Editor's Note
By Jim O'Quinn
American Theatre's publisher, Theatre Communications Group, is turning 50. By the time you read this, an array of anniversary activities will have been announced at TCG's annual National Conference in Los Angeles. Part of the yearlong focus will be on the national service organization's four core values: artistry, diversity, activism and global citizenship. We decided at American Theatre that, in recognition of TCG's half-century of accomplishment, four of our ten issues in this landmark year would be specially crafted to reflect and explore those resonant themes. This is the first of the four, and it is devoted to artistry.
"Artistic quality of effect or workmanship" is Webster's rather clunky definition of the word, but the emphasis on "effect" should quicken a theatremaker's pulse—there's the active, dynamic component of artistry that has the potential to provoke, stimulate, even electrify an audience (or, in its absence, to bore that audience to death). TCG executive director Teresa Eyring talks in her column about the power of artistry to transform individuals and communities and to "pry open new ways of seeing the world." Guest commentator José Rivera, circling deftly around the word's creative implications, declares, "Give me space for my imagination and the time to construct a world there."
It's only natural that artistry means a wealth of different things to its varied adherents. For Diane Paulus, the leading figure in Christopher Wallenberg's down-to-brass-tacks cover story, artistry isn't confined to her award-winning work on stage. The reinvigoration of a storied theatrical organization and the audience it serves is an artistic accomplishment in its own right, and, thanks to Paulus's conviction and tenacity, the "effect" that Webster's definition stresses has been profoundly felt in the Boston area theatre community and beyond.
In the case of Jonathan Moscone, who is in the throes of bringing a deeply personal story to theatrical life, artistry is, for the moment, an interior matter, intensely bound up in psychology, memory, grief and loss. Arts reporter Robert Avila's compassionate and insightful account of the creation of Ghost Light—a meditation on the politically motivated 1978 murder in San Francisco of Moscone's father—is a virtual analysis of the mechanics of artistry, in both its individual and collaborative forms.
What's the environment most conducive to artistry and the well-being of those who practice it? That's one of the persistent questions in "Dissolving the Barriers," arts reporter Celia Wren's comprehensive special report on TCG's recent Field Conversations project, which involved input from hundreds of creative folk in every segment of America's theatrical community. And artistry is no less front and center in two compelling back-of-the-book articles about theatre for military audiences, and a third extolling the value of performance in caring for the aged.
"Give me space for my imagination and the time to construct a world there." With sufficient space and time, isn't anything possible?
—Jim O'Quinn
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