it! The people who go to Fieri’s restaurant don’t care what the NY Times thinks of the restaurant!

·      Amy – it’s one thing to provide a vicious takedown of Spiderman: Turn off the Dark, but there is a financial responsibility to a reviewer to say “if you’re going to spend $500 on a ticket, you shouldn’t see this one”; the review did give me a really excellent sense of what it would be like, eating in Fieri’s restaurant; I agreed with Jones about Equivocation but I though he was an asshole!

·      Ellen – Even in Hedy Weiss’ overly superlative, headache-inducing review had a lot in common with the Jones review in that they’re trying to be overly witty; in doing so, they’re emulating the show; I find that very informative; it only really comes into clarity when you read multiple reviews by the same reviewer; this can be a source of genuine information;

·      Amy – Dorothy mentions that by referencing Max Bialystock, he’s doing the same thing!

·      Dorothy – snarky things can be made well if they do have different layers of why a person is being snarky about it, not just that they didn’t like something; the restaurant reviewer is making fun of more than just the food, but everything;

·      Ellen – the quality of the restaurant is exaggeration, overmuch, always; the review is too much! it spills beyond the bounds of a normal food review; it captures stylistically what’s up, and what particularly offends this food reviewer; lack of seriousness, technique, carefulness, and so on.

·      Sara – I appreciated that the reviewer points out that Fieri is making fun of his customers; I’m going to give you the best of your food, and he’s just serving you Applebee’s and calling that genuine; that’s really offensive to me; the reviewer does a good job at expressing his hopes for Fieri’s sincerity, and his letdown.

·      Iris – I’ve totally been that person in the restaurant; he used specifics to snark, and I understood the restaurant much more

·      Ellen – the location and site of the restaurant tells us that this is a business enterprise; he hawks mac n’ cheese and porkchops, but you should get good food, not bad food; the review is all about the cruel bait and switch; this would be the restaurant for people who wouldn’t want to go to a place like Café Bouloud

·      Amy – part of the role of the reviewer is as gatekeepers; we were supposed to see Black Watch because Jones told us to;

·      Jennifer – This reminds me of the Grand Forks Herald review of the Olive Garden; she goes on to share details and people made fun of her for really appreciating Olive Garden; I can understand why Jones wants to separate himself from reviewers like the Olive Garden lady;

·      Amy – I think there is a value to recognizing the difference between a Martha Stewart brand towel and the actual towel she has in her house; the role of the reviewer is as reporter, to acknowledge that this thing happened and this is the quality of the experience I had

·      Ellen – this is one of the strongest commonalities between blog posts - - I thought Jenna’s account of what was masquerading as review (only plot regurgitation); taking apart what happens when a reviewer applies praise; for better or worse, we are in the business of giving out praise in this profession; you have to learn to do it well and subtly; it is an art, and it seems to me that the review is setting up a false paradigm about praise; praise needs to be descriptive, it can’t be a bunch of adjectives attached to a plot synopsis; it’s very hard to do this; it’s astonishing to me that it remains such a conspicuous problem, even with Black Watch and the attempt to narrativize it, to ignore the extratextual goings-on; the one thing reviewers can rehash easily are basically what the script is; I wanted to talk a little bit about Cody’s blog post and talk about the demand for contextualization; I don’t think all of us left the production with the political problems on our minds in equal measure;

·      Amy – I think the question that Cody raised is that how do we hold reviewers responsible for political or historical contexualization without setting them into ideological camps? the fact of the matter is that most theatre/cultural events, though maybe conservative in some way, but it’s not a bastion of conservatism; where is the line between articulating an ideological and political position of the play and making an argument for/against it?

