Web masters

Rob Kozlowski

robkozlowski.blogspot.com

The self-deprecating title of Kozlowski’s blog is Everyone’s Favorite As-Yet-Unproduced Chicago-Based Polish Playwright, but Kozlowski is no stranger to writing. He teaches film history at Columbia College, was a founder of the Playground Theater and teaches comedy writing at Second City. He also wrote a column for the trade paper PerformInk in the ’90s on ways actors could use this mysterious Internet, and penned 1999’s The Actor’s Guide to the Internet (which he says is “so out of date, it defies you to buy it”).

Kozlowski began blogging in 2005, and with his sardonic voice about Chicago theater, it’s become one of the most widely read theater sites in the city. He believes the job of critics should be a pragmatic one: “Our leisure time is so split off among 1,000 different media, we need critics to tell us, ‘Here’s what you should go see.’”

In his own posts about plays, he sounds like a regular-guy fan, as in this comment on Steppenwolf’s Good Boys and True: “I know what you’re thinking. ‘Oh, good. Another play about the problems of rich people!’ Believe me, I share that bias. There was a period at the Goodman and Steppenwolf…where I swear to God every single play prominently featured an enormous plasma television.”

He sometimes writes critically about companies he’d like to see produce his work, but he doesn’t think he’s hurting his own chances. “If I submitted a play and they decided [not to produce it] because I criticized something they did, then I don’t want anything to do with that theater,” he says. “I sort of have nothing to lose at this point. I try to be a smartass as much as possible.”

— Kris Vire