Editor's Note

Editor's Note by Jim O'Quinn

If you've seen Bartlett Sher's ravishing production of The Light in the Piazza at Lincoln Center Theater, you'll know exactly what Steven Drukman means—in his insightful cover interview with the Seattle-based director—when he praises Sher's work for its "meticulous framework of relationships between the actors and the objects in the space." It's on just such a framework that Piazza's opening sequence builds its lyrical intensity and power: Around the pediment of a towering statue, a Florentine square comes gradually, intoxicatingly to life, as denizens of the city—cyclists, hawkers, lovers, priests—pass in their orbits around two impressionable Americans, Margaret Johnson and her daughter Clara, who are about to be swept up in events that will change their lives forever.

There was a moment in Sher's recent production of Three Sisters at his home theatre, Intiman, that struck me with similar force and theatricality—an interplay of actors and objects that Chekhov never imagined but that conveyed with stunning economy both the deep-rooted interconnectedness and the insubstantiality of the characters' lives. It came, oddly enough, in the form of a set change between the play's Acts 3 and 4—from the interior of Olga's bedroom on the night of the fire to the ramshackle garden outside the Prozorov house, where the sisters ultimately find themselves "left alone, to begin our lives anew." Bathed in blue half-light, the play's full complement of characters—family, servants, soldiers, hangers-on—bustled purposefully about, assisting a crew of black-clad stagehands as the house and its homely furnishings were swept away stage right. What was left was vacant sky and yearning birches as redolent of Beckett's cosmos as of Chekhov's—signs of the sisters' fates that struck the senses like a photo coming suddenly and indelibly into focus.

This is an issue of American Theatre in which the search for such moments of theatrical revelation is mapped and scrutinized—in Mollie Wilson's account of the creation of Synchronicity Performance Group's epic Women + War, and in preview reports of three "hands across the sea" collaborations opening this month, as well as in Bartlett Sher's candid analysis of his own European-influenced approach to directing. These are the moments—when actors and objects and spectators share the creation of meaning in a common space—that make the theatre unique in our experience, and that keep us coming back for more. —Jim O'Quinn