Editor's Note

By Jim O'Quinn

In her inaugural From the Executive Director column in this issue, Teresa Eyring describes how delving into a dusty box of theatre programs, unexpectedly discovered, provoked a flood of art-inflected memories. "With each program, a series of images emerged," she writes, "memories of what I was doing at that time of my life, who I attended the plays with, the impact each piece had on me and how it became woven into my life story." Working on this issue, I had roughly the same experience, prompted not by memorabilia but by, of all things, a photo shoot.

It happened on a chilly February evening in Mabou Mines's cluttered rehearsal studio at P.S. 122 on Second Avenue in Lower Manhattan, and it produced the compelling sepia portrait of Lee Breuer and Ruth Maleczech you see on this month's cover (as well as a delightful array of other images of the first couple of America's theatrical avant-garde). As they posed and preened and tussled and embraced for ace photographer Tom LeGoff's cameras, Lee and Ruth reminisced, candidly and affectionately, about their long history as partners in art and life.

For this superfluous observer, attending to their banter had an effect similar to Teresa's encounter with her memory-laden programs: A throng of images from Mabou Mines's prolific history, collected over a quarter-century of theatregoing in New York City, crowded in on me. The nondescript studio was teeming with them.

I could see Bill Raymond and his puppet pal, lit like refugees from an Edward Hopper canvas and talking goodfella talk into a payphone, in A Prelude to Death in Venice. I watched Ruth's face, simultaneously exotic and familiar, glowing white against a floor of patterned fabric in Hajj. I could hear her broken voice keening over the body of a dead child in Lear. I felt the tingle that came when usually staid Broadway patrons were propelled out of their seats and into the aisles, stamping and clapping with Pentecostal fervor at Gospel at Colonus. I sensed again the almost unbearable poignancy of Karen Kandel's delicate physical relationship with the puppet children of Peter and Wendy. I saw billowing red fabric swallow an entire stage in Red Beads. Doo-wop quartets and anthems for ants rang in my ears. I was nuzzled by shaggy dogs and masked cows.

I left before the shoot was over, carrying the menagerie of images—they belonged uniquely to me, after all—out into the cold night and home. The astonishment I felt that night was not just that Mabou Mines's vibrant and seductive body of work had become (as Teresa put it) "woven into my life story." The astonishment, which I continue to feel when I look at LeGoff's photos of Lee and Ruth, is that so much of that art, rich and strange and one-of-a-kind, germinated in the space between the two of them, in the fecund and ultimately mysterious intimacy of their relationship.