Editor's Note

By Jim O'Quinn

The visually arresting production that appears on this month's cover—a three-way co-production of The Miser, directed by Dominique Serrand of Minneapolis's Theatre de la Jeune Lune—isn't the only version of Molière's ferocious comedy on the boards as the 2004–05 season picks up steam. Another preeminent American physical theatre ensemble, the 30-year-old Dell'Arte Company of Blue Lake, Calif., is presenting the same work at the same time in a wildly different rendition—a 21st-century adaptation that reinvents Molière's paragon of greed as an elderly California widow with a fortune stuffed in her bra, whose adult children are desperate products of her fanatical hoarding. Director Michael Fields and adapter Lauren Wilson have re-dubbed their version Golden State, because, Wilson says, it paints "a portrait of California laid waste by the lust for profit."

The coincidence of programming has provided the Dell'Arte company an opportunity to issue an impertinent challenge to their Midwestern cohorts. In authentic 17th-century fashion, Dell'Arte has sent Jeune Lune a challenge in the form of a glove, daring them to go head-to-head with "dueling Misers." The California company offers to host the Minnesota one in Blue Lake, then asks for equal time to seduce its rival's Twin Cities audience. Who will emerge triumphant? (Molière, we suspect.)

Given this annual Season Preview issue's rich menu of critical writing—essays not only on The Miser (by Karen Campbell) but on Shakespeare's history plays (by Stephen Nunns), two new works that put Freud on stage (by Misha Berson), and the musicalization of a contemporary classic, Samm-Art Williams's Home (by Jonathan Shandell)—the readers of American Theatre can count themselves winners as well. This 160-page edition is, incidentally, the biggest single issue in the magazine's history—which makes American Theatre's ever-energetic staff feel like winners, too. —Jim O'Quinn

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