Director and writer David F. Chapman’s first professional assisting gig, working under Mark Lamos at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, was “at times nerve-wracking,” he remembers—once he even spilled the requisite coffee on his distinguished supervisor (“I did a complete pratfall while walking toward him with his 4 p.m. Starbucks!”). But Chapman’s wide-ranging overview of the varieties of theatrical assisting (page 42) emphasizes the positive: “It’s a kind of thank-you card to a job that’s taught me so much, and a gentle call to arms about how we can make it even better,” he allows. “Assisting, it turns out, is as highly individual an art form as any other job in our profession.”

Joshua Dachs—whose firm Fisher Dachs Associates specializes in the architectural and technical design of performance spaces—has some surprisingly critical things to say about the ubiquitous black box and its effect on our perceptions of drama (page 96). “The growing interest among theatre artists in working in
nontraditional and found spaces suggests a basic frustration with the conventional idea of a ‘neutral’ place for drama—and rightly so,” reasons Dachs, who has helped shape such remarkable venues as D.C.’s Mead Center for American Theater at Arena Stage and the Old Globe of San Diego’s Conrad Prebys Theatre Center.