Editor's Note

By Jim O'Quinn

"I’m lightin’ out for the western territories,” Huckleberry Finn announces in the final moments of Big River, the Tony-winning show whose upcoming New York revival is a first-of-its-kind production—a Broadway musical that is cast with a mixture of deaf and hearing actors and signed throughout to make it accessible to the hearing-impaired. Arts reporter Karen Wada’s behind-the-scenes cover story, tracking the production’s creative trajectory from the rehearsal rooms of Los Angeles’s Deaf West Theatre to the marquees of 42nd Street, turns out to be just one of several articles in this eclectic issue that follow artists on a journey—an expedition, a trek, a pilgrimage—from the sheltered regions of the familiar into uncharted territories.

Chris Coleman might have quoted Huck’s very words when he decided, in 1999, to leave the scrappy, critically lauded, actor-centered theatre company he co-founded and led for some 11 years in his native Atlanta to undertake the stabilization and revitalization of a very different kind of institution, in a very different kind of place—the flagship Portland Center Stage of Oregon. In a forthright conversation with Des McAnuff, artistic director of California’s La Jolla Playhouse (himself no stranger to daring professional journeys), Coleman owns up to the challenges he still faces after three years at PSC’s helm.

A third feature article chronicles the quite literal excursion of six American playwrights to one of the contemporary world’s most volatile political flashpoints: the Occupied Territories of the Middle East. In turn, the writers document their dramatic personal encounters with a region wracked by war: the landscape, the people, the resolute attempts of Palestinian theatremakers to transcend anguish through art.

All these journeys—through the creative process, the challenges of leadership,the imperatives of commitment—make for compelling reading. Bon voyage. —Jim O’Quinn

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