Editor's Note

By Jim O’Quinn

This is, you might say, an all-American issue of American Theatre: There’s no foreign wünderkind unveiled, no colorful report from festivals abroad, no diary of a critic’s travels through far-flung theatre scenes. Nevertheless, several of the stories told in these pages are tied indelibly to major events far beyond our borders; revolutions and cataclysms have haunted the lives of the artists involved and transformed the nature of their art.

In the case of playwright J.T. Rogers—whose drama The Overwhelming had its successful debut last year at the National Theatre in London and is currently running at New York City’s Roundabout Theatre Company through Dec. 23—the event in question is the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Rogers begins his cover article “Ties of Blood” with a chilling sentence I will not soon forget: “There are no strangers in Rwanda.” The extraordinary and wrenching story he tells is less about the process of the play’s creation than about its confounding and contradictory human ramifications.

Another playwright, the inimitable Eduardo Machado, takes space in these pages to explore the sensuous impulses that inspire his writing—a three-week trip to his native Cuba and some “unbearably delicious” tamales are involved—and in the process exposes the schism that sometimes unnerves his producers and incenses his audiences. No apologist for the Castro regime, but nevertheless anti-embargo and willing to critique the U.S. as “imperialist,” Machado reveals himself as a writer whose very consciousness has been forged by the vagaries of global politics.

Political transformations in another Latin American nation have had profound consequences in the life and career of director and producer Susana Tubert, profiled in this issue. Her birthplace, Argentina, is “a country that is reborn from the ashes over and over again,” says Tubert, who with her family fled the military dictatorship there when she was still a teenager. These days she returns to Argentina as an impresario, canvassing that country and its neighbors for resonant theatre to import to the U.S.

These American artists live and work without blinders. They understand that theatre, like politics, is a response to a world in flux. They wear their hopes for our enlightened future on their sleeves.