Editorial

Our cover feature this issue is built around the nuclear issue. Noted psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, whose years of study of the survivor as a social type, and his work as a political activist/lecturer on nuclear disarmament , opens up important areas of thinking with regard to the creation and belief in art in an era faced with the actual threat of a nuclear holocaust. Bonnie Marranca, who interviewed Lifton, adds her own thoughts on the nuclear issue to an analysis of the media in which theatrical vocabulary unhealthily shapes the discourse of political affairs. Czestaw Mitosz's exquisitely thought essay, Who Is Gombrowicz?, besides being a model for critical inquiry, provides a political, historical and aesthetic frame for one of the great writers in modernist literature, and hopefully should encourage renewed interest in him. We have expanded the Contemporary Styles in Production section to include short articles on a selection of productions from here and abroad which we feel deserve critical attention in PAJ. Americans receive very little information about what important directors abroad are doing, and most American productions don't receive any more attention than ill-conceived newspaper reviews. We invite our readers to write to us about covering productions around the U.S. and abroad. In keeping with this desire to serve as a forum for new ideas and an information source, among other things, we include a special feature entitled American Theatre Abroad-The European View in which spokespersons from France, Holland, and Italy discuss the current reception-by audiences , artists, and in some cases, governments-of avant-garde work from America. Martha Coigney, who heads the U.S. Center of the International Theatre Institute, details the American perspective on cultural exchange , why and how it should change. This controversial topic has not been publicly debated in this country, as it should, because it raises many questions about the nature of culture, the development of art, and the part politics plays in it. 4 And, finally, continuing in our delight in bringing to our readership lost plays of the modern period's dramatic heritage, we have chosen for PAJ 18 the Hungarian Frigyes Karinthy's plays which, readers will be pleasantly surprised to learn, predate lonesco's work in the same vein. Perhaps they will encourage some historian to rewrite the history of absurdism, or more, modern theatre. The Editors 5 ANNOUNCING FEBRUARY PUBLICATION OF 1981 NOBEL PRIZE WINNER ELIAS CANETTI'S COMEDY OF VANITY & LIFE-TERMS Appearing for the first time in English, two plays by the winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize for Literature, Elias Canetti. Comedy of Vanity (1934), a dark satire on mass movements and narcissism, is a prophetic vision of fascism; in LifeTerms (1956), everybody in a new society is assigned the number of years he or she may live. Canetti's plays provide a missing link in the European dramatic heritage. Canetti is a writer of unusual dramatic power. (NEW YORK TIMES) [$18.95 cloth; $7.95 paper] ...