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The ensemble of dressed-down, mosdy white young actors looked so slacker-class, they chattered in such exaggeratedly flat lingo (\"It hasn't really sunk in for real, the fact that I'm 30, or like, to be honest, yeah, honestly I am panicked, or it's not just that I'm panicked but...\"), and they slouched around a linoleum-lined employees' break room so gray and so empty that they might have been standing in line for a brilliant audition for Reality Bites or Clerks. This sort-ofmixed-race casting - a subtle yet signal gesture that had gotten great traction in PlayCo's first U.S. production of a cutting-edge play from Japan (Yoji Sakate's heartbreaking The Attic, directed by Ari Edelson in 2007) - disconcerts those of us accustomed to taking in foreign plays with foreign actors and English supertitles. [...] how many nonprofit theatre companies consistendy throw die full weight of their resources into producing exciting new writers who are still emergent Ln their native countries?

In building her Greenwich Village coffeehouse, Café La MaMa - which morphed to become the world-famous La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club - our Mama welcomed huddled masses of artists yearning to breathe theatre. At her stately funeral atManhattan's St. Patrick's Cathedral, Frank Carucci, president of La MaMa's board, reminded celebrants of the signature words Stewart always uttered, while ringing her famous cowbell, to introduce performances: \"Welcome to La MaMa, dedicated to the playwright and all aspects of the theatre.\" ROBERT WILSON, director and visual artist In die early '60s, my friend David Finkbeiner took me to see a performance at the Café La MaMa, which had recently opened.

Opening in February at the Peter Jay Sharp Theatre on 42nd Street under the assured hands of director Carlos Annesto (whose New York-based troupe Theatre C won a Princess Grace Foundation Special Project Grant to mount this production), Park's play is an immigrant family drama with Korean fan dances based on his own life.

Rob Mermin, founder of Circus Smirkus; Chuck Hudson, a theatre and opera director, former artistic director of the Immediate Theatre in Seattle and now artistic associate of La Lingua della Lirica, an intensive summer training program for opera singers in Italy; Samuel Avital, founder and director of Le Centre du Silence Mime School in Boulder, Colo.; and Gregg Goldston, founder of the Goldston & Johnson School for Mimes, an intensive summer program, and founder/director of the Invisible People, a seven-member touring company. Other Marceau-trained performers and teachers include Kirsten Stephens and Dean Hatton, who recently concocted Silent Poetry, a tribute to the maestro; Mark Jaster, Marceau's former teaching assistant who founded with Sabrina Mandell the Happenstance Theater in Rockville, Md.; Robert Rivest, who in 2001 founded the Rivest School of Mime Theater in Springfield, Mass.; and the incomparable actor Bill Bowers, who presently teaches at New York University's Stcinhardt School of Education, Paper Mill Playhouse and VSA Very Special Arts. In interviews with reporters, during workshops that involved students and the general public, indeed in almost every occasion where interested listeners gathered to hear him expound on his theory of mime's special relativity as an autonomous art form, Marceau spent an inordinate amount of time educating peopie about the elements that make mime independent though somehow related to dance, music, circus and Asian classical genres.

[...] I quickly take the posting down, apologize and try to make amends. The altruism that informs this ecological approach is continually being poked, prodded and tested as Himberg angles for the Theatre Program to attain field leadership during a time of painfully critical self-analysis for the new-play development field in the U.S. \"After seeing plays not being produced as well as they could be, or hearing how playwrights are not getting great experiences in a production situation,\" he says, \"we began to ask ourselves, 'Do we have a role beyond the end of the labs?'\" Part of the answer lies in the search for continuity.

(That situation has worsened, with recent reports of sexual violation of some men and boys.) \"I had no idea what play I would find in that war-torn landscape,\" Notlage says, \"but I traveled to the region because I wanted to paint a three-dimensional portrait of the women caught in the middle of armed conflicts; I wanted to understand who they were, beyond their status as victims.\" Back in Brooklyn some three years later, as Ruined wended its way to a 2008 premiere at the Goodman Theatre of Chicago and the Manhattan Theatre Club, Nottage would sum up her African sojourns in tender language: I found my play in the painful narratives of Salima and the other Congolese women, in their gentle cadences and the monumental space between their gasps and sighs. Humanist to the core, she seeks to demonstrate that what's obdurate is, in fact, assailable - that although the consequences of gender inequality in Africa are so vast and the statistics those consequences generate are so huge, theatre is still a place that can enlarge our collective feelings of connection and political agency.

At one point, Modi tried to halt Sarabhai's television project dealing with development issues (women's empowerment, health, water and rural problems), because as a producer of TV programming Darpana Communications did not first consult with the state. [...] as part of a large-scale effort to develo the Sabarmati riverfront, the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation proposed in 2006 to build its own theatre 500 meters from Natarani, Darpana's 450-seat venue, near enough to cause worries.

S. government support, anyway. Since the demise of Arts International (Ai) in December 2004 - it was \"probably the most important of the post-cold war cultural exchange organizations t lv.it ultimately went bankrupt,\" says Margaret C. Ayers, president of the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation - U.S. financing for international exchange programs has been markedly slashed. [...] the politics of, say, obtaining visas for foreign guest artists still tlepends on bureaucratic caprices and mysterious logic.

According to recent reports, Globovisión, a local television station, may be next on the chopping block; the network's president was recently arrested for allegedly insulting Chavez. According to Michel Hausmann, a Venezuelan stage director whose for-profit production outfit Palo de Agua has seriously felt the effects of the censorious atmosphere since last year (see sidebar), \"There are many theatre companies in Venezuela experiencing political discrimination. For obvious reasons, most foreigners fail to see Chavez for what he is: one of the most popular and powerful political figures in the Western hemisphere. Since the creation of a new regional organization of 32 Latin American and Caribbean countries, provisionally named the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (from which the U.S. and Canada were excluded), Latin America has taken strong moves to assert its geopolitical independence. Last year, TeatroStageFest hosted the U.S. premiere of Diciembre by Guillermo Calderón from Chile. Since that gig, a U.S. tour of Teatro en el Blanco's production of Calderón's play (see page 36) has traveled to Los Angeles, Denver and Miami under the auspices of the Performing Americas program of the National Performance Network, anil La Reil de Productores Culturales de Latino America y el Caribe (La RED) has supported the touring of U.S.-based artists to La RED sites in Central and South America.

[...] I felt a flowering of sorts happening in the ArabAmerican and the larger Middle Eastern arts community. Add to that quandary the apathy among some U.S. critics who consistently dismiss (or in rare cases apologetically inveigh against) plays that deal with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, like Shamieh's Tamam and Lerner's Coming Home, by writing things like, \"These plays may not change anybody's political convictions,\" or \"These plays speak to the converted.\"