Editor's Note

By Jim O'Quinn

Boldness, in the view of the artists headlining this issue of American Theatre, is clearly and unequivocally a virtue.

Consider the visceral image on this month's cover—a scene from Dutch auteur Ivo van Hove's new theatrical adaptation of Ingmar Bergman's acclaimed 1973 film Cries and Whispers. Who but van Hove could have pulled off the wildly unlikely color switch from Bergman's crimson-saturated palette ("I have thought of the color red as the interior of the soul," the filmmaker famously observed of his visual plan for the film) to these out-of-control swaths of emotionally chilly chroma blue? Our critic Randy Gener, who saw the production this past May in Stockholm, suggests in "A Passion for Extremes," his multi-faceted examination of van Hove and his work, that this jolting shift across the color spectrum effectively propels Bergman's tragic 19th-century characters into an epic 21st-century battle between art and death.

Don't look for wishy-washy sentiments in the issue's other major feature, either—that's hardly Marsha Norman's style.

Under the headline "Not There Yet," Norman seizes upon a topic that has had the national theatre community buzzing in recent months: Why are women—especially women writers—so severely underrepresented on the American stage? That's not a new question, of course, but thanks to a Princeton researcher's study released this past summer (and reported on with questionable emphasis, in some cases, by the media), the issue of equality for women working in the theatre has fresh currency. Norman's common-sense sojourn through this fraught territory is forthright, exhortatory and bracingly free of piety or humbug. Here's an opinion essay you can lean into and spar with—and use, as Norman suggests you should, "to figure out what role each of us has to play in turning this situation around."

Boldness, as Gener convincingly illustrates, is director van Hove's modus operandi as an artist. Boldness is also what we need, Norman asserts just as convincingly, to remake our American theatre into a fairer and more truthful place. Challenge delivered.

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