Editor’s note

In reading responses from those memorializing the passing of our dear colleague and editorial board member, Debra Hundert McLauchlan, several adjectives recurred. Committed. Creative. Generous. Supportive. Caring. Nouns recurred, too. Drama. Theatre. Brock University. Mother. Grandmother. Wife. Friend. Students. One surprisingly consistent noun was “story.” Everyone mentioned how she told good stories and employed anecdotes; how she helped students tell stories through theatre and drama; how she taught and supported and wrote with story; how she made space and time for story—her’s and others’. Always.

Of course, David Booth was her mentor. In their book Story Works (2000), Bob Barton and David Booth remind us:

We humans are storytelling animals. The drive to story is basic in all people, and exists in all cultures. Stories shape our lives and our culture—we cannot seem to live without them. (7)

In these complex times of shifting truths and competing counter narratives, facility with and respect for story matters, more and more. This general issue explores how story shapes our work as form, as content, as method, as data, as art.

In “Practice makes perfectible: The impact of training and rehearsal on program fidelity,” Wendy K. Mages helps us look at pre-school program fidelity with a drama-based interactive drama and storytelling curriculum implemented by teaching artists and serving students and teachers new to drama, but akin with story. The way-making function story affords theatre’s “legitimate” entry into theatre-starved/test-focused schools recurs and connects, with adults and children. Lest we imagine theatre folk would always honor and articulate the value of story, Rives B. Collins and Fiona G. Maxwell help us gaze into the mirror. In “Tell it with zest: The generative influence of storytelling on the origin of creative drama,“ Collins and Maxwell critically analyze how our own theatre/drama literature portrays influences shaping the iconic Winifred Ward without acknowledging the enormous impact of story and literature on her, her work, and her legacy.

Erika Hughes’s piece (“Dramaturgies of risky play: Two (risky) case studies”) chronicles a layered qualitative story of risk. She portrays her own childhood and adolescent reminiscence tales of risk alongside a careful cataloguing and analysis of risk in her theatre artist work with and for young people in two distinct settings. In another richly descriptive qualitative piece, Eve Müller, Diane Nutting, and Katie Keddell tell the journey of a research project where the story found outshone the story sought. In “Understanding ArtAbility: Using qualitative methods to assess the impact of a multi-genre arts education program on middle-school students with autism and their neurotypical teen mentors,” all eyes initially trained on the arts experiences of young people identified on the autism spectrum, yet their teen helpers’ perspectives productively deepened and de-centered the research story.

As we move through these articles, as well as across our work and daily lives, may we all remain particularly attuned to story and the myriad ways we, as theatre scholars and artists, are charged and enabled to live with, in, and against stories. May our storied actions be artful and brave. And may they honor the memory of our colleague, Debra Hundert McLauchlan, whose legacy is a testament to the power of story as an act of generous inclusivity and cogent advocacy.