Editor's Note
By Jim O'Quinn
Meet Enda Walsh. He's quite a playwright—and quite a personality, as arts reporter Christopher Wallenberg discovers in his sometimes alarmingly candid video-assisted conversation (click here) with the Dublin-born writer, who lives these days in London. Once you've gotten acquainted with Walsh, take a deep breath. Why? Because the rest of this information-packed issue coalesces around a couple of themes that have far-reaching implications for both contemporary theatre practitioners and observers of American theatre history.
The first of these themes—introduced in Lily Tung Crystal's engrossing foray into the life and times of the Bay Area's Asian-American performance community (click here)—is the complex and intractable connection between theatre and identity politics. From its beginnings, theatre on this continent has wrestled with the representation of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, "otherness" of every kind. Some of these threads are untangled in Crystal's telling interviews, others in senior editor Randy Gener's detailed commentary on the recent ReOrient Festival in San Francisco, which he hails for its introduction of "a new genre of Middle Eastern—American drama." Playwright Velina Hasu Houston picks up related strands in her first-person account of Silk Road Theatre Project of Chicago's provocative DNA Trail project, in which seven playwrights respond to revelations about their own genetic heritage. Together, these articles form a virtual short course in the complicated kinship of theatre and identity.
A second theme—the historic tension between naturalism and abstraction in modern American drama—gets equally vigorous treatment in another trio of articles. Director David Herskovits inserts himself and his Target Margin company into what he sees as a turning point in American writing and stagecraft—the high-profile failure of Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan's 1953 collaboration on Camino Real, after which, Herskovits asserts, the experimental was increasingly marginalized and "mainstream theatre technique became crystallized as naturalism." Critic Garrett Eisler fast-forwards from the HUAC-haunted '50s to the present day in his essay on the dramaturgy of Clifford Odets, whose standing as a card-carrying realist is being challenged in a wave of bold new interpretations. And, finally, in reviewer Gener's appreciation of an important new book, The American Play: 1787—2000, author (and erstwhile American Theatre associate editor) Marc Robinson is lauded for exploring "how American plays have evolved over the centuries to turn realism against itself." The radical impulse, it seems, is our art form's inveterate fellow traveler.
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