From Sam Shepard in 1984 to Qween Jean in 2023.
It was almost called Stage.
“That’s the name that Jim and I and Laura liked most,” said Terry Nemeth, the original publisher of this magazine, about its launch in April 1984 under founding editor Jim O’Quinn and associate editor Laura Ross. “But Peter Zeisler was adamant that it be American Theatre.”
It seems clear in hindsight that Zeisler, longtime executive director of our publisher, Theatre Communications Group, was right to insist. In naming a magazine for both the nation and the art form/industry too many still associate with just one U.S. city, TCG was spelling out both its prime allegiance and its coverage area: the resident theatre movement that had sprung up in dozens of U.S. towns and cities in the decades since Theatre Arts, the storied New York-centric theatre journal, folded in 1964. By showing that burgeoning field to itself and to the world, American Theatre hoped both to recognize and encourage its flourishing.
“It is called Theatre Communications Group, but there was very little communication going on,” said Lindy Zesch, longtime deputy director of TCG, who joined the organization in 1972 and worked there through 1995. The notion of creating a magazine was on her and Zeisler’s minds from the start, and by the late ’70s, the seeds of both the magazine and the organization’s other publishing concern, TCG Books, were planted with a few guidebooks, published plays, and a monthly newsletter called Theatre Communications.
It was that newsletter that O’Quinn, a Louisiana-bred newspaperman who’d come to study performance at NYU, was initially hired to edit in 1982. He joined Laura Ross, a young dramaturg just out of Yale Drama School, who recalled laying out the Theatre Communications newsletter with scissors and paste. Nemeth was hired soon after to guide all TCG publications, and he helped lead the charge to take the ad-free, 40-page newsletter up to the next level. As Nemeth told me, “We thought, basically, if you just took that newsletter, put ads in, and made the photographs bigger, you had a magazine. Everything was there in terms of the material.”
Of course, ideally a magazine is more than a super-sized newsletter. Freelance designer Cynthia Friedman created a spare, clean-lined template, printed “on the best damn paper you could find,” as Nemeth put it. And the magazine’s first year showed an admirable mix of ambition and authority, with penetrating interviews with playwrights Sam Shepard, Athol Fugard, and Wole Soyinka; with multi-hyphenate power couple Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn; with set designer Eugene Lee. There were profiles of avant-garde icons Mabou Mines, the Living Theatre, and Meredith Monk, and ruminations from critics like Richard Eder and James Leverett, TCG’s director of literary services.
There were also inspired pairings of voices: an intergenerational conversation between Lillian Hellman and Marsha Norman; the back-and-forth between a pair of then-wunderkinds, Peter Sellars and Des McAnuff; a reprint of Studs Terkels’s illuminating dialogue with Lorraine Hansberry; Kenneth Cavander’s summit with Joseph Campbell on the untapped myth-making potential of the American theatre.
There was also a certain amount of material you might expect to find in a newsletter: listings, news items, op-eds from leaders in the field, a report from an industry conference—not just any trade gathering, of course, but the TCG Conference in Amherst, Mass., in June 1984, where guest speakers included Arthur Miller, Ying Ruocheng, John Guare, and Derek Walcott. Nor were the news items in those early years mere logrolling: In the midst of the Reagan-Bush era, AT rang the alarm about threats to arts funding and global exchange in the midst of the Cold War.
The magazine would keep its finger on the pulse of the world outside the stage doors in the decades to come, as the theatre and its artists faced the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the NEA culture wars, the aftermath of 9/11, the Great Recession, right up to #MeToo, Covid, and the racial reckoning of recent years. If an emphasis on cultural equity seems like a new direction to some of our readers, consider that August Wilson’s “The Ground on Which I Stand,” and the debates it inspired, graced these pages in 1996.
O’Quinn would freely admit that the balance between being a “house organ” and an independent journal was a tricky one to strike from the start. While we have always tried to include a chorus of impossibly varied, sometimes contentiously divided voices, there is no avoiding that, starting with our name, American Theatre has always sought to tell the stories of the nation’s performing artists and institutions more or less on their own terms.
Zesch said she measures the magazine’s success in terms of cross-pollination—i.e., the extent to which AT put avant-garde troupes and homegrown ensembles like Steppenwolf or Cornerstone on the same pages as the nation’s flagship institutional theatres, and vice versa.
“The regional theatre profile depended on subscription and audiences and serving a community,” Zesch said. “Experimental theatre, on the other hand, was much more interested in the content and the art. I’m not saying that regional theatre wasn’t concentrating on that, but they were just two different things. What we tried to do was bring them together and have them influence each other. I must say that was a hugely successful mission.”
The magazine’s mandate, though, isn’t just about showing but about telling. I will give O’Quinn—who retired in 2015 and died in 2021—the last word.
“The act of theatre happens between artists and audience, but it’s not complete,” he told me years ago. “Because theatre is an art form of language and ideas, the discourse that follows the act of theatre is an integral part of it. When you have a community that has good theatre but has lousy theatre critics—if the discourse that derives from theatre is weak or faulty—then that weakens the theatre itself. So I feel like this is a very important component of the act of theatre. To have a place, a forum for discussion of it, is essential and crucial.”
Rob Weinert-Kendt (he/him) is editor-in-chief of this magazine.