·      Dorothy – I think Jones did, in a way, make a clear political stance; I tend to historicize theatre reviews even if they’re contemporary; the way he’s comfortable with the military, that this war thing isn’t a big deal - - - this tells me a lot; I think they can’t avoid their political views; I don’t think it’s necessarily beneficial to have someone be more aware organically of their politics, since history won’t have an accurate portrait of this;

·      Cody – it seemed like very cursory mentions of ideas of the play; for me, I didn’t get a sense for what the play would be thematically; I think if a viewer went off of Jones’ review, they’d be really disappointed

·      Ellen – I want to see Jones ask “I felt this about this subject after I saw this play, and I want to know why and how I got there!”; 

Prompt 21, Dorothy

I'm sorry this is late, I lost track of time and also struggled to find a performance I have recently been to that received any reviews! I searched for at least 10 different performances I've been to in the last year or two, and finally had to go in the way-back machine.

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/blood-and-passion-in-a-new-salome/

This review is over-all well written, but there are some organizational problems that make it, in my estimation, a less than great review. The most obvious of these is that the description of the set and the staging is a throw away, the last paragraph of the review. It seems to me that reviews are most helpful when they help a reader who has not seen the performance envision it in their mind. The sets for this staging were particularly interesting, with a dark, dystopian aesthetic that reminded me of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Without that information at the beginning, the reader could, quite naturally, imagine a very traditional pseudo-Babylonian look which frames the performance in a different light. The costuming is never mentioned at all, which further separates the reader from the performance and avoids more possible venues of analysis (especially considering that the Five Hebrews, characters in the opera, were dressed as modern day Hasidic Jews, an anomaly amongst the non-specific,  vaguely futuristic garments worn by all the other characters).

I am also curious about the introduction referring to the “bravely and marvelously macabre production,” without really describing what makes this production more macabre than any other. He later references the Grand Guignol when speaking of the final scene (in which Salome hold the decapitated head of John the Baptist), but again, this didn’t capture the actual production, which wasn’t any darker than Salome’s story usually is, and, as Grand Guignol implies, didn’t feature a more realistic, special effects assisted beheading. To me, this again misses an opportunity to really capture what made this performance unique. In that final scene, this Salome practically straddles the head of John the Baptists, rubbing it against her crotch as it bleeds bright red stage blood profusely. This scene did not seem to be, as the review implies, a marvelous dark romp, but the logical conclusion to a Salome portrayed more as hysterical (with all the misogyny implied) than seductive. I don’t bring this up to say that the reviewer should have shared my interpretation, but rather to say that by not showing the characterizations that set this production apart, he fails the reader.

Blog Post 21- Iris

In her review of "Equivocation," Hedy Weiss starts us out by giving us a definition of the title word. This is useful information, as the play explores the concept of equivocation in great detail. But as far as I'm concerned, that definition was the only part of the review that matched up to my experience of the show.

First of all, let's talk about specificity. As Ming hilariously pointed out, there are a lot of adverb-adjective combinations in here that just muddle the writing. But I found some of them to be downright misleading. How can you get away with calling the actress who played Judith "beautifully understated yet strong" when every other review tagged her as flat and forgettable? How can you talk about the "feminist undertow" in a play with one female character? And what, pray tell, does the phrase "snap, crackle and pop" do to the reader's understanding of this production? I'll give you "The Daily Show," I'll give you Aaron Sorkin, even if I think it's insulting to "The West Wing," but I will NOT give you breakfast cereal.

The part of this review that I found the most disappointing was in the premise itself. Weiss starts the review with a definition of equivocation, and a taste of how important it will be in the plot of the play. But we get very little information about Shag's struggle to find a balance in his work. We hear nothing of his responsibilities to his company, his studies under Garnet, or his fear for his own soul. We only hear that "Shagspeare turns out to be a master equivocator." This is simply untrue. Shag never learns how to equivocate- he just writes "Macbeth" instead. This was one of my biggest gripes with the play, and Weiss overlooks it entirely, just like James overlooks it in the play because "Macbeth" is full of magic and witches. By being general when she could have been specific, and by falling for the production's shoddy misdirection when it comes to equivocation, I feel like this review misses the mark.

