Editor's Note

By Jim O’Quinn

It’s going to be a movie before you know it—and, if the casting dish in the latest issue of Vanity Fair is to be believed, Meryl Streep will star in the film as the skeptical, holier-than-thou nun Sister Aloysius, opposite Philip Seymour Hoffman as her foil, the personable but imprudent priest Father Flynn. Still, for at least the 2007–08 season, John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt belongs not to Hollywood but to the theatre. To date, some 34 not-for-profit companies across America have announced that they will be staging the spiritually charged Pulitzer- and Tony-winning drama, propelling it to the number one spot in American Theatre’s annual tally of the season’s top 10 plays.

Beyond Shanley’s ascension to most-produced-writer status, what’s notable about the list? It’s a pleasure to see so many fine plays published by TCG—including Doubt (TCG Books 2005) as well as the two that tied for second place, David Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole (TCG Books 2006) and Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House (TCG Books 2006 and American Theatre, Nov. ’04)—leading the countdown. Aficionados of theatre for young audiences will be pleased by the proliferation of the Reale brothers’ delightful A Year with Frog and Toad. Personally, I think the eight theatres that slated Douglas Carter Beane’s caustic and funny The Little Dog Laughed are smart as whips. And it’s no surprise that August Wilson is solidly represented, in this first full season in which we are no longer graced with his living presence. All in all, the rundown is impressive, agreeable, substantive. Who needs Hollywood?

The real meat of our annual Season Preview, though, can’t be found in the short list of plays that win the numbers game. For the main course, you’ll want to delve more deeply into the state-by-state entries of productions—there are 2,271 of them, we calculate—for revelations about patterns, trends, new talent, region-based programming and so on. As usual, we’ve enlisted a few dozen of your friends and colleagues to anticipate some of those revelations in the section “I wish I’d thought of that!” Consider their enthusiasms a prelude to your own.

Editorially, this oversized issue anticipates the new season with a special section, “Inside the Mind of the Director,” represented on the cover by collage artist Rakefet Kenaan’s whimsical 3-D excavation of the director’s consciousness. The section’s five accomplished artists have big projects on tap in ’07–08. So does tell-it-like-it-is playwright Adam Rapp, who communes with interviewer David Ng. Critic Frank Rich and actor Phylicia Rashad offer extraordinary assessments of two August Wilson masterworks, concurrent with TCG’s landmark publication of the complete 10-play cycle.

And in an information-packed back-of-the-book, a pair of creative teams (Craig Lucas and Bartlett Sher, and Kevin Kline and James Lapine) talk candidly about the joys and vagaries of collaboration; outsider artists Lee Nagrin and Ken Roht get a rare spotlight; critic Elinor Fuchs burrows deep into German theatre; and author Jeremy Gerard puts Wynn Handman and his influential American Place Theatre in historical context.

Welcome to the 2007–08 season.