Mike Daisey Isn’t Done Smacking the American Theater — or Teresa Eyring — Around « Clyde Fitch Report

Mike Daisey Isn’t Done Smacking the American Theater — or Teresa Eyring — Around « Clyde Fitch Report:

Here in New York, meanwhile, you’ve got major nonprofit theaters siphoning off bloggers and segregating them, like African-Americans on Alabama buses. They calling them into early-preview invitations and dubbing whatever those bloggers write “marketing initiativess” and not treating them like what they are — legitimate critics. It’s absurd and it’s shameful. It’s as if Brown vs. Board of Education was written with an exemption for those that worship at the Temple of Dionysus. Feh — as if it isn’t already absurd that blogger-critics aren’t paid to write what they write, because they ought to be. And please, oh Lord, don’t give me the argument that there are too many bloggers and press agents can’t discern which ones are “legitimate.” It was the same story 10 years ago when all the theater websites cropped up and, well, the market figured it out — the publicists figured it out.  No, what Daisey is getting at is another manifestation of theaters being too dumb, too dim, too insular to turn the ship before it strikes the iceberg. It’s also about the fact that the managerial and administrative enablers also depend on the status quo for their own economic survival.