Talk to me about theater blogging

Would it be correct to say that theater in New York City is the thing you cover most? There's a lot about vegetarian cooking and books as well, but would you still call Surplus a "theater blog"? What do you think is the value of having a blog about your life that covers theater versus a blog that exists solely to review theater? Do you think one approach is more or less valuable to the greater "theater community"?

There was a span a couple of years ago, around 2007, when theatre was definitely the focus of my blog.  It all happened accidentally - I started this blog to just vomit my thoughts onto the internet, but since I love theatre, and see a lot of it and think about it a lot, much of my writing happened to be about theatre.  And then in maybe 2006 or so, there was this sort of coalescing of a theatre blog community.

To back up for a second, the way that I, and I think this is true for many people, ended up getting any strangers to read my blog was basically through commenting on their sites (not just for this nefarious purpose, of course), and then, once in a while, they'd follow my comment back to my blog and be like, "Oh, neat, this is something I'll read."  Or if I link to someone's site and they see in their statcounter that my site linked to theirs.  I've found blogs to read myself the same way.  But so there's that way that commenting opens up blog networks.

So a few years ago, at least that's when I started discovering theatre blogs.  Before that I'd been reading about toddlers and, like, Gawker.  And the theatre blog "community" started forming somehow, and I got swept up in that.  I never thought of my blog as a theatre blog, but I wrote about a lot of theatre, maybe 60% of my content (I really have no idea), and I certainly wasn't going to be like, "No, keep me out of your bloggy community. Take your link traffic and referrals and camaraderie elsewhere!"  

And also, these people were cool, and I am a sucker for a group that wants me to be - assumes I am - a part of it.  I liked the things I was reading through this web.

But that doesn't answer your question so much.  Let's see, would I consider my blog a theatre blog.  No, not any more than, in 2007 and 2008, after my workplace discovered (quite kindly) my blog, I would've considered it a lolcats blog.  (More on that transition in a moment.)  It's always been my personal blog, a repository for my thoughts and opinions and stories.

I think that format has actually sometimes slowed down my blog's growth - other theatre bloggers take their sites waaay more seriously, see it as a journalistic responsibility.  Since Surplus has always been an outlet for me, I never felt beholden to my readership, working on a sort of "They'll find me" thing, which doesn't always work.  I write about a lot of theatre for non-theatre people, and then I'll not write about theatre for a month if I'm not seeing any, and the blogging about cats and farmers markets can turn the theatre people off.  

But as much as the more hardcore theatre blogs (and the ones more fully committed to the "theatre blog community" and its... issues) have found greater readership, Surplus still feels right for me.  It exists because I need a place to post the latest Where the Wild Things Are trailer and share my thoughts, or to report on the Port Authority greenmarket, because if I emailed my friends with every thing like that, they would disown me.  And there are some people out there who like reading my wide-ranging sharings, and I love them for it.


When was the first time a theater company offered you press tickets to their show? Or was it the other way around; did you contact a theater company and offer to review their production on the blog?  Can you pinpoint any particular entry that may have gotten press peoples' attention?

I'm pretty sure the first time was Roundabout's production of Pig Farm, in the summer of 2006.  At least, that's the first I remember.  Theatre bloggers had started getting some invites - I know my friend Isaac, at Parabasis, had gotten one for The Wedding Singer, and I was mad jealous.  (I don't remember if Isaac and I were friends yet at this point, or just blog-friends.)  I think producers were starting to notice that the theatre blogs existed, and they were assuming that people read us.  And Pig Farm had gotten a really rough review in the Times.  So they organized - and this was the first of these I heard about - a Bloggers' Night, where they'd invite us all on one night.  Before that I think producers were writing to folks individually with ticket offers.  I wasn't able to go to the Pig Farm night, but they weren't the last people to offer tickets.

I don't think I've ever approached a theatre for tickets - I'm not a journalist, and I'm not a professional reviewer.  But I am a sucker for free theatre tickets, so I often accept offers.  (Especially when they're for things I wanted to see.)  Oftentimes blogger invitations will be extended with a "we'd love for you to write about the show after seeing it" attitude, which is great, because it exempts you from a negative write-up if you don't want to say bad things.  You're given space to just not say anything.

Looking back at my June 2006 archives, I don't think there was a particular watershed moment.  I'm writing about: theatre, tv, books, Stephen Colbert, science, An Inconvenient Truth - I think I just blogged about enough theatre that it tipped the scales, and, maybe more importantly, other theatre blogs were starting to refer to Surplus as a theatre blog, so I had that street cred, or pedigree.

