(Different story in film, of course; no critic worth his salt blames a non-directing writer for a bad script, since movie scripts can be altered by directors/producers/studios at will.)

Presumably the reviewer discussed the things that weren’t working in the show because at the end of the day, the production as a whole didn’t work. That’s the way it goes.

Finally, one comment on the original review asks “aren’t reviewers supposed to read the play before writing?” The answer is no; reviewers can only judge the production in front of them. We don’t even know if the script was made available to interested critics.

As regards this reviewer’s practices, you write: “It’s not good journalism.” In point of fact it is not journalism at all. Journalism involves several key factors seemingly absent from this particular effort. To be a journalist first implies that you have endured a process whereby your prior work is evaluated by senior writers and editors to see if it is worthy of being presented beneath their banner.

In true journalism, you must compete to be heard; you don’t just start nattering away. Even those serious-minded outlets which have no corporeal existence outside the internet adopt this model of vetting: you will never write for Stage and Cinema without first braving the Scylla and Charybdis of Tony Frankel and John Topping. (And good luck with that if one is not generously endowed with raw talent.)

Even then, the writer’s work remains always subject to editorial oversight. This can be sometimes a humiliating process, but having one’s copy coldly torn apart and reformed, without recourse, is how you grow as a writer. In editorial, I am quite certain that at least 30-40% of the Bechnya reviewer’s content would have vanished, along with its many instances of self-indulgence. A sentence that begins “Bechnya turns out as an everything but the kitchen soup smorgasbord that falls into its own trap…” would be gone, if for no other reason than nobody has ever seen a kitchen soup – much less in a smorgasbord – and wouldn’t want to even if such existed.

As young bloggers rush headlong into the moist gaping hole that is internet self-publishing, they imagine themselves pioneering some new and improved form of journalism, but they are not. They are simply bypassing those obstacles necessarily put in place to winnow out dilettantes and the unqualified. To be a great lover requires skill, finesse, long experience, sensitivity, and imagination: the same qualities that mark a gifted reviewer. Anything less is just so much fumbling around in the back seat of a ’67 Nova.