Editor's Note

Editor's Note by Jim O'Quinn

Stuff Happens is a history play," says David Hare of his new drama about how and why the U.S. went to war in Iraq, "which happens to center on very recent history." Having been at the Mark Taper Forum in late May for the first preview of Gordon Davidson's American premiere production, I can report that the experience of watching it is extraordinary—for Hare presents us with a story and characters in medias res: They exist simultaneously in theatrical time and in the still-unfolding "real life" scenario that plays itself out daily in the battle zones of Iraq, the halls of power and diplomacy, and the media. Hare is working, as Davidson suggests, in the tradition of Shakespeare's great political/history plays, but with a daring immediacy in sync with the breathless pace of today's world events.

The lead feature articles in this issue—David Rooks's wide-ranging interview with Native American playwright William S. Yellow Robe Jr. and Randy Gener's richly detailed account of a two-pronged project at Alaska's Perseverance Theatre—are about history plays, too, new works that evoke telling comparisons and contrasts to Hare's audacious drama-of-the-moment. Both Yellow Robe's Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers, which examines the toll of 19th-century events on contemporary reservation life, and Perseverance's The Long Season and Voyage, tales of the wave of early-20th-century Filipino immigration to Alaska, bring to light episodes of American cultural history that have previously been ignored.

These plays, like Stuff Happens (and Shakespeare's histories, for that matter), are based on true events, but—with the exception of Voyage, which draws its text directly from interviews and archival research—they are not documentaries. "What happened happened," Hare says, in an author's note that might be aptly applied to the Bard's method as well. "Scenes of direct address quote people verbatim. When the doors close on the world's leaders and on their entourages, then I have used my imagination."

And it is imagination, of course, that renders these old and new histories "real." As Long Season director Peter DuBois suggests, "There's a way in which fiction can get you to the heart of the matter even more truthfully than fact, an emotional truth that you can't always build with the actual words people are saying." As they reveal their working process in these pages, the creators of these history plays demonstrate the theatre's capacity for complexity, ambivalence, imaginative compassion. They are dancing in the slender zone that is shared by life and art. —Jim O'Quinn