Editor's Note

By Jim O'Quinn

This month's cover image, from Tracy Letts's muscular new play about a midwesterner's crisis of faith, Man from Nebraska, gives the issue a masculine cast. But when you delve into its pages, you'll discover that the mainstay of this edition of American Theatre is actually a remarkable array of women—women actors, directors, producers, translators. And, not incidentally, the bylines on these interviews and essays are those of women as well.

Actors are particularly well represented, from Pamela Renner's intimate portrait of the strong-willed leading lady Viola Davis; to a quartet of stage-and-screen legends sharing candid insights about Tennessee Williams heroines they have embodied; to Marian Seldes's paean to Eleonora Duse, the actress who might best be seen as Seldes's own spiritual forebear.

The director's art is examined with critical sophistication in Gitta Honegger's profile of Germany's Johanna Schall, who happens to be the granddaughter of Bertolt Brecht. The ins and outs of producing are examined with double savvy in Daryl Roth's observations on the life and times of Lucille Lortel. And seldom has the dilemma of translating well-loved classics been more entertainingly laid out than in Tina Howe's account of her encounters, literary and otherwise, with Eugène Ionesco. Women artists and administrators are well represented as well in Celia Wren's roundup of testimonials to the importance of political engagement in an election-year season.

There are, in addition to playwright Letts and his questing Nebraskan, other men who make cameo appearances in the issue—particularly Texas-born auteur Robert Wilson, whose epic new work prominently features (while we're on the subject of gender) ambisexual shamans from an ancient Indonesian culture.

But as American theatres gear up for the 2004–05 season, we've got our eyes on the women leading the charge. —Jim O'Quinn

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