On criticism and being a douche
The last two weeks have been consumed with the Minnesota Fringe Festival. No, I'm not going to write about my show.
Instead, I'm going to write about one review that caught my eye among over 2000 audience reviews because the review was neither useful as a critique of someone's work or worthwhile as a rating of the show. It got me thinking about the nature of creativity and the nature of critiquing the work of someone else.
The critique in question was for Joseph Scrimshaw's "Brain Fighters" and it was a 2 kitty review.
For those unfamiliar with the Fringe rating scale, audiences are encourage to rate shows anywhere from 0 to 5 "kitties" with 0 meaning "Holy crap this show was awful" and 5 meaning "holy crap this show was amazing."
A 2, therefore, is a negative review.
Negative reviews are fine, by the way. You are never going to please everyone and sometimes the review highlights a problem with the show that is genuinely fixable.
This review was not overly long and read like a resentful producer (I don't know this to be true) complaining that Joseph's show was crawling with people while his show was not.
What pissed me off was the subject line of the review which was "I could write this in my sleep."
Really? Accepting for a moment that "in my sleep" is hyperbole and what you really mean is that any yahoo could have written that script with little to no effort, I'd like to issue a challenge.
Your job is to write a show in an hour. Right now. Start the clock and in an hour, you are done. Then send me the script and we'll see if it is better than "Brain Fighters." Or "Highlander: The Musicial." Or any number of other shows, good and bad, that I saw at the Fringe Festival this year.
You can't do it because writing a show is hard work and even if the show is a bad show, it took a ton of effort. If the reviewer was a producer, I have even less respect for them because they know that.
They know that anyone who has ever created anything spent a ton of time on in. They thought about it long before they ever started to put it on paper. Once the wrote it down, they spent long hours trying to make sure they got the words just right. You can't produce anything "in your sleep."
I saw some bad shows during the fringe. I saw a couple of shows that I very nearly left rather than be subjected to the entire thing.
But I didn't because I understand the amount of work that goes into any show - even a bad one. Unless you are actively trying to antagonize me as an audience member, I'm going to stick it out because I know how much work went into getting that show on stage.
Now, I may give your show a bad review. I may tell friends to avoid it like the plague.
One thing I will never do, however, is disrespect the work it took to make that show happen.
A script that doesn't work still took work to write. The person who wrote it genuinely believed that they had a good idea and they tried to make that idea play to the audience. Sometimes it doesn't. Nobody is going to be more upset about that than the person who wrote it.
So if you think that their script was a failure, that is fine. Either tell them why it didn't work for you or avoid eye contact so you don't have to tell them how much you hated their show.
Don't start throwing around insults about the lack of effort it must have taken to produce the thing. You know that is BS and you are just taking a cheap shot. A cliche cheap shot.
Remember that anyone who puts something in front of an audience doesn't do that lightly. And that means you shouldn't dismiss it lightly.
Because that kind of behavior doesn't belittle the individual who wrote the show. It only belittles the person who wrote the review.