This magazine launched in the spring of 1984, amid the reelection campaign of incumbent President Ronald Reagan and the Democratic primary to pick his challenger, Walter Mondale, who would later that year go down to a crushing 525-to-13 electoral college defeat (Mondale won only his home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia). Among other things, that election resoundingly confirmed the nation’s rightward turn after decades of New Deal and Great Society liberalism.
How did these politics show up in our pages? Most obviously, the increasingly chilly climate for federal arts funding was a recurring subject of the magazine’s coverage, including regular columns by TCG’s deputy director, Lindy Zesch. The National Endowment for the Arts was then still giving money directly to individual artists, including playwrights and translators, but from the start TCG and AT were sounding alarms about a battle that would flame into a full-blown culture war in the ensuing decade.
Also in the year our magazine began, the HIV/AIDS epidemic was already killing thousands of people, a disproportionate number of them in the arts, in a metastasizing crisis that would both exacerbate extant homophobia and stir a generation of human rights activists to demand equality under the law. It would also show up onstage in era-defining classics like The Normal Heart and As Is (Angels in America would come roughly a decade later, though it germinated, and was set, in the Reagan ’80s).
One curious series of stories in our first year followed the controversy over whether Dario Fo, the Italian author of Accidental Death of an Anarchist, would be allowed to attend the play’s opening on Broadway. Initially denied entry on the basis of a McCarthy-era law barring left-wing visitors, Fo and his wife, Franca Rame, were finally granted permission to travel. A true man of the theatre, Fo made the most of the moment, thanking President Reagan for the free publicity.
I cite this history not to suggest merely that we’ve been there, done that, when it comes to the kind of reactionary politics and radical retrenchment that characterized the Reagan era, and which are already part of what we must now call, however grudgingly, the Trump era. But I find it useful in this fraught moment to recall that this magazine, no less than the artists and companies it covers, entered the drama mid-scene, and that we all have roles to play in this still-unfolding story, roles assigned by our moment more than by our own choosing. One question among the many that swirl around this moment of profound national and global indeterminacy—indeed, one of the few we can answer right now—is whether we accept the unique challenges that history has handed us or retreat from them into denial and diversion.
This question is faced by the characters in We Live in Cairo, a new musical about the high hopes and dashed dreams of the Egyptian revolution of 2011, which Nikki Massoud writes about in depth in this issue. And it is greeted with varying degrees of equanimity by the parents of students at the Berkeley private school depicted in Jonathan Spector’s blistering comedy Eureka Day, printed in full in this issue (only in print). Whether weighing the merits of democracy or vaccines, these shows find new ways within old forms to reflect our fractious times and do what theatre uniquely can do, and will be called on to do with fresh urgency in the coming years: make us feel the human stakes of these conflicts in ways no newscast or op-ed can.
This issue also contains our annual spotlight on theatre training, an inherently forward-looking subject, with a particular focus on teachers and the crucial work they do to equip new generations of dreamers and makers for tomorrow’s theatre and tomorrow’s world. That there will be a tomorrow, and that we will all be part of it, is some cause for hope—though hardly for complacency. The drama has more scenes to play before the curtain. Are we ready for our cue?
