I was quite surprised upon reading Joseph Smeall’s review of “The Illusion” to find that Brendan Horton ’08 had not received any credit for his work as set designer. Considering that this production was his senior thesis, this omission was most glaring. Indeed, this error was compounded by the fact that both William Cranch and Christopher Gillyard were given (quite deserved) credit for their thesis work and were even said to, “have earned their honors,” within the review.

I will give Mr. Smeall the benefit of the doubt and assume that he did not intend to slight Brendan in any way. I suppose it was possible to miss Brendan’s name, even though it appeared in all promotional material for “The Illusion,” including the posters prominently displayed around campus and the Theater and Dance department’s Web site. I also suppose that it was possible for Mr. Smeall to have misplaced the program he received upon seeing the production and not asked for a replacement. It simply struck me as odd that, in a review that seemed to rely heavily on the impression that the writer had performed a good amount of secondary research, Mr. Smeall did not check his facts more thoroughly concerning the actual subject of his review.

It is not my wish that this letter be a personal attack on the Mr. Smeall or The Amherst Student’s Arts and Living section. In fact, I found the rest of the review to be comparable in its quality to similar theatrical reviews that the paper has published. I simply desire that the man who was personally responsible for designing what was the finest set that I, in my (admittedly limited) acting career, have ever worked on be given proper credit for his work. Still, I would like to say that this review, by stating that only two of the three seniors who worked on “The Illusion” were worthy of honors and thereby slighting the third, however accidentally, was a glaring example of poor journalism.

Michael Chernicoff ’09