 
You currently have a day job, as the Literary Associate at MCC, an off-Broadway theater in Manhattan. Did you ask your employers before starting the blog? Do they know you have a blog? Has it ever been a problem? It seems your attitude is that it's your blog, you can promote your theater if you want to, but have you ever been accused of having a conflict of interest by readers or colleagues? Do most theater bloggers have day jobs in the industry but not as journalists?

I started my blog before coming to work at MCC, as something separate from my job.  An escape from it, in fact.  And I continued in that vein at MCC.  In 2006 or 2007, when the theatre blogs were really taking off, David Cote from Time Out, was moderating a panel about theatre blogs, and invited me to take part.  Until that time, I was blogging semi-anonymously - I used my first name only, and didn't write about work at all.  In order to take part in the panel, I knew I'd need to break that, and I consulted with one of my bosses.  (He happened to be the one who would know what a blog is.)  So I told him I had a blog, and about the opportunity to be on the panel, and in talking about it I decided I didn't want to do the panel.  But so then that one boss knew.

Then, in 2007, Time Out included in its spring theatre preview a list of theatre blogs to bookmark, and I was on that list (on the web and in print, thank you).  And this boss from before announced it, congratulatorily, at a staff meeting. That was a turning point for me, in what I felt comfortable writing - one day I blogged something about new play development, I think, with something about how I wished all artistic directors would read the thing I was linking to, and this boss called me and was like, "Is there something you want to tell me?"  (Me: "No! I meant in general!")  But as much as work knowing about it - and I have a strict no-work-on-the-blog rule, which I only sometimes break, despite one of my other bosses asking why I haven't promoted MCC's shows - it's also been the theatre world in general.  The times actors I know and work with have told me they've read my blog.  Or the time I wrote about a director having nice hair, and his fiancee commenting.  (She and I have since become friends.  And he does, I'll say it - Kip Fagan has awesome hair.  Do your worst, Heidi.) 

Knowing that the people I'm writing about may very well read my writing, well, first it put me into a lolcat phase.  I wrote about theatre much less in the year or so after I got de-anonymized.  And coming out of that, I've become much less inclined to write anything negative about a show I've seen.  I'll still occasionally take an organization to task, but-- I think James Urbaniak (brilliant actor and livejournaler) put it this way: I won't write anything I wouldn't say at a party after two drinks.  


Do you consider yourself a journalist?

No. Definitely not.  Nothing I write is formal enough or professional enough for that.  I mean, I've written entire posts in lolcats.  But I am a writer, of whatever sort.  The lolcat thing is actually one of my favorite posts.  (Eep.)


What was even up with that David Cote Time Out New York wish list? I love the tagline, by the way: "TONY's Theater editor plans the future. By David Cote ". The Future! Has been planned! Fantastic! Anywho, as you I'm sure know, one of his wishes was the following:

5. Bloggers: Engage/enrage
This item will generate noise (and that's the point): I wish bloggers would mix it up more. Does it take a Rachel Corrie fiasco to generate heat? The theater blogosphere has been dull, insular and quiet lately. We need more arguments, more dirt, more bloody knock-down-drag-out fights. Not just self-promotion, obscure manifestos and production diaries. And here's hoping for a new breed of long-form critics worth reading.

Do you agree or disagree that the theater blogosphere is 1. Dull 2. Insular and 3. Quiet Lately? What are these bloody knock-down-drag-out fights he wants? Should blogs be bloody for the sake of being bloody? His own blog never struck me as being especially "bloody"...is it?  Is he basically saying everyone just supports and promotes and comments on their friends? Do they?

David Cote is amazing.  Mostly because he loves stirring up shit like this.  I love it.  He's the only reviewer I know of in the city, especially at an organization of solid size and standing, who challenges theatres and producers to kick more ass.

But did the blogosphere need this kick in the ass?  I don't know.  It's tricky because almost every theatre blogger is also a theatre professional, or an aspiring one, and only a very few people write anonymously.  (And yes, our theatre blogs sometimes get us work.) But since we're using our real names, putting ourselves out there like this, we can't go about trashing other people.  Also, it's just not nice. 

So is the theatrosphere (I hate that word, but it's shorter to type... unless I follow it up with an explanatory parenthetical, of course) dull?  Maybe a little.  But the answer to that isn't more fights. It's people breaking out of their writing ruts, out of the insular feedback loop that sometimes gets started.  The last thing I, personally, want to read about on a theatre blog is other theatre blogs.  I don't mean in terms of "So-and-so has a really awesome/interesting/stupid post," I mean the theatrosphere drama. I do not care.  And it's easy to get sucked into it, to give it a lot of meaning and power and importance, when, in reality, it does not exist outside of this little world.

