Editor's Note

by Jim O'Quinn

  Surveys indicate that, at different times, actors and students of acting have comprised up to 40 percent of American Theatre's readership. So the subject of how to fashion a coherent, productive, creative life as a working actor is one we return to again and again, in various ways. On the heels of "Advice to a Young Actor," last month's rich collection of essays and interviews exploring the complexities and challenges of entering the profession, this issue offers feature coverage of two exemplary stage performers who are working at the height of their powers.

Neither Elizabeth Marvel (whose audacious reinvention of the iconic heroines Blanche DuBois and Hedda Gabler has earned her a coterie of emphatic admirers) nor Ruben Santiago-Hudson (whose solo reminiscences of the upstate New York community he grew up in proved so compelling on stage that HBO has turned them into a full-scale film) are names that everyone will instantly recognize—yet. But the stories of the paths their careers have taken—and their telling insights about how the art of acting nourishes creativity and accomplishment in other aspects of life—make this pair of feature profiles fascinating reading.

The joys and rigors of the actor's life are central elements as well in the candid accounts by husband-and-wife team Kent Thompson and Kathleen McCall of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival's landmark tour of its full-scale production of Macbeth to 13 military bases across the country, inaugurating the National Endowment for the Arts's Shakespeare in American Communities program. Our condensed version of McCall's personal diary of the tour (her original ran almost 20,000 words) provides a revealing, sometimes funny, sometimes poignant actor's-eye-view of a unique encounter between two powerful forces: the art of Shakespeare and the U.S. military. "This tour rose above politics," McCall concludes in her final diary entry. "It was in its purest form about a storyteller, a listener and an incredible journey for both."

Actors, in fact, are called upon constantly to make incredible journeys, in their art and in their lives. This issue of American Theatre invites you to be an intimate companion on some of those travels. —Jim O'Quinn