Editor's Note

By Jim O'Quinn

If you've ever made a practice of interviewing theatre artists about their work, you know that some are terrific at articulating the hows and whys of what they do, and that others are, well, not. Most designers, I've found, have a facility for translating their aesthetic decision-making into illuminating language; the visuals-into-words thing seems to come naturally as an intrinsic part of the design process. There are equally talented folks, on the other hand—actors and playwrights, particularly—who get tongue-tied the moment you pose a question about methodology or artistic intent. How? Why? You might conclude from the dearth of communicable insight about the artistic wonders they accomplish that for them, creativity is a vague, dreamy, purely instinctual business in which intellect and precision play nary a part.

Two terrific interviews in this issue of American Theatre serve as happy contradictions to these rule-of-thumb observations. Both interviews are with playwrights, one of whom also regularly acts in his own plays. And both demonstrate that intellect and precision are every bit as fundamental to the crafts of writing and acting as they are to any theatrical discipline, design included.

The two brave and uncompromising artists who do the talking in these pages are, insight and eloquence notwithstanding, from radically different worlds. Taylor Mac is a California-bred writer and performer who—as interviewer Caridad Svich notes in her astute introduction to their conversation—draws upon the traditions of camp and drag that came to the fore in the 1970s to fashion seductive, politically potent stage works. Koffi Kwahulé is a French-speaking, African-born playwright and novelist—Chantal Bilodeau translates his exchanges with AT senior editor Randy Gener—whose linguistically rich, narratively spare plays have earned him comparisons to Samuel Beckett. Both Mac and Kwahulé are on the verge of being more widely known in U.S. theatre circles, and these in-depth interviews serve as full-fledged introductions to their ideas about theatre art and its place in their respective societies.

It's a bonus of sorts when those who make theatre are willing and able to elucidate the processes that undergird their art and the purposes to which it aspires. How? Why? Meet two artists eager to explain it all for you.