Course Blog 21 [Sara]: The Transcendent, Transformative Power of Theatre

By and large, I felt that most of the reviews of the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre's 2012 production of Black Watch fell short in their inattention to the concept of genre, both in an interrogation of the object under review's manipulation of genre and in the medium of the theatrical review itself. This was in evidence in most of our posted examples, but perhaps best exemplified by Oliver Sava's Chicago Theater Beat article that seems, at best, unsure of its own hermeneutics.

I was drawn to this piece, in part, because of Sava's earnest appreciation for Black Watch's innovative theatrics: 

"Incorporating music, movement, and video, director John Tiffany creates a visceral, multi-sensory experience that will shake audience members to their core, and not just because of the booming sound system. Black Watch is the type of play that shows the transcendent, transformative power of theater, and kudos to Chicago Shakespeare for bringing this play to our city."

He seems here to recognize that the true power in Black Watch as a work theatre is its innovative approach to story-telling, but then fails to develop this idea, reverting instead to a textual summary and emotional analysis of the story-level of the play rather than the physical reality of the production, with such remarks as:

"Burke’s script is a deeply powerful look at the history of the Scottish regiment, and captures all the tension, danger, and ennui of their recent campaign in Iraq. Enemy combat is rarely seen, with the play focusing on the conflicts amongst the troops and within the soldiers’ minds, creating a brutally honest portrayal of the horrors of war."

and

"Despite the Scottish dialects and setting, it is easy to relate to Burke’s script, and that connection is what makes Black Watch such a powerful production."

Black Watch is neither a history play nor simply a human interest story "probing the emotional and mental effects of war on the soldiers." In fact, it's history is largely biased and full of holes and its revelations about the male experience of war typical, even maudlin, in spite of its recognition of the effects of the changing nature of terror-based warfare in the twenty-first century. What is interesting about Black Watch is its very physicality, its integration of dance and multimedia with interview-derived text, its subversion of the genre of documentary theatre and its comment on the inadequacy of linear, causal structure and even the medium of text-based narrative to communicate the truth of history, war, or the human condition. The most that Sava says about this is that:

"Black Watch doesn’t follow a traditional plot structure, but rather gives short, concentrated looks at the soldiers’ Iraq experiences that are broken up by abstract movement sequences that build on the thematic themes of the piece."

But Black Watch isn't a straight play juxtaposed by movement scenes highlighting its "thematic themes" (really?), it is something more akin to dance-theatre, a postmodern deconstruction of documentary, an exploration of the aspects of affect present in military space. Savas gets in his own way by adhering to the genre-conventions of typical theatrical reviews with their insistence on plot and character as the dominant items of interest. He plays to the newpaper reader/playgoer's somewhat impoverished expectations of what theatre is/should be, i.e. emotionally engaging stories and "relateable" characters. As such, he fails to push himself past identifying with the plot and historicizing the moment depicted in the play to actually discuss what makes the production exemplify "the transcendent, transformative power of theater." In setting out to make his audience understand where Black Watch is special, he gives only the details which make it "culinary" as Brecht might say, and none of those which make it a experience that goes past theatre's "shoulds" and challenge its "coulds."

Where Sava goes wrong in his account is in failing to identify the positive effects of the manipulation of genre at work in Black Watch and thus he becomes trapped by the trappings of the theatrical review. In this he not only gives a impoverished description of the work of the production, but can never even approach a critical evaluation of the work's project, the successes and failures of its manipulations of genre/story-telling and the possibilities of performance.

Course Blog 21 (Jenna)

When reading over the assortment of reviews of the plays we saw in Chicago, I was surprised to note how little performance appeared in the reviews. While many of the reviewers adopted a particular performance style for crafting their reports (Chris Jones and his collection of puns comes to mind), the substantive sections of these articles, particularly those discussing Equivocation, ignored the actual performance. Instead, the Equivocation reviewers mainly provided their readers with glorified plot summaries carefully crafted to include a plethora of laudatory or acerbic adjectives that, as Justin mentioned, may be lifted from context for commercial purpose.

