Editor's Note

By Jim O'Quinn

If you’ve never met Tony Taccone, Ellen McLaughlin’s up-close-and-personal interview with him will make you feel as though you have. If you’re lucky enough to count yourself as part of the Bay Area director’s steadfast network of friends and collaborators, the interview will remind you why knowing him has been such a rewarding experience. And whether you’re among the former or the latter, the interview will surprise you with its unsparing self-revelations and its savvy analysis of the cultural arc Taccone’s own career inscribes.

That cultural arc—from the idealism and collective spirit of the 1970s and early ’80s to the current ethos, marked by intense polarization between Left and Right and focused (as Taccone puts it) “on individual achievement, money and fame” has been of keen interest as well to the theatre folk Laura Collins-Hughes talks to in her survey of conservative Christian drama. Who could have predicted that the stalwartly progressive Taccone would be dealing in his recent, widely traveled production of David Edgar’s Continental Divide with precisely the same sociopolitical rupture—America’s media-fueled split between liberal and conservative, secular and religious—that troubles and motivates theatre practitioners who belong to Christians in Theatre Arts?

The sociopolitical resonance of theatre is an undercurrent running through other articles in the issue as well—through the tangle of conversations reported by Nicole Estvanik in her clear-eyed account of TCG’s 2006 National Conference in Atlanta; through Eduardo Machado’s paean to the courage and resilience of Václav Havel; even through T. Ryder Smith’s delightfully iconoclastic musings on the nature of acting, recounted in Sarah Hart’s vivid profile.

“I sometimes describe what we do as ‘theatre of urgency,’” Taccone notes near the end of his conversation with McLaughlin. He’s captured the conviction of the artists in this issue in a phrase.