Political Bloggers on Theatre

Two interesting recent posts, one from Johann Hari on musicals, and one from The New Yorker's George Packer, who's developing a play with The Culture Project--fast becoming The New Yorker Theatre (since Lawrence Wright's hit My Trip to Al-Qaeda). I was struck by this insight:

In my thirties, I wrote two novels and learned that the central problem of fiction is the narrator: Who is he? How does he know what he claims to know? What’s his relationship to the characters? To the author? I never really solved the problem, which may be why I haven’t written a third. In nonfiction, including journalism, it’s less complicated: the narrator is the author; what he knows is based on experience, research, and thought. The most difficult narrative problem is how much to hide or reveal himself. But in plays these vexing questions are mercifully moot: the characters speak for themselves.