Kathryn Schultz has a great piece today on New York Magazine called "How Twitter Hijacked My Mind"; in it, she writes that since joining Twitter, she's found herself formulating thoughts in bite-sized increments.

Sometimes I feel like my opinions about theater are formed in 400-word blocks, because that is the typical length of our theater reviews. Print reviews are so often these fussy little capsules, full of ideas that seem fixed because they're written down. At their worst, they read like an edict from some haughty arbiter of All That Is Good, skating entirely over the notion of subjectivity (the possibility that one person's tedious dystopian fiction is another person's eye-opening parable), as well as the practical realities of theater, which dictate that a Friday night performance is probably going to be more energetic and effective than a Sunday old-person matinee (aka "nap time").

I've mentioned 5 Useless Degrees and a Bottle of Scotch on Blogtown before—it's a podcast that covers theater and whiskey, and I look forward to listening to it after I've seen a show. (I'm not gonna lie, I usually skip the whiskey segment due to... profound indifference.) The reason that I like it so much: Talking about a show, with other people, is a way of reviewing that permits ambiguity, questioning, disagreement; the subjectivity of experience is built in to the format, in a way that it isn't in a print review. The critic's job is to think deeply about a work; it's not to be right, and I like models of criticism that prioritize the thinking-about-the-work over the telling-people-what-to-think-about-the-work.

All of this is to say that I love it when critics disagree, and there's no consensus whatsoever on Artists Rep's new show, Foxfinder.

When I saw Foxfinder, I kept thinking about a quote I'd read on Liminal's website, explaining their mission statement: "The work is not about something. Rather, it is the thing itself." Foxfinder is about something, which is fine, but I did not find the thing itself compelling. (To be fair, I've read a LOT of dystopian YA fiction... it's no Knife of Never Letting Go.)

The 5 Useless Degrees podcasters responded to it more positively than I did, though they have plenty of criticisms; the Willamette Week liked it and found parallels to the NSA and Edward Snowden; Bob Hicks at Oregon Arts Watch, in a glowing review, says it "revels in the sort of dystopian and post-apocalyptic atmosphere that successfully blends shards of medieval memory with warnings of contemporary disaster just around the corner."

Hey, it's almost like we all saw totally different plays... If you've seen it, weigh in in the comments, she said optimistically.