Editor's Note

By Jim O’Quinn

We chose the Great Eye that gazes back at you from this month’s cover—part of a spectacular set by Johannes Leiacker for an upcoming production of Puccini’s Tosca on a floating stage at the Bregenz Festival on Lake Constance in Austria—to represent the vast diversity of theatrical activity that audiences around the world will be experiencing in the coming summer months: performances of every imaginable kind at dozens of theatre festivals, domestic and abroad, catalogued in our annual, annotated pre-season listings.

Reviewers of Tosca, which debuted in Bregenz last season, mostly declined to speculate about exactly what effect, aside from astonishment, Mr. Leiacker’s massive eye—100 feet high by 165 feet wide, with entire scenes of the opera staged inside it—is supposed to have on audiences. As symbols go, though, the human eye is probably the closest to all-encompassing—especially when the topic at hand is theatre (“a place for seeing,” as the Greeks would have it). Try keeping that emblematic eye in the back of your mind (or in whatever quadrant it comfortably fits) as you read the various feature articles in these pages. Why is this a useful exercise? If you give it a chance, it won’t take long for the eye to morph into a symbol neatly, perhaps even profoundly, attuned to the material and motifs you’re reading about.

There it is, for example, in the very first paragraph of Lori Ann Laster’s essay analyzing a spate of freshly conceived productions of the American classic Our Town: “The Mind of God—that’s what it said on the envelope,” Thornton Wilder has the play’s young Rebecca tell her brother George, and suddenly it’s easy to envision a Great Eye, benevolent but somewhat austere and melancholy, keeping its distant watch on the homely denizens of Grover’s Corners.

There it is in designer Tal Itzhaki’s contribution to this issue’s special coverage of the theatrical response here and abroad to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: In “Beyond Concrete,” her fascinating meditation on the ubiquitous béton brut that pervades Israeli architecture and forms the substance of the wall being built to separate the two embattled cultures, Itzhaki writes: “The separation wall has become a monstrous visual entity we shun to see, a reality we do not want to witness. It seems to be saying: We live in the hope for the Palestinians to evaporate, to disappear behind the wall.” Whether one imagines the Great Eye peering sorrowfully across the wall from the Israeli side or the Palestinian side, the symbolism is rending and powerful.

Let the Great Eye accompany you on your course through these pages, amplifying your own perspective with its expansive presence. You may discover that, despite the conventional wisdom, seeing is something very different from believing. In the theatre, particularly, things are never quite that simple.