Editor's Note

By Jim O'Quinn

What do we mean in theatre when we say "mainstream"?

It's a word we regularly use to convey such positive connotations as pertinence, widespread appeal and commercial viability. From another angle, the same word might indicate conventionality, bloodlessness, or calculated orthodoxy. The term pops up in several contexts in this issue of American Theatre, with tantalizing implications.

For director, puppet-meister and Spider-Man web-weaver Julie Taymor, "mainstream" has come to mean access to virtually unlimited audiences, critic Roger Copeland points out in his lead article. The niche she's created for herself on Broadway and beyond may be just where this one-of-a-kind artist belongs, he suggests, her inventive and influential early career in modest avant-garde circles notwithstanding. Copeland backs up his observations with surprising insights from Taymor's formative forays into the far-flung cultures of Indonesia.

Theorist Richard Schechner is out to make the mainstream more inclusive—radically so. In a thought-provoking essay focusing mainly on gender, he exhorts the theatrical establishment to celebrate the art form's essential duality—the liveness of the event versus the artificiality of its content—by pushing casting practices to their limits. Women taking over roles traditionally played by men is particularly revolutionary, he reasons, because it "drives a wedge between actor and character" and militates against "a simple-minded identification of the performer with the role."

John Douglas Thompson's encounter with the mainstream, notes interviewer Edward Karam (page 34 of the print edition), has presented the much-lauded actor with a plethora of classic roles (in some 25 of Shakespeare's plays, for starters) in record time. Thompson's recent well-received turn as Richard III at Massachusetts's Shakespeare and Company certifies Schechner's point that, in American casting circles, "race-blindness is overtaking race-consciousness." And even arts reporter Alexis Soloski's expedition to EMPAC, a complex in upstate New York of unequalled technological sophistication, calls into question the nature of mainstream theatre in the future: Will it fall under the spell of techno-magic or, in revolt, cast technology aside to reassert the primacy of the empty space and the actor's body?

Theatre as a "double event," open casting, the conundrum of techno-innovation, the push and pull of the mainstream—these tensions weave in and out of this issue's pages. Pat resolutions, needless to say, are unlikely.

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