The Death of PAJ: Performing Arts Journal

When I went off to the CUNY Graduate Center to get my doctorate in theater history/criticism/literature, I wrote to Bonnie Marranca, the co-founder and editor of Performing Arts Journal offering to volunteer to help out in any way was needed. I had been reading back issues in the library at Illinois State University, where I was working on my masters degree, and I was inspired by the vision for the theater that Marranca and her husband, Gautam Dasgupta, put forward issue after issue. I was amazed when I received a letter back from Bonnie offering me a job as an Editorial Assistant. I arrived in the late summer of 1989, and I remember sitting in the office discussing the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and event about which I was more skeptical than they were. As usual, they were right.

I worked there mornings for two years. My knowledge of the New York avant garde, much less the European version, was very much lacking, and I am afraid I appreciated only in retrospect the people who showed up at the PAJ office: Robert Foreman, Robert Wilson (whose office was just a few doors down the hall from PAJ), Maria Irene Fornes, and many other artists and intellectuals. Bonnie and Gautam were always discussing some new idea, and I tried to soak up what I was hearing. But I was also, at the time, interested in structuralism and Marxist theory, and not as tuned into the more literary tradition in which the worked. At the time, Bonnie was in a historical and pastoral phase in her writing, in which she published Hudson Valley Lives: Writings From the 17th Century to the Present and American Garden Writing, which were decidedly not theatrical.

After two years, I returned to Illinois State to begin my teaching and administrative career (while struggling to write a dissertation that I had to abandon and then start over entirely). But I have always looked back fondly on the time I spent in the Varick Street office.

So it is with some sadness that I happened up the announcement that the final issue of Performing Arts Journal had been printed, and Bonnie had retired as editor as of Fall 2024. I’m glad that she and MIT Press did not continue publication after her departure – there are some institutions that should not be passed on to the next generation because to do so would be to move in a different direction from the original impetus and end up being a contradiction.

Here is an interview with Bonnie Marranca, published by MIT in January of this year, in which Bonnie evaluates the impact of Performing Arts Journal. The interview is called “Saying farewell to PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art with editor Bonnie Marranca," and it is worth a read. You can also watch the interview here. I was particularly taken with her description of PAJ’s main competitor at founding, The Drama Review (TDR), and how they differentiated themselves from that journal.

Well done, Bonnie – 48 years as editor is an amazing feat. I hope you can enjoy your Hudson Valley home.