It is an increasingly rare pleasure to come across new blogs that offer interesting, long-form writing about theatre and drama, but when it comes it’s a pleasure nonetheless. Sarah Grochala’s Flat Against the Sky is one such blog. Ms. Grochala describes herself as a “theatre writer,” a PhD student at Queen Mary College, University of London, and the winner of the 2007 Amnesty International/iceandfire Protect the Human Playwriting Competition for her play S-27.

Though I’d normally be reluctant to recommend a blog based on a first, single post, I feel safe in doing so here. Her first entry on the arguments for and against “immersive theatre,” “Shopping,” is a nuanced and knowledgable offering:

The arguments for immersive theatre as liberating and empowering make a lot of sense to me intellectually, but I don’t quite buy them in real terms. This is because I often find these performances don’t make me feel either liberated or empowered. They make me feel highly controlled. I’m not a deliberately disruptive participant, but sometimes I have gone “off script.” Seeing some movement on the other side of a large snow covered room during Before I Sleep, I struck out across the drifts to investigate, only to be sharply reprimanded by the theatre police. I dutifully returned back to the path. A very linear path, it should be noted and exactly the same path that everyone before and after me will have followed. In this situation, I don’t feel that I have agency. I feel restricted and oppressed.

As you’ll see when you read her entire entry, this is far from the only facet of her complex response, but it is well and truly delivered. Her blog promises to be a fine companion to Chris Goode’s Thompson’s Bank of Communicable Desire, another long-form idiosyncratic blog of unique interest to theatre writers and others.

Offer Ms. Grochala your welcome to the blogosphere, and encourage her (as we all so often need the encouragement) to continue on.