Editor's Note

By Jim O'Quinn

Who is this issue of American Theatre for? All of us, naturally—but it may be of particular interest to dramaturgs. Stop! Did that observation tempt you to toss the magazine aside with the expectation that you'd thumb through it again when you'd finished cleaning out your inbox, or maybe when "Saturday Night Live" goes into reruns? Get a grip: Dramaturgy, its associations with pedantry and esoterica notwithstanding, can make for enlightening, even exhilarating, journalism! As Liz Engelman, the Minneapolis dramaturg who served as president of the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas in 2004-06, has been known to quip: "It's not a disease. Dramaturgy is the study of dramatic structure."

And the examination of dramatic structure, the writers in this issue are eager to show you, can be both illuminating and, well, inherently dramatic (read: exciting, suspenseful). In his cover story on 33 Variations, for example—tracking playwright Moisés Kaufman's twisty creative journey from a germinal encounter in Tower Records to an imminent opening on Broadway—dramaturg extraordinaire Mark Bly conveys how this already widely lauded drama accrued, layer by layer, over almost five years of collaborative effort. As he squires you through Kaufman's multifaceted writing process, try counting the names Bly mentions as vital contributors to the life of the play: scholars, company members, actors, designers, musicians, technicians, leaders of theatre institutions, friends of friends—they number in the dozens, contradicting at every turn the conventional image of the solitary playwright tapping away at the keys of his computer in a lonely room.

Terry Berliner's intimate portraits of five up-and-coming musical-theatre writing teams Songs for the Way We Live Now—all rich dramaturgical excursions into a theatrical genre in the throes of change—are similarly teeming with names, names not only of close creative collaborators but of those seemingly peripheral figures who ultimately make all the difference in these far-flung artists' lives and careers. "New musicals are not the kind of thing you can produce in a vacuum," Chicago-based composer and lyricist Alan Schmuckler remarks with wry understatement, and Berliner's reports demonstrate the truth of that maxim with aplomb.

There's still more tasty fodder for the dramaturgically inclined in Cassandra Csencsitz's appreciation of poet and classicist Anne Carson's new translation of the Oresteia; in Aaron Mack Schloff's examination of director Rachel Dickstein's text-and-movement-melding methods; even in Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder's tales of rural Alabama teenagers writing plays that push the limits of the form. But you don't have to be a dramaturg to appreciate these varied artists and the intricacies of their accomplishments. You just have to be here—inside the covers of an issue you won't want to miss.