Editor's Note

By Jim O'Quinn

This issue marks the 25th anniversary of American Theatre. The magazine was launched in April 1984, with an insouciant Sam Shepard squinting from beneath the brim of a cowboy hat on its cover. Inside, along with a rare Shepard interview (conducted by a 19-year-old writing student at Harvard who had beguiled him with a "Dear Mr. Shepard" letter), appeared such items as a column decrying President Reagan's call for an $18-million cut in federal arts funding (the National Endowment for the Arts appropriation that year was $162 million, a figure that significantly outclasses Congress's base allocation of $145 million in 2008…plus ça change!); and a good-humored essay by the great director Alan Schneider called "Things to Come," broaching essentially the same topic that the 25 guest commentaries tackle in these pages: What will the future bring for the American theatre?

Twenty-five cover images, one for each year of the magazine's history, share space on this issue's cover—a memory-jogger for longtime subscribers (not to mention longtime editors). In all, we calculate, there have been 260 covers fronting 260 monthly editions—a quarter-century record of the nation's theatrical aspirations and accomplishments—a mixed brew of personalities, opinions and exposition. And complete play texts—130 of them, counting Sheila Callaghan's provocative new script in this issue.

Twenty-five (plus one) theatre artists—people we figure will be among those having a major impact on theatrical life in America over the course of the next 25 years—accepted our invitation to train "An Eye on the Future" in this issue's special lead-off section. Their crystal-gazing is by turns inspiring, alarming, tongue-in-cheek, sobering, intriguing.

Twenty-five years of the best writing in American Theatre has also been collected, on the occasion of this anniversary, in a new volume from TCG Books called The American Theatre Reader. This hefty, 600-page compendium of 80 articles, essays and interviews amounts to an impressionistic history of theatre in our time—yet it represents only a handful of the thousands of theatre folk who have lent form and substance to American Theatre over the years.

Twenty-five is the magic number. You're invited on board to see where we go from here.