Editor's Note

By Jim O'Quinn

It happens every January. Because American Theatre's annual Approaches to Theatre Training issue attracts a greater volume of advertising than any other single issue, more editorial material is required as well to fill out the magazine's swelling page count. You the reader get more column inches of text—more articles, longer articles—than at any other time of year. This is the issue you may want to keep on the nightstand for long-term perusal.

Above and beyond our three-part Special Section devoted to management training (including a roundtable moderated by Joan Channick also published online), the articles in this issue range far and wide—and into considerable depth—as they examine such eclectic subjects as cross-cultural play translation, rehabilitation through the arts, science as a dramatic trope, the artistic legacies of John Osborne and Joseph Papp, and contemporary Korean theatre. Let me suggest some reasons why our writers' takes on these topics are well worth your attention.

On translation: Affiliated Writer David Ng's high-spirited lead feature about the triply difficult task of transforming a trés French new comedy by Yasmina Reza into an American entertainment—as well as the language, he notes, there are clashes of culture and sensibility to consider—is as revealing about Reza's international popularity as it is about the tangled process of translating works by a living (and highly opinionated) writer. On rehabilitation: It was something of a coup for American Theatre to gain entrée for reporter Pamela Renner and photographer Rivka Katvan into Sing Sing Prison, where both journalists experienced raw and deeply affecting responses to an inmate production of Oedipus Rex.

On science dramas: You'll see a contemporary phenomenon through new eyes after sharing the iconoclastic view of one of America's most acclaimed scientists, Carl Djerassi, who is also no slouch as a playwright. On Osborne and Papp: A richly detailed excerpt from John Heilpern's new biography of the playwright puts Look Back in Anger in historical and critical context, while dishing some tasty period gossip; a century-hopping speech by Oskar Eustis, inheritor of Papp's Public Theater, draws a bold and unexpected line from theatre's earliest origins to its present practice.

Finally, on Korean theatre: Senior editor Randy Gener's splendidly readable account of two weeks of theatregoing in and around Seoul reaffirms his standing as one of our foremost commentators on intercultural theatre—it's a vivid and up-to-the-minute panorama of Korean performance.

So think of it as your first resolution for January 2007—not to miss a word.