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Editorial ::: Mary McDonald-Lewis, a professional voice actor from Portland, Oregon, who is interviewed in this issue, will contribute an ongoing series of articles written from the perspective of RT as an end in and of itself. Lucy Rioux joined us last issue (see archives) and continues in this issue writing from the viewpoint of one with many years of experience teaching and using RT in a classroom milieu. Together, these two regular contributors will help set the stage for the kind of content balance that I believe our diverse readership will appreciate. Readers Theatre is unique among all theatre forms in its diversity of application. It's this very diversity that challenges us here at RTD to achieve a vigorous editorial balance between RT as a means to an end, and RT as an end in itself. A cursory search of the Internet will show that RT today is frequently used in K-12 classrooms to augment the teaching of everything from arithmetic to zoology. It's usefulness in literacy and language arts is widely recognized. As Mary McDonald-Lewis alludes, the value of RT as a teaching and training tool should be supported but with this caveat: if it becomes identified as an activity for children it will go the way of puppetry here in America. Unlike Europe where puppetry has a centuries old tradition as theatre for grownups, puppetry in America today barely exists except as amusement for children. We encourage the use of RT in the classroom while strongly supporting its validity as authentic theatre for grownups.
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