Editor's Note

By Jim O'Quinn

"Theatre," Václav Havel remarks in his 1990 book Disturbing the Peace, "is always a sensitive seismograph of an era, perhaps the most sensitive one there is; it's a sponge that quickly soaks up important ingredients in the atmosphere around it." It's an observation that might be perceived as idealized or romantic—but this month's issue of American Theatre suggests that the intimate connection Havel posits between the art form and the world it mirrors is alive and well on a variety of American stages.

Borderlands Theater of Tucson, Ariz., whose work is the subject of this month's cover story, has been recording the seismic tremors impacting its community and its region for the past two decades. But not until the immigration battles of George W. Bush's second presidential term has the national and international spotlight been trained so intently on southern Arizona and its clash of cultures. Borderlands, building on its record of developing some 50 new plays about Latino-Anglo relations, has seized the moment to explore the explosive implications of illegal immigration in a format that takes all sides of the debate into account—and compellingly humanizes all involved. Affiliated Writer Kerri Allen's first-hand report from Tucson, and points south, paints an intriguing and thought-provoking picture of theatre on the front lines.

Off-Off Broadway's Flea Theater in downtown Manhattan couldn't be more different from Borderlands—it's a pocket-sized, ultra-urban hotbed of experimentation where celebrities can sometimes be spotted among the hoi polloi. But Flea artistic director Jim Simpson and his new favorite playwright, mainstream mainstay A.R. Gurney, make a convincing case, in a candid double interview with arts reporter Laura Collins-Hughes, that the Flea is indeed a theatrical sponge, in Havel's sense. These days the atmosphere the Flea is soaking up is permeated by political discontent, in the form of a Gurney cavalcade of anti-administration comedies, with Simpson at the helm. As the director puts it (with an echo of Havel), "Being current, being responsive to the world we're living in, is simply good theatre."

When we chose the photograph on this month's cover—a powerful and resonant image of an Arizona stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border, where the Minutemen have built a rudimentary fence—the question arose, "What does it have to do with the theatre?" There are answers in these pages.