Editor's Note

by Jim O'Quinn

I pulled American Theatre's May/June issues of 2004 and 2005 off the shelf to refresh my memory, and noted that except for brief touchdowns in Greece and Germany, our international coverage in recent years has concentrated overwhelmingly on Asia and Africa. While we've been witnessing breakthrough gender-mixed productions in Kabul, thanks to Joanna Sherman's reportage ('04), or trekking through Uganda with Lynn Nottage to hear a chorus of Batwa pygmies sing ('05), just what have our theatrical counterparts in Europe been up to? With articles (and a wealth of dynamic images) focusing on work from Belgium, Italy, France, Germany and Norway—as well as capsule coverage of international productions at summer festivals worldwide—this issue will give you considerably more than an inkling.

Why have we called our special section "The New Europe"? Because each of our writers—beginning with avant-gardist Jan Lauwers, whose candid evocation of the Flemish cultural scene strikes some uncanny parallels with our own—is interested not only in art that trafficks in up-to-the-minute manifestations of national sensibilities, but in exploring theatrical horizons that are, in the words of the section's curator Randy Gener, "not fixed and unchangeable." Ours is a world in transformation, and it is often in the minds and hearts of artists that the character of those transformations can be most vividly read.

Back on our shores, this issue delves into the work of three diverse artists whose work you'll be hearing about in coming weeks: pop composer Duncan Sheik, who has an uninhibited talk with arts reporter Nicole Estvanik on the eve of the premiere of his much-anticipated new musical Spring Awakening; playwright Diana Son, who returns to form with a deeply personal new play, Satellites, that examines the experience of motherhood; and experimental director David Herskovits, who audaciously tackles Goethe's Faust in a new six-hour staging. Testing unfixed horizons is clearly their business, too.