There have been some great firestorm issues that ripped through the theatre blogs - the question of new play development, and its evils, which always gets me going, because I work in new play development, and it's not evil, but most bloggers are writers or directors or something, and I'm sort of on the other side.  (Not that it's me vs. them - just different perspectives.)  The My Name is Rachel Corrie brouhaha also got the blogs going.  More recently there was lots of drama about the female playwrights study, but that frustrated me because the drama got going before the study came out, and was based on a lot of hearsay and really tenuous stuff. 

And that's a case of blog bloodyness that's actually really bad for everyone.  There's bad information, unnecessarily high emotions, and people freaking out about nothing. 

The other question I put to David is: What's the point?  Are Artistic Directors reading blogs?  Are producers?  Are they listening to us?  If not, it's just bloggers getting bloggers riled up.


Do you have a response to this comment on The Cote List on the TONY website?

Posted by Matthew Risch on Wed, Jul 22, at 06:14pm

Eek! To want to give bloggers more power seems not only a frightening prospect, but a downright dangerous one. I am an actor who has admittedly scoured the internet for bloggers' "reviews" and "dirt" and have found them to be more often than not dangerous, cruel, irrational, and from an uneducated POV! If anything the internet has just become a pool for everyone to vomit up their 2 cents in. God help us if some of these people become critics. Words are weapons and need to be handled as such.

First of all, dude, don't be a jerk.  "God help us if some of these people become critics."  Have you read the freaking New York Times?  But there's also a huge range in what's being written on the internet - there are dirt-slingers and rank amateurs, and there are people who take their writing very seriously. There is legitimate journalism and criticism and activism happening on blogs, and that deserves respect.  The internet's egalitarianism is intense - I'm grateful for it, because, hello, that is why I am here writing, but it means anyone can have a platform.  But it also means, and this is its beauty, that the reader gets to decide what she takes in.  It's the opposite of the Times being the "arbiters of taste."  And it's part of what I love about blogs - I've gotten to know which bloggers share my taste, and so I give more weight to their reviews (theatrical or otherwise).  And then there are some blogs I don't read, because I don't like their content or perspective.  You get to decide what you let into your brain.  And, okay, maybe Perez Hilton disproves this theory, but I think, to quote JP Morgan in Ragtime [Note from Amanda: Nerd Alert.], the cream rises to the top.  Except I don't mean it in the semi-eugenicsy way I think he meant it.  I just think that awesome bloggers get noticed, and if they get some clout, it's not the worst thing in the world.

But, as noted in the comments on that post, bully to Matthew Risch for using his real name there.  Not every commenter was so brave.


What has been your most positive feedback you've ever gotten on the blog or a blog entry?

Oh gosh... I think, well, this isn't theatre-related, and it's a bit convoluted, but-- basically, my blogging (at Surplus and my column at Cheap Healthy Good, which I got by virtue of my Surplus writing and, I think, some clever comments) got me started contributing to this Canadian food magazine, Spezzatino. It's run by the woman who also runs Stumptuous, a weight lifting for women site that I adore, and which somewhat changed my life, at least in theory.  She had put a post on Stumptuous saying that she was looking for contributors for Spezzatino, and I answered, supplying my writing at Cheap Healthy Good as my portfolio. She asked me to write an article, and after that, another (which is due tomorrow, eep).  To have this woman, whose website I so love and respect, say that she loved my writing was a huge compliment. 

In terms of Surplus, what's really stuck with me has been the (rare, rare) times people have said a post was really funny.  What David Cote wrote about my blog in the Time Out blogs to bookmark article meant a lot to me, too.  (Again with the telling me I'm funny.)  And knowing that people read it.  Every time a person reads my blog, an angel gets its wings, the grinch's heart grows two sizes, etc.  


Why do you think most people - who presumably have jobs and lives, though some may actually not - take the time to write blogs? Given the option, would you want blogging to be your full-time job?

I think it's different for different people.  But it's usually a combination, in varying proportions, of having something to say, thinking people will want to hear what you have to say, and loving writing.  I wrote all through college, and though my blog is less serious and less rigorous than any of that, it's still an important creative outlet for me.  I think the blog style, the sort of post-valley girl voice that's evolved across the board, is really interesting.  There's craft there, even if it's harder to see - the timing of a well-placed "uh," the judicious use of all-caps. Seriously - just read Wonkette. They're brilliant writers.  And I appreciate that, and aspire to it.

And oh my god yes would I ever!  When I first started blogging, I think I saw it as biding my time, spinning my wheels, until I got back into "real writing."  But it's one of my favorite things to do, and it is definitely real writing.  Just with some likes thrown in.  But if you've read David Foster Wallace, you know that that sort of tone can be legit.  I'm sure that in a full-time, pressurey situation, blogging might lose some of its appeal, but I would love to get to find out.