Sunday, January 06, 2008

An Angry White Guy in Chicago: The Year in the Rear View Mirror: 2007:

2007 brought the theater world the half-assed, uninspired publicity stunt that was 365 Days/ 365 Plays, an exercise in performance art that was, depending on who you asked, a great community building experience, a demonstration of the connectedness of American theater artists or a huge stunt pulled off nation-wide. Most did not, however, discuss the brilliance of any one of the 365 "plays" Lori-Parks "wrote" for the year-long festival. Why? Because, for the most part, the pieces were badly written bits of theater that left any and all of their failure or success on the shoulders of the performing artists - a feat that could have been accomplished by selecting 365 soup can labels and having 365 different companies "stage" the labels as performance art.

2:07 AM