Editorial

Power said to the world,"You are mine."The world kept it prisoner on her throne.Love said to the world, "I am thine."The world gave it the freedom of her house.

—Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds

There is nothing abstract in power. Its abstraction lies in our limited faculty to articulate its pervasive impact on our lives and livelihoods. In our fictions I've watched it built and sustained nightly. This issue grapples with and bears witness to it.

Onstage, I've seen Philip Akin and Jonathan Goad hurl it around as Othello and Iago respectively. Monique Mojica's Caesar in Death of a Chief dominated a conjured vastness. Anusree Roy's Brothel #9 and David Yee's Carried Away on the Crest of a Wave are intricate studies in status. Don't get me started about the complex goings-on in Pig Girl, because I have a word limit. Suffice it to say, we know power when we see it.

Offstage, I've seen colleagues break into tears at the negotiating table and come to blows in the parking lot over power. Or it might have been me. The details are unimportant. But the lens is critical (read: vital and/or analytic and/or adverse).

Through conversation—and even confrontation—we can engage these abstractions in pursuit of shared clarity and best practice. Perhaps we will choose to be driven by power in the same way that we are driven by stories, where acquisition serves only as a precursor to redistribution …

Michelle Olson unseats the universal by acknowledging incompatible contexts with an unfolding of endless multiversality.

Jivesh Parasram expands on an incisive assessment of the societal influence we wield as makers of stories/bricks/dreams.

Lindsay Anne Black peels back the familial veneer of our collegiality to expose the geographical hierarchy.

Olivia Marie Golosky gives shape to the ephemerality of "safe space," locating accountability for the construct within leadership's act of relinquishing.

Rebecca Burton brings balance to analysis of collective movement building among imperfectly aligned and fallible humans.

Santiago Farias Calderon invokes the power of translation to dismantle barriers imposed by the global hegemony of the English language.

Philip Adams challenges the habitual assumption of conventional governance structures for purportedly paradigm-shifting organizations.

Sarah Garton Stanley cracks open her own social location, putting perceived status on the back foot in service of shifting sites of influence.

Keith Barker, Tsholo Khalema, Catherine Hernandez, and Mick Augustin offer optic expansion on this issue's themes, highlighting position, power, and perspective. Leah-Simone Bowen's script The Flood is a Pandora's box of a women's cellblock, digging down into stories submerged by political invisibility.

This issue also features unnamed and innumerable contributors whose experiences people the short scenes scattered throughout, as well as the ephemeral imprint of editorial guidance from allies Paul Halferty and Jenn Stephenson. This profusion of voices conveys how power is palpable in our professional environment, how it can be enacted without being named, leveraged on the strength of implicit consequences, perpetuated by acquiescence and assumption.

"When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers" is a proverb I learned from Carlos Bulosan Theatre's 2013 performance of In the Shadow of Elephants.

Among the profusion of big thinkers I encounter in the story-telling professions, I often hear casual profundities uttered in passing. In these errant fragments are tools that I think can help us to better understand the larger construct and thereby our roles in shaping it.

Contributors to this issue look at dynamics of human interaction in rehearsal halls, board rooms, administrative offices, design studios, carp shops, and tech booths. We discuss how authority is wielded in script pages, contracts, symbols, and body language.

Inevitably, we consider how the structures we find ourselves working within replicate the structures of the world that we live in, that we take inspiration from, that we endeavour to impact. (How are we doing with that, by the way?) We may never know, for example, exactly what impact the profusion of pipeline-themed plays has had on our current public opinion or political policy.

Everything I've seen this year reinforces...