Editor's Note

By Jim O'Quinn

Some gulfs are tough to bridge. There are those who like anchovies on their pizzas and those who don't. There are red states and blue states. There are theatre audiences on the East Coast and those on the West Coast.

In the latter case, some mysterious but potent disjunction of taste seems to prevail, frequently sending plays and productions that San Franciscans or Los Angelenos flocked to down the tubes in New York, and vice versa. Will the twain ever meet, and where?

One gesture of reconciliation is hidden in plain view on this month's cover. The image is from a production by the L.A.–based Son of Semele Ensemble (the name refers to Dionysus's mortal mom), one of a dozen freshly minted, artistically precocious but off-the-beaten-path companies featured in our "Hot, Hip and On the Verge" compilation. Son of Semele is shown offering its Los Angeles patrons, of all things, a Richard Foreman play called Film Is Evil: Radio Is Good. How did this brainy, self-referential riff on the media, a quintessential product of the New York avant-garde, land a couple of miles west of downtown L.A.? "Artistically, the troupe jumps off cliffs the way most people step off curbs," reports critic Steven Leigh Morris, whose profile of Semele's progeny praises the company's gulf-bridging choice of material as well as its bold aesthetic.

Adventurousness is, in fact, the main thread connecting the collection of upstart companies you're about to be introduced to. And there are additional adventures afoot on subsequent pages: in an unexpectedly provocative set of interviews that might be dubbed "adventures in translation"; in Danny Hoch's passionate manifesto for a hip-hop generation; in the primal beauty of the outdoor spectacles of the great Bread & Puppet Theater.

The fact is that adventures (as those who fashion theatre of any sort—and those who report it, too—are duly entitled to say) are our business. —Jim O'Quinn

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