Of the four, Dan Zeff's was the only review to address the production values of the play. Even then, the various designers were granted single sentences of little analytic value, such as, “William Boles has designed a flexible set that creates appropriate environments the play’s several locations.” or “Janice Pytel designed the period costumes.” “Flexible” and “period” contribute little to an understanding of mis en-scene. These assessments are mere afterthoughts in what is largely a description of plot. Even Zeff's analysis of the acting performances are organized around the story of the play. For instance, he writes, “At the Victory Gardens, Marc Grapey is a superb Shakespeare, not the literary deity he would become after his death but an audience-high man suddenly enmeshed in a very stressful situation. He also has to work among the feisty personalities and egos of his cohorts Richard Burbage (Bruce Young), Robert Armin (Matt Kahler), and Richard Sharpe (Arturo Soria), as well as report to the menacing Robert Cecil (Mark Montgomery).” While presented as a review of Grapey's performance, these two sentences fail to mention a single moment of that performance. They describe the actions of Grapey's character rather than his embodiment of that character. Ostensibly, an actor in any production of Equivocation could be “superb” provided he enact the plot and encounter the listed characters.

This devotion to describing Equivocation's plot enforces many of the comments we have made about attention to narrative in our viewing, reviewing, and discussing performance, namely that it has become detrimentally inescapable. If I had not seen Equivocation and had only read these four reviews of the Chicago production, I would have a sufficient understanding of the script, but would be at a loss to envision how that script had been performed.

Course Blog #21 - The Review that Got It Wrong (Jess)

I didn't see Black Watch with the rest of the class, but I did see 44 Plays for 44 Presidents, performed by the NeoFuturists in Chicago. This assignment was harder than I anticipated - - - most reviews I found were quite positive, so finding the Review That Got It Wrong was a bit of a challenge. But, lo and behold, TimeOut Chicago's review fit the bill.

Benno Nelson reviewed the roughly 2 hour long play, and I feel he missed the mark. He calls out two specific performers to applaud their work and gives a quick synopsis of a few of the presidential vignettes, but he completely ignored the parts of the show that gave it soul and structure. He left out any mention of live musicians, song, dance, puppetry, or any of the myriad mediums used to tell the 44 stories on stage. He also failed to include any reference to how the NeoFuturists cast the show, which was gender and color blind. I suppose potential audience members would be aware of the NeoFuturists' reputation as more unconventional storytellers of sorts, but Nelson did a disservice to the work and performers by omitting these key elements from his review. Levin's ideas on why opera is unsettling work here with this show, and are very important to understanding the work as a whole. It's a mix of performance mediums that upset traditional notions of space, bodies, and narrative, and Nelson didn't recognize the importance of that, apparently.

He did have something quite astute to remark on, if wrong in my view: "Where the evening struggles is in the impenetrability of its curation. The tone, form and content of the plays is unpredictable and too often feels forced or self-important." It is absolutely key to note the impossibility of a venture like 44 Plays for 44 Presidents. To encapsulate the lives and times of all our presidents is indeed a futile pursuit, since there is no singular truth or narrative to define the presidency in all its human parts. So, with this in mind, the NeoFuturists crafted specific vignettes that illuminate (or reiterate) slivers of what a particular president represents to America very generally, how they came to power, or their life stories that could inform their choices made as president. Their aim was not to give a definitive, detailed portrait of each president, but to, at best, craft moments in which truths or opinions about each president were revealed.

