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TheatreLouisville interviews Sherry Deatrick, page 2

The Wednesday Factor

What about the challenges involved in reviewing for a weekly publication? "That does kind of make it hard to scoop anybody," she says with a laugh. However, she tries not to read other reviews until she has turned hers in. "I don't want to be influenced by other people's opinions of what I see. So I always read them, but I'll wait until I've sent that email." The Wednesday distribution date can also mean that some shows get missed, such as when a play only runs for one weekend. LEO doesn't publish a review if the show can't be seen the following weekend.

On the plus side, LEO writers may have more latitude than others in what they can say in print. "We're encouraged to be honest," she explains, "and if we don't like something, to say so, but be able to back it up." Specifics are essential. "Don't just say, 'This sucks,'" she muses. "You've got to say why." She says that it's the reviewer's responsibility not to whitewash. "I think it does the community a service to tell them when there's something that's not good," she says. People deserve some assurance that their money will be well spent.

LEO also allows her to focus on Louisville's smaller, independent productions, spotlighting some important works that The Courier-Journal doesn't cover. "When I first started writing for LEO, I wanted to pay more attention to the independent theatre," she tells us. "Because, you know, Actors [Theatre of Louisville] is great, but I think they get enough attention, and enough support from the community, that they don't need extra help from LEO ... It's the little guys that need the attention — so I try to do that as much as possible."

Occasionally, she finds that readers confuse her with fellow LEO reviewer Rebecca Haithcoat, or erroneously state that LEO (rather than a specific reviewer) liked or disliked a production. Sherry says that Rebecca tends to examine the acting more in her reviews, while she herself approaches them more from a playwright perspective. "I think we balance each other out pretty well," Sherry says.

Analyzing the Process

Although she enters a theatre optimistically, she has been known to walk out of a performance on occasion. "It was outdated, it was dull," she recalls of one such production. "In fact, we left at intermission." The play was a repeat of one that the same theatre had presented quite recently. She then declined to write the review, "because I can't review it if I can't see the whole thing. And I couldn't sit through it." However, the audience seemed to like it. "You know, maybe I'm just too picky," she says, having seen plays she thought were awful but the audience gave them a standing ovation. "I think they revere it too much, thinking that anybody who gets up there on stage is doing a great job. They don't know the nuances, or they're too easily impressed." She says she is glad that the standing ovation is becoming less frequent, and more often reserved for performances that truly deserve it.

She points out that ticket sales alone are not an indicator of quality, and that some of Louisville's more populist productions seem to have been selected primarily to boost revenue. That makes the reviewer's task difficult, or perhaps even cancels it out — i.e., if a show is going to sell tickets no matter what, then "it doesn't need a review," she says, "and especially if I'm going to say I hated it. No, I just leave it alone."

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