Editor's Note

By Jim O'Quinn

The year was 1993, and, thanks to someone's savvy recommendation, I showed up at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco's Mission District to see a show called Eight Saint Plays. I'd never heard of Erik Ehn, but when this brainy, occasionally hilarious, thoroughly beguiling performance was over, the playwright—close-cropped and gangly, looking much as you see him in this issue's photos, taken by ace photographer T. Charles Erickson more than a decade later—was chatting with folks at the back of the theatre. "How many of these saint plays are there?" I asked Ehn over a handshake. "Well," he replied soberly, with the air of someone who has his work cut out for him, "if I get around to it, there should be a couple of thousand." It was an evening of strong first impressions.

If Celia Wren's lively, perceptive cover profile is your first handshake with Erik Ehn—the plays, the personality, the "big cheap theatre" ethic he espouses—you'll register some strong impressions, too. Ehn's ideas, theoretical and practical, are as ambitious as his writing targets, and frequently involve (as he puts it) "opening up possibilities of chaos." He's an inimitably American theatre figure whose complexity and commitment invite a powerful response.

In addition to Ehn—who recently traveled to Rwanda to research his newest work, Maria Kizito, about the horrors of genocide—this issue features, in a special section titled "Foreign Affairs," nine other American artists who have traveled abroad to share their ideas and their work with international audiences and colleagues. Still more insights on global theatrics can be gleaned from Charles Evered's eye-opening interview with playwright William Mastrosimone, who has cultivated a soldier-of-fortune relationship with Afghanistan, and in TCG deputy director Joan Channick's insightful editorial about the key differences in various nations' official stance toward support of the arts.

So keep an eye out in these pages for (as Randy Gener puts it in his "Foreign Affairs" introduction) "the density, flavor, forms and colors of other cultures." Happy trails. —Jim O'Quinn

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