Sweeping the stage

Theater - Year in review

by Carolyn Clay

1. Collected Stories (Huntington Theatre Company). Jacques Cartier helmed a deft production of this small-scale but literate and affecting work by Donald Margulies about the evolving relationship between a mentor and student, both writers. The playwright uses the shifting surrogate mother-daughter relationship of his characters -- expertly portrayed at the Huntington by Felicity Jones and Deborah Kipp -- to explore questions not just of ethics and friendship but of creativity and experience.

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the year in review

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2. Dealer's Choice (Gloucester Stage Company). A surprisingly strong small-theater staging of this 1995 London Evening Standard Award winner by British actor/director/writer Patrick Marber, a sharply funny play that treats poker as serious -- and revelatory -- business. Michael Allosso directed the all-American cast, who didn't always nail the accents but got the rhythms and the tensions right. Ronald Hunter was particularly memorable as the terse, menacing cardsharp among amateurs.

3. Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (Huntington Theatre Company). Michael Bloom helmed the Boston premiere of Moisés Kaufman's increasingly condensed and expressionistic arrangement of the 1895 trials that led to a body- and spirit-breaking stint in Reading Gaol for the dandy/playwright/aesthete. This dazzlingly dramatic work, much of it culled from the trial transcripts, goes a long way toward proving its point -- that Wilde was prosecuted less for his homosexual activities than for his eloquent insistence that art and morality need not be bedfellows. The staging, more flamboyant than Kaufman's own, was surely no less intelligent and gripping.

4. How I Learned To Drive (Trinity Repertory Company, American Repertory Theatre). Trinity Repertory Company presented the New England premiere of Paula Vogel's Pulitzer Prize winner, a compassionate, troubling, and daringly funny examination of the relationship between a young woman and the relative who molests her. Directed by frequent Vogel collaborator Molly D. Smith, the play was acted by Trinity vets Anne Scurria and Timothy Crowe with a mix of tenderness, pain, and snake-oil charm. A subsequent staging at the American Repertory Theatre, directed by David Wheeler, marked the stage debut of film star Debra Winger and featured a quietly mesmerizing turn by Arliss Howard as the funny uncle who teaches Lolita to drive.

5. In the Jungle of Cities. And while we're speaking of Arliss Howard: he was also at the center of Robert Woodruff's abrasive, hypnotic staging of Brecht's mythic Chicago-set boxing-match-to-the-death between a Malaysian lumber dealer and the bookstore clerk he tempts to blood sport. Paul Schmidt's new translation caught the visceral, hard-bodied language of the German playwright. And Howard turned in a harrowing, corrosive performance as George Garga to Alvin Epstein's delicate, chilling, if cartoon-accent-burdened C. Shlink.

6. The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare & Company). Tina Packer's outdoor staging of this Elizabethan-comedy-turned-modern-problem-play made Venice a melting pot of faiths (each with its own processions), in which ethnic hatred simmered all around and no one faith had a corner on morality. The production's effort to soften the Jewish-moneylender villain made for a few puzzlements, but Jonathan Epstein was a powerfully wounded Shylock nonetheless. And Tod Randolph was a revelation as Portia, mannish and girlish at once -- and racked with the strain of being a living lottery prize.

7. Molly Sweeney (Nora Theatre Company). Scott Edmiston helmed a lovely, subtly interactive production of Brian Friel's lyrical three-hander, part parable and part case history, that uses intermeshed monologues to tell the story of a competent, contented blind woman whose miracle cure robs her of the rich if circumscribed world of her blindness. A potent exploration of the relationship between sight and understanding, the piece was nicely acted by Paul Kerry, Richard Mawe, and especially Judith McIntyre, whose Molly boasted both a centered radiance and a sense of mischief.

8. Racing Demon (Merrimack Repertory Theatre). David G. Kent's production of David Hare's eloquent and provocative 1990 play about a team of Anglican clergymen fighting social ills, eroding faith, and one another in a tough London neighborhood was rich and spare at once -- as was Howard Jones's set, a marriage of Gothic cathedral and chain link. And the acting was uniformly impressive.

9. The Taming of the Shrew (American Repertory Theatre). Director Andrei Serban threw everything but the kitchen sink into this wild-in-Padua production of another Shakespeare problem play, this one a comic paean to wife torture as a means to domestic bliss. Dizzyingly inventive and freewheeling, the staging won its stripes at the play's thorniest moment, turning Katharina's troublesome ode to female submission into a gorgeous moment of mutual surrender. And the superb team of Don Reilly and Kristin Flanders negotiated Serban's gauntlet of vaudeville, cross-dressing, and Cole Porter with devilish aplomb.

10. Tiny Alice (Hartford Stage) and Wit (Shakespeare & Company). Both these productions -- Mark Lamos's elegant revival of Edward Albee's thumpingly obvious yet deliberately obscure 1964 religio-sexual parable and Daniela Varon's roughhewn staging of Margaret Edson's powerful study of death and Donne -- deployed stellar acting to mine the mysteries of potent if imperfect works. Richard Thomas brought intelligence and grace to the sacrificial lamb at the center of the impenetrable Tiny Alice. And Frances West gave a piercingly unsentimental performance as the hard-nosed scholar (a specialist in the Holy Sonnets of John Donne) whose Beckettesque descent into cancer hell brings her to a deeper understanding of the subject of her life's work.

No small actors. In addition to those already mentioned, there were outstanding turns by Lizbeth Mackay in 'night, Mother, Stephen Rowe in Albee's Men, Dee Nelson in Macbeth, John Kuntz in Actorz with a Z!, Thomas Derrah in The Imaginary Invalid, Jon McGovern in Alter Egos, Rebecca Hart in A Girl's Life, Ellen McLaughlin in A Girl's Life and The Threepenny Opera, Sarah Newhouse in Lost in Yonkers, Rose Liberace in Skylight, and Paul Butler and Anthony Chisholm in Jitney.