Editor's Note

By Jim O'Quinn

The issue you hold in your hands marks the 20th anniversary of American Theatre. The iconic image on the cover of the April '84 inaugural edition was of Sam Shepard, squinting into the sun from under the brim of a cowboy hat. That issue captured the reclusive Shepard in mid-career, and it seems fitting two eventful decades later to revisit what our interviewer Don Shewey calls "the dance between Shepard's life and his work." [see article]

Shewey's perceptive conversation with Shepard is a reminder of other top-flight articles AT has carried over the years, and this seems an appropriate moment to mention a few of them. High on my "editor's choice" list is another Shewey piece, "The Actor as Object of Desire" (Oct. '90), a confessional essay that (as part of a resonant special section on "The American Actor") brilliantly explored the erotics of acting. Author and theatre professor David Savran contributed "Tony Kushner Considers the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness" (Oct. '94) during the Broadway run of Angels in America, and, more recently, "Adam Guettel Faces the Music" (Jan. '04), on the occasion of The Light in the Piazza, eliciting what I consider "best-ever" interviews with both artists.

An award-winning essay by critic Roger Copeland, "Cabaret at the End of the World" (Jan. '99), sagely assessed the Kander-Ebb masterwork as a template for darkening times. Todd London's penetrating series on theatre and addiction, beginning with "Theatre on the Couch" (May '89), prompted field-wide discussion. The magazine has recorded lively one-on-one encounters—between Anne Bogart and Kristin Linklater (Jan. '01), Robert Brustein and Frank Rich (May/June '99)—and witty excursions into theatrical byways, like James Magruder's "Can I Get a Witness?" (Oct. '92), about Arkansas's Great Passion Play, and James Oseland's "Dinner Theatre, U.S.A." (April '98); artists' testimonials like "See Me, Feel Me, Touch Me" (Nov. '93), Des McAnuff's nitty-gritty account of the creation of The Who's Tommy; and superb reportage, like Robert Coe's "Verona, Mississippi" (May '89), about Cornerstone Theater Company's interracial Romeo and Juliet in the Deep South. And no list of important AT pieces would be complete without playwright August Wilson's seminal "The Ground on Which I Stand" (Sept. '96), originally delivered as an address to the TCG National Conference at Princeton University.

This short list of personal favorites barely begins to suggest American Theatre's variety and richness of coverage over the past 20 years. The next 20 begins now. —Jim O'Quinn

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