While I was at UCLA last week, I stumbled onto an event I was unable to attend -- "THE BLOGGERS PROJECT."

In keeping with my well-documented journalistic shortcomings, my reportorial coverage of the event sucked, and all I have is this lame picture of myself holding the advertisement:

How might a blogger review such a momentous and portentous event without being there?

What was THE BLOGGERS PROJECT?

UCLA's web site doesn't have much, but the LA Times Calendarlive.com describes it this way:

Read a bunch of blogs. Copy. Paste. Act.

That, in a nutshell, was the classroom assignment UCLA professor Mel Shapiro gave to students in his Advanced Graduate Acting course last fall. The fruits of those efforts have evolved into "The Bloggers Project," an experimental theater piece based on real weblogs that began taking final shape a few nights ago at the school's Freud Playhouse.

Copy? Check.

Paste? Check.

Act?

Now that I can't do, because I am not an actor. But do actors make better bloggers? If they do, then all hope for the blogosphere is lost.

If the LA Times piece is right, the actors seem have improved on the actual blog content. Here's a sort of blog-by-blog blow-by-blow:

Shapiro, a congenially rumpled veteran director who collaborated with playwright John Guare ("The House of Blue Leaves") and Sammy Davis Jr. before joining UCLA's School of Theater, Film and Television faculty in 1990, started paying attention to bloggers during the John Kerry Swift Boat controversy. He decided to steer his acting students toward Internet-based rants, hoping they would translate the swarm of online info-pinion into fiery performances.

"I got fascinated with these bloggers who were doing investigative reporting with this incredible passion and wondered if there was a way of putting this kind of thing on stage," Shapiro says. "I kept saying to the actors, 'It doesn't make any difference what political side you're on, but you should get involved in what the arguments are on these issues. What about this war in Iraq?' I was trying to provoke them into an involvement with these things, and then the project started to develop from there."

To prime his actors for the show's overtly political material, Shapiro first urged them to create faux blogs for historical figures. Beyond the informational nuggets mined online, the blogosphere's raw spontaneity rubbed off on some of the performers.

When actor Allman began Googling Gacy to research his piece on the Illinois murderer, he related easily to the Web's unfiltered spew. "Traditional scripts," he noted, "are written and rewritten and tested and changed before audiences so they're very concrete and formulaic. Blogs come directly from the blogger's mind. You find spelling mistakes and run-on sentences and incomplete thoughts, which I think is accurate about how quick and choppy people think and communicate in this MTV age."

Whoa! Am I getting the hand of this blog acting stuff OK?

This is fun!

Maybe I should try acting like a blogger more of the time!

There's more:

For her three-minute televised sex blog, Nicole Reding turned to Washingtonienne, Washington, D.C., intern Jessica Cutler's online diary detailing her affairs with Beltway big shots. "Jessica said in an interview that there is really no difference between her blog and writing down one's conquests on the bathroom wall," says Reding. "Blogs are sort of the Shakespeare soliloquy of the modern day, except penned by much inferior writers. The possibilities for characterization are endless."

The actors' solo spots lead up to "Homer in Cyberspace," which re-imagines the first four chapters of "The Iliad" as a metaphor for the Iraq War. Massive video projections, programmed with video game software by UCLA's Center for Research in Engineering, Media and Performance REMAP group, portray Athena and Hera as goddesses dishing dirt about the Trojan War. On the ground, live actors debate dubious reporting from the field.

You know. Ancient wisdom and all. . .

Shapiro wrote the piece, he said, because "I've been fascinated with the way the administration — any administration — sends out disinformation and mixed signals. This was also so much the core of 'The Iliad' in that the gods kept screwing up the mortals and lying to each other, and then waging a war for ridiculous reasons. Because, Helen of Troy was stolen. It just seemed very apt."

"Project" culminates in an ensemble performance featuring excerpts from "Just Another Soldier," blogged by an American G.I. stationed in Iraq. The soldier's first-person reportage is juxtaposed with readings from riverbendblog.blogspot.com, posted by an Iraqi woman and published in book form as "Baghdad Burning."

But hell, what would I know? I'm not an actor. As it is, I'm having a tough enough time acting like a blogger who's forced to act like a reporter, much less an actor who's forced to act like a blogger who's forced to act like a reporter.

(The whole thing is a tough act to follow.)