Up Front

Writing the preface for an issue that's more fox than hedgehog usually becomes an exercise in finding (or inventing) connections. Sometimes, however, the disconnections among the various parts are too stark, and the only possibility is to think about what they mean and whether they are permanent.

1. First we look at two theaters of politics: The Chilean artists' accounts of their work under Pinochet are emblematic--they survived through inventiveness and defiance; and not only did they survive, they helped change their country. For a reader in the United States, the inescapable background is our own government's brutal and duplicitous role. Igal Ezraty's Arab-Hebrew "model Truth and Reconciliation Commission" is contemporary work of great ethical weight, bravely created in a time and place when violence and racism threaten to drown out all such voices. Both come from afar, and not because of geography.

2. When we turn to New York's experimental theater, we could be gazing at another galaxy. In Shawn-Marie Garrett's description and analysis of young theater companies, in Richard Maxwell's play, and somewhat less absolutely in the BAM talks, the private, the tentative, the small-scale prevail. There's courage, there's invention, but of a formal or a deeply inward kind.

3. And what then does the academics' forum have to tell us about either activist or experimental theater, no matter where? That "theory" has resolutely distanced itself from practice; and also that it's trying to reconnect. That the true seriousness of scholarship is in (polite) battle with the often false seriousness of high abstraction, and a new set of questions is emerging.

I have only a page, so I can't begin to deal with what the three degrees of extreme separation mean. But on the question of their permanence, perhaps it's safe to say that faced with Bush, faced with recession, flood, plague, and international gloom, faced with dire change all around us, the imaginative introspection of our best young (and old) theater and our best young (and old) intellectuals will start turning outward.

--Erika Munk

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