Editor's Comments

No doubt you’ve noticed the new cover, the work of designer Tekla McInerney. Gone is our old subtitle, “Dramaturgy, Performance Studies, Pedagogy.” Its absence highlights a newly clarified mission that evolved from conversations with ATHE’s membership. The adjacent copyright page now states that Topics publishes “on a wide variety of subjects, including acting, advocacy, community-based theatre, design, directing, dramaturgy, performance studies, and theatre pedagogy, with an emphasis on articles that reflect the intersection of theory and practice.” We hope the redesigned cover and the corresponding new look of the journals as a whole convey this spirit—a refinement and not a repudiation of Topics’s traditional mission.

The lively forums that frame this issue—a session with Emily Mann and a panel of movement specialists—are actual conversations that took place at recent ATHE conferences. Stanton B. Garner, Jr.’s provocative reflection on teaching Oleanna documents the explosive student conversations that resulted from reading and seeing the play. David Rush’s concise primer on talkback sessions seeks to improve the quality of conversations with our audiences. In all of these articles, conversations emerge as readers interrogate, enter into dialogue with, and talk back to writers and audiences—literally, those who hear. It seems only appropriate that Mann leads this issue, since her plays are often the direct products of conversations that she has had with her protagonists. She hears them so that audiences can do so too.

Within this framework, Jill Taft-Kaufman’s detailed account of her narrative theatre production of a Vietnam war novel finds itself implicitly in conversation with Mann’s “theatre of testimony.” Both artists create scripts and direct productions that authenticate and give voice to experience beyond the wall of the theatre. The issue concludes with Gerry Large’s innovative suggestions for postmodern body training, followed by the candid conversation of major modern movement teachers, submitted to us by Bruce Lecure.

As always, I invite you to join these conversations through your responses or contributions. More specifically, Theatre Topics is planning a special issue on advocacy to appear a year from now. Look for programming at this summer’s ATHE conference connected to this theme. I hope to hear from you.