“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.

the above paragraph is from this article by Jason Zinoman in the NY Times. It sounds like the show is weak, but since Culturebot has been tracking the intersection of blogs and performance, it is certainly an interesting development.

Culturebot and P.S. 122 have been presenting The WYSIWYG Talent Show for over a year now – the first-ever all-blogger series of readings and performances. (the next one is Tuesday, March 22nd at 7:30!).

We’ve had all kinds of things from stand-up, to readings, to music, to performance art. But we haven’t quite reached the sort of cross-pollination and collaboration that we could. Some of our bloggers have told me they were once playwrights or they have interest in longer form work. So it is cool to see someone take the ideas we’ve been exploring and take them into a traditional theatrical context.

I think the challenge is to figure out how to move it forward in a theatrically innovative and compelling way. Not just doing monologues that sound like blog entries but really figuring out what the narrative demands are of the blog form and how that would translate to staging, etc.

I’m writing this pretty quickly, off the top of my head.
What do you think?
Discuss.