Saturday, March 19, 2005
The coming of the blog play
" 'Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog From Iraq' is not a very good play, but it's worth your attention for two reasons. It's the only political drama in New York written from the point of view of an Iraqi who lived through the American invasion, and, for better or worse, it inaugurates an entirely new (and seemingly inevitable) theatrical genre - the blog play.First Salam Pax go to write a regular column for the "Guardian", then publish a book, and have a film made about him; now this. Something tells me neither Healing Iraq, nor Iraq the Model, nor Free Iraqi are likely to get the same arts treatment. Not ambiguous enough.
"Melding two chic cultural forms, the documentary drama and the blog, the Six Figures Theater Company has turned the online writings of Riverbend, the pseudonym of a 25-year-old Baghdad woman who has become something of an Internet celebrity, into a dramatically awkward series of readings.
"Riverbend (www.riverbendblog.blogspot.com) is a thoughtful writer whose articulate, even poetic, prose packs an emotional punch while exhibiting a journalist's eye for detail. She is decidedly antiwar and critical of the Bush administration, but not polemical. Judging from the play, the tone of her writing about the war is one of exasperated disappointment."
Nor, for that matter, are we likely to see "Instapundit: the Musical". But Andrew Sullivan? Perhaps. And "The Lamentations of Kos", a play in 1,276 acts sounds like a real possibility.
Any other concepts? And who would star in them?
|
