OMG! Riverbend (Baghdad Blogger) has a PLAY in NYC!

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.

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.

The most interesting passages are those about the minutiae of daily life in Iraq and those that suggest the kind of chatty political discussions that take place around a kitchen table. For Americans interested in the human effect of their country's foreign policy, it's a valuable chronicle: a mix of the mundane (apparently even Iraqis listen to Britney Spears) and the horrifying (her uncle was abducted, though he was later ransomed).

more...

http://theater2.nytimes.com/2005/03/18/theater/reviews/18burn.html

I hope she makes some dough from it. She's so talented.

Thanks for posting.

but hadn't heard a word about this.

went to the NYT theatre page for the SPAMALOT review and found it!

(although, based on the review, it sounds like a cheesy production... too bad. should have been a one-woman show probably.)

would love to see her get out of there for a spell.

nt