After the war he moved from theatrical journalism to political journalism, and later formed his own party, called the CGBP.

There were occasional flashes of brightness from relatively unknown artists, as in Diana Son's play "Stop Kiss," Karin Coonrod's vigorously unorthodox staging of Shakespeare's "Henry VI" plays and, most important, the theatrical journalism of Anna Deveare Smith.

Mr. Hare, the master polemicist of the British stage, and the Out of Joint theater company apply a similar skepticism to the captains of industry in "The Permanent Way," a bracing work of theatrical journalism at the National Theater.

Thus is a 21-year-old man named Matthew Shepard described in the extraordinary final moments of the first act of "The Laramie Project," the enormously good-willed, very earnest and often deeply moving work of theatrical journalism that opened last night at the Union Square Theater.

In other words, the play is not so much a documentary as theatrical journalism, an attempt to tell a true story in a way that would be more difficult in another medium.

Publicly avowing an interest in the latest piece of earnest theatrical journalism, but privately deciding that you're not really in the mood just tonight, is hardly unnatural.

The play's words are the actual, transcribed words of townspeople, culled, edited and shaped into a widely praised theater piece that has been called theatrical journalism and docudrama.

An enormously good-willed, very earnest and often moving work of theatrical journalism.