Editor's Note

By Jim O'Quinn

With the arrival of each summer’s international festival season, American Theatre scours the schedules of impending theatre events around the world for festival entries that will both tempt the potential traveler and intrigue the inquisitive stay-at-home reader. The consequences of our search—five thumbnail critical commentaries scattered through the International Summer Festivals section—span the length of North America, from Mexico City in the south, where Lindy Zesch anticipates multiple Sigmund Freuds and silent-movie virtuosity at the Gateway to the Americas festival; to Montreal in the north, where Douglas Langworthy prepares us for a five-hour, multimedia, pool-party treatment of Dostoyevksy at the hands of German conceptualist Frank Castorf. In between, critics Matt Wolf, Eileen Blumenthal and Lewis Whittington skillfully evoke some of the extraordinary productions on tap at New York’s Lincoln Center Festival, Charleston, S.C.’s Spoleto Festival USA and the Philadelphia International Children’s Festival. 

And that’s just for starters. Other theatrical corners of the world come into view as Roberta Uno and Maura Donohue delve into an idea-packed gathering of Asian women directors in New Delhi; educator Robyn Quick, writing from Warsaw, witnesses an artistic amalgam of work from five far-flung countries; and Kim Euell learns how the plays of August Wilson sound to Ugandan ears.

On the home front, a pair of in-depth articles examines America’s ever-mutating institutional theatre system in the light of “Art Will Out” (Oct. ’02), Jaan Whitehead’s much-discussed essay that posited a gap between the creative needs of artists and the institutions that hire them. Are our theatre institutions, on balance and in the main, nurturers of robust and genuine art, or, on occasion and unwittingly, inhibitors of it? Zelda Fichandler and a panel of eight notable theatre folk consider this hot-button question.

May all your travels, through these pages and beyond, be happy and informative ones.

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