Editor's Comment

Theatre Topics is a unique journal in that it offers us the opportunity as theatre educators, scholars, and practitioners to reflect not only on what we do, but also on how we do it—how we teach, how we do our research, how we write, how we perform. Most Theatre Topics essays have a kind of meta-quality, a rich self-consciousness of process and purpose. I am delighted to introduce six essays for this issue of Theatre Topics that exemplify the range of the journal's subjects and styles. To me, all of these essays perform an intervention, whether historical, theoretical, pedagogical, or performative.

Both Steve Bottoms's and John Fletcher's essays intervene in what have become axiomatic ideas about performance studies. Bottoms historicizes the political and rhetorical origins of "performance studies" in the 1960s, and looks at the masculinist and homophobic underpinnings of early performance studies. Fletcher focuses on the work of Tim Miller and Cornerstone Theatre to explore the conjunction of "community-based" and "political" theatres and to challenge and extend the efficacy of this work. Both of these articles ask us to question some of the key assumptions on which our work is based.

The essays by Laurie Beth Clark and Alisa Roost revise presumed notions of what composes a theatre course. Clark and Roost each describe classroom practices and offer wonderful, specific teaching ideas that cross disciplines. Clark's extensively illustrated piece invites theatre educators to teach from a performance artist's perspective, and Roost suggests ways to teach writing that complement the idiosyncratic learning styles of theatre students.

Kim Marra and Deb Margolin both offer personal performances that rethink traditional performance. Margolin's piece, which was adapted from a performance at ATHE in summer 2002 (with an evocative introduction by Elin Diamond), explores her insistence on making parody a tool for a Jewish female performer. Marra recounts her relationship with her research subject—the gay playwright Clyde Fitch—through her own performance of gender and sexuality as a butch lesbian.

This issue of Theatre Topics also introduces a Book Review section, with four lively reviews, excellently edited by Leah Lowe. Theatre Topics plans to review books with an emphasis on practice or pedagogy, as well as anthologies and other educationally oriented publications.

I am so very pleased that Joan Herrington of Western Michigan University will take over as Editor beginning with the March 2004 issue. Joan has enthusiastically read and reviewed more than a hundred submissions over the past two years, offering consistently incisive and useful reader's reports. She has also been a great sounding board for me on every stage of the journal's production.

I also welcome Jonathan Chambers of Bowling Green State University as Coeditor. Jonathan's experience as an artist, a scholar, and an educator bode well for Theatre Topics's future leadership, and he has already contributed to the journal through numerous terrific reader's reports.

As this is my final issue as Editor, I want to thank Amy Steiger, Assistant Editor, for her time and energy. Thanks too, to Ellen Gainor and Janelle Reinelt, ATHE's previous and current Research and Publication Chairs; each was enormously helpful and supportive as a liaison between Theatre Topics and ATHE. Finally, thanks to Mary Muhler at JHUP, who graciously answered every question and solved every problem.