Blog Post #21 (Justin): Wrong Reviews Equal Capital

Dumb question: Why do major and minor news outlets [I'm using the word 'news' loosely] generate theatre reviews? Yes, these opinion pieces assist potential audience members to make decisions concerning their next theatre-going experience. And for working theatre artists, the articles provide a way for checking on the projects of friends and colleagues, which can be a fruitful experience (in ‘warming-the-heart’ or ‘groups-to-avoid’ senses). And, much as I hate to say it, they can provide constructive feedback that could change an artist’s future work, if not the current production under review. [Twyla Tharp’s production Movin’ Out comes to mind, which the New York Times controversially chose to review while it was still in a preliminary run in Chicago. The poor review led to a complete overhaul of the show’s second act – and a much more favorable review by the Times when the show opened on Broadway…]

All of these answers point to a particular accepted ‘accuracy’ on the part of the reviewer (taking the reviewer’s ‘opinion’ to be accurate due to expertise or specialization in the field). But, far from critical, many reviews solely praise a production (such as Hedy Weiss’s review of Equivocation for The Sun-Times) or deride a few elements yet ultimately recommend the production for other ‘redeeming’ qualities. Unfortunately, the drive to give praise where none is due (and I would contend that only the set of Equivocation is worthy of praise), may be related to spectacle’s inextricable link to capital, as pointed out by Debord (in much stronger terms). Theatre reviews are not just tied to ticket sales and publicity to theaters (although both are strong capitalist incentives for the reviews). They are also key pieces of evidence used by professional theaters to raise money through donations, grants, and corporate support. Money for productions is raised long before the show goes on, so theater's must point to other evidence of artistic merit, this is especially true for small companies where full productions are only intermittently staged. Without constant live theater to showcase to funders, overly positive reviews are development staff members’ best friends. And, yes - theater reviewers are aware of this fact.

Thus, Victory Gardens is now armed with Weiss’s review of Equivocation for their next meeting with a major donor or submission to a granting agency. The review can be handed as evidence of artistic merit with key portions highlighted: “a snap, crackle and pop production at Victory Gardens Theater,” “Director Sean Graney, in peak form, deftly moves his supremely brainy and talented cast in the play’s speed-of-light mood shifts,” “Everyone here is operating in breathtaking overdrive in a play that also pays homage to the theater.” Each is a handy sound bite to use when trying to garner funds for the theater’s next production.

Blog 21 (Cody): Wrong Review, Black Watch

I have never been wont to allow the virtuosity and aesthetics of a well-crafted stage, well-choreographed dance moves, well-timed sound effects, good acting, bawdy jokes, and a few tear-jerking, heartbreaking scenes to absolve a play's bad or ignorant politics.  Chris Jones, however, seems far less conflicted than myself with naming Black Watch a four-star success.  Though, in a way, the play was a success insofar as it certainly drew a large audience while appealing to both conservatives and liberals: hardened conservatives got to see their "freedom ain’t free" ideology reenacted on stage while spineless liberals got to shed a few tears and feel sorry for someone.  And most importantly, the play was a spectacle.  Jones writes that Black Watch "is a genuine [?] spectacle that revels in its own theatricality and comes replete with music, marching, explosive effects and its own piper."  Do we see a problem with this reveling-in-one's-own-theatricality relative to the complex, controversial politics at play within the (major) gaps of Black Watch’s plot?  Yes, the sound effects were cool, the pornography on the TV screens hilarious, the sign-language-interpretive-dancing mesmerizing, but all the latter (for me, at least) had one primary effect: to hide the fact that these soldiers probably killed, collectively, hundreds of Iraqi civilians, demolished houses and towns, and destroyed families all because their jingoistic, male blood lead them to battle for the greater (Western) good.  Instead, the audience was meant to feel unequivocal sympathy for these white, male soldiers’ castrated warfare-hard-ons without qualifying these feelings with any geopolitical context.  As Jones writes, the play was a celebration of the “grunts on the ground” of the white, male aggressor, of this regiment’s chivalric history, which made the play “very exciting to watch.”  Yes, exciting to watch indeed, so long as you’re a white, middle-class Westerner in Chicago or Edinburgh.  Like an uncritical audience member of this play's targeted audience, Jones provides no substantive analysis of Black Watch's themes and politics, leading the reader to believe that a bricolage of theatricality, a few startling and impressive sound effects, and a war story make for a four-star performance.