Editor's Note

By Jim O'Quinn

Heads up, actors. Your craft—the mechanics of it, the psychology of it, the professional setting in which you practice it—is in the feature spotlight in this month’s American Theatre.

Not that it’s an actors’ issue per se. Only in Martha Hostetter’s perceptive and historically insightful cover essay "The Hedda Syndrome," about Ibsen’s most notorious heroine and this season’s three high-profile portrayals of her, do we hear actors themselves talking shop: motivation, character, the arc of the action—in short, the arsenal of choices, tools and techniques actors bring to bear on a role.

Still, it’s the crucial importance of the actor’s contribution—to the life and well-being of particular theatres as well as that of the art form in general—that forms the subtext of both accompanying features. In Jean Schiffman’s report about the status of resident acting companies in America, artistic directors from several theatres devoted to the company concept speak eloquently about what actors and organizations can mean to one another. In Gerald Freedman’s open-hearted memoir of a challenging summer at London’s reconstructed Globe Theatre, it is the director’s infinitely complicated interaction with actors—and their ultimate triumph together over muddles and miscommunications—that makes the experience a compelling one.

And Freedman’s journal makes something else clear: that actors sometimes radically disagree with the opinions of directors and playwrights. A story uncovered by Martha Hostetter’s research on Hedda Gabler illustrates the point. The fiery female characters he created notwithstanding, Henrik Ibsen refused to align himself with the burgeoning feminist movement of the early 20th century, declining even to endorse the cause of universal suffrage. Actors were way ahead of him. At the 1911 Coronation suffrage pageant, the largest and most spectacular demonstration of the British suffragette movement, the actresses’ contingent was led by a woman on horseback wearing a feather in her cap and a long black dress. She was playing Hedda Gabler. —Jim O'Quinn

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