Editor's Note

Editor's Note by Jim O'Quinn

The equally inimitable subjects of this month's two lead features, Will Power and Lisa Kron, are veteran solo artists at crucial junctures in their careers. Both are writer-performers with fresh, distinctive voices and multi-layered gifts of self-presentation. And both have decided that they have still more gifts in their arsenals to offer.

Power's Flow and Kron's 2.5 Minute Ride have been presented to wide acclaim across the country. But in their current work, analyzed in twin interviews conducted by playwright Charles L. Mee and arts reporter Wendy Weisman, Power and Kron are expanding the parameters of their theatre--they're moving beyond the constraints of the one-person show, populating the once-contained psychic space of the stage with multiple characters, figures stubbornly independent of the writers' own medley of identities. What's it like for a solo artist when folks with agendas of their own elbow their way into the theatrical action?

For Power, whose hip-hop musical adaptation of Aeschylus's Seven Against Thebes is currently running at New York Theatre Workshop, the characters in question are embodiments of some of Western culture's oldest and most resonant myths--and the process of discovering contemporary parallels prompted him to look at his own California upbringing with new eyes. "As I've been studying Homer and these other writers, I've begun to think of my life as the mythology that I've grown up with," Power avows.

The adjustment was perhaps even more complex for Kron, because among the multiple characters in Well are Kron's own mother, Ann, and a frequently befuddled playwright named Lisa Kron. The Lisa Kron character will be played by another actor in the show's engagement this month at the Cleveland Play House, but when Well begins performances on Broadway March 10, the real Lisa Kron will be inhabiting the part--with a certain reified authenticity, it should go without saying. "If I were protective of my own image, I wouldn't do this kind of work," Kron confesses, "because I don't find what I do particularly flattering to me, especially in Well ."

Alongside Power and Kron, this issue is packed with outsized personalities--the great Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, the Texas-tough theatre pioneer Margo Jones, a Russian iconoclast named Nikolai Kolyada, the commandingly comic actress Kristine Nielsen--which casts the pair's introspective, self-analytical interviews in an even more fascinating light. In the art of theatre, identity is frequently a constructed affair; here's a glimpse into how that happens.