Editor's Note

By Jim O'Quinn

Au·dac·i·ty \.o -`da-s-t-e\ n, pl -ties [ME audacite, fr. L audac-, audax] 1: spirited, fearless, daring; 2: intrepid adventurousness, marked by originality and verve.

AUDACIOUS DIRECTORS may not be the catchiest American Theatre cover line ever, but given this issue's emphasis, it was irresistibly apropos: Creative audacity is the stock-in-trade of the quartet of distinguished stage directors—Anne Bogart, Martha Clarke, Edward Hall and Mark Lamos—who in these pages explicate their recent or current productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream, using a single photographic image to exemplify their concepts.

And it's a quality that's freely ascribed to the subject of our lead feature article, 38-year-old director Darko Tresjnak, now artistic director of the Old Globe Shakespeare Festival and an artist whose work you will be hearing more and more about in seasons to come.

Delving further into the issue—in which onetime acting student Wendy Weiner tracks the professional lives of her undergraduate classmates, and longtime Actors' Equity Association executive director Alan Eisenberg offers a rare and forthright assessment of the union's agenda for its 45,000-plus members—a reader might decide that "AUDACIOUS ACTORS" would have introduced the issue just as well.

And there's ample room—in Pamela Renner's portrait of Arab-American playwright Betty Shamieh, who channels the voices of "powerful, articulate and downright hilarious Arab women" in her plays, or Julia M. Klein's Front & Center item about Michael Hollinger's research adventures in the Galapagos Islands—for "AUDACIOUS PLAYWRIGHTS" to share the spotlight, too.

Perhaps the overriding point of these varied accounts of artistry and aspiration is this: Audacity is a core requirement for forging a working life in the American theatre today. This issue conveys that message in spades. —Jim O'Quinn

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