When we went live this morning with next week’s Theater opener, in which Christopher Piatt and I report on last week’s surprising (or not, depending on your point of view) announcement that 23 members of American Theater Company’s 27-member ensemble were departing the company en masse over disagreements with artistic director PJ Paparelli to reform as American Blues Theater, I posted a link to the story on Facebook. Several folks have already weighed in with comments on that forum; one of the first things said included this:

‘Your writing is, as usual, excellent, but I gotta say you missed the mark. Kudos to interviewing multiple sides for a semblance of neutrality, but maybe a look deeper (like, say, the President of the Board of Directors who resigned WITH the ensemble?) might have shed a bit more light on things than to merely state that the artists’ voices in the company were becoming a problem.’

The notion that ATC’s board president, John Goldstein, was resigning along with the ensemble can be traced to an anonymous commenter at The Theater Loop, where the Trib’s Chris Jones was first to post the story. Though he declined to be quoted, Goldstein was one of the nearly two dozen people Christopher and I spoke to; he told us that he hasn’t resigned from ATC’s board and doesn’t plan to.

That’s one of the ways in which, at every turn and with every phone call, this story turned out to be not quite what we’d expected. Read the whole thing here, and feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments below.