1. Bailegangaire (Súgán Theatre Company). Irish writer Tom Murphy’s 1985 work (whose title means "town without laughter") ties a lyrical endless loop of a tale about a long-ago laughing contest to the plight of three women caught in limbo in a Connaught backwater. Mommo is the gnarled old crone spinning the story that must end in order for teller and listeners to move on; the trapped listeners are her caretaker granddaughters. Carmel O’Reilly’s production of the cryptic but exquisitely written piece was sure-footed, aptly squalid, and nicely performed by Nancy E. Carroll, Natalie Rose Liberace, and Judith McIntyre.

2. Bat Boy: The Musical (SpeakEasy Stage Company). This Off Broadway hit musical inspired by tabloid stories about a "bat child" found in a West Virginia cave is pretty irresistible. (Aficionados will be glad to know the production is returning to the Boston Center for the Arts January 3 through 25.) The show sports a libretto by Keythe Farley and Brian Fleming and music and lyrics by Laurence O’Keefe that parody musical-theater icons from My Fair Lady to The Lion King. Goofy but sweet, it makes satiric hay of the capture, civilization, betrayal, and back story of Bat Boy, who when introduced to small-town society proves as educable as Eliza Doolittle but as incorrigible as Nature. In the charming performance of Miguel Cervantes, in Spock ears and Dracula fangs, he’s also athletic, animalistic, and adorable, even when harmonizing while hanging upside down. There are good performances too from Sara Chase, Kerry Dowling, and Michael Mendiola, all under the tongue-in-cheek direction of Paul Daigneault.

3. Family Stories (Market Theater). The late, lamented Market Theater hit its zenith with this assaultive, Annie Dorsen-staged production of Serbian playwright Biljana Srbljanovic’s 1998 work, in which a quartet of adult actors playing children playing house grotesquely mirror trickle-down, war-numbed life under dictator Slobodan Milosevic. The drama is a Punch-and-Judy depiction of the dehumanization of a society squirming under the boots of repression, nationalism, corruption, and war; and the Market cast found the line between the relentless exaggeration of kids and emotional truth.

4. Homebody/Kabul (Trinity Repertory Company). Tony Kushner’s first major play since Angels in America is as splendid as it is disjointed, evolving as it does from a long monologue by a sheltered British housewife called the Homebody into a complex, cartoonish personal journey cum political thriller set in the ancient Afghan city of the title. But Oskar Eustis’s masterful production, in which bombed-out Kabul floated like an Old World cloud into the woody Victorian environs of the Homebody, made a whole out of Kushner’s grand Cuisinarting of history, politics, family disconnection, and vocabular audacity. The play, which Kushner undertook in 1997 and which he sets in ’98 and ’99, couldn’t be more prescient, but Trinity captured its magic as well as its pertinence.

5. A Lesson Before Dying (New Repertory Theatre/Orpheum Foxborough). Lois Roach helmed a simple, searing staging of Romulus Linney’s powerful adaptation of Ernest J. Gaines’s 1993 National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel. Set in Louisiana in 1948, the work centers on a young black man wrongly sentenced to death by a white jury but learning with the help of an African-American schoolteacher to face his fate with dignity. The play flattens the novel a little, but in this production, the acting, particularly by Malik B. El-Amin, Malcolm Foster Smith, Barbara Meek, and Jacqui Parker, radiated a steady sincerity that made up for that.

6. Marat/Sade (American Repertory Theatre). Scraping Peter Weiss’s 1964 play (whose full, plot-synopsizing title is The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat As Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade) out from under the long shadow of British director Peter Brook is no mean feat. But the work proved a fine match for the imagistic American Repertory Theatre æsthetic, and Hungarian director János Szász put his mark on it in a physically striking staging that was elaborately choreographed by Csaba Horváth. I didn’t approve of Szász’s superimposed snuff-movie ending, but the production was both harsh and hypnotic. And with its cage crammed with loonies and its walkways of steel tables, it nudged Brook’s clinic bathhouse to a side corner of memory.

7. Medea (Broadway in Boston at the Wilbur Theatre). You can make the old new, as the Abbey Theatre of Ireland proved with this electrifying production of Euripides’s 2500-year-old play. Both director Deborah Warner and actress Fiona Shaw, whose sexually ragged performance of the title role eschewed vanity and even sanity, won London Evening Standard Awards for their work on the staging, which left this critic drained and trembling.

8. Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (Huntington Theatre Company and Broadway in Boston at the Wilbur Theatre). Irish-Catholic playwright Frank McGuinness switched sectarian sides for this 1985 drama that follows eight Ulster Protestants headed toward the World War I bloodbath called the Battle of the Somme. A meditation on masculinity and war, patriotism and jingoism, naked fear and human gallantry, the play was directed by Huntington Theatre Company artistic director Nicholas Martin, who made the most of its ghostly pageantry. And it was well acted by an ensemble anchored by Mulholland Drive star Justin Theroux.

9. The Subject Was Roses (Gloucester Stage Company). For a work that won the Pulitzer Prize, a Tony, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, Frank Gilroy’s autobiographical 1964 play about a 21-year-old World War II vet returning to the familial battlefront in the Bronx is not often revived. Eric C. Engel’s rock-solid staging of the old-fashioned yet explosive drama, highlighted by Robert Walsh’s painfully convincing turn as the now affable, now fist-pounding father, made one wonder why.

10. Uncle Vanya (American Repertory Theatre). János Szász would seem to be the director of the year, at least on this list. His vividly realized if decidedly auteurist vision of Chekhov’s work, which is set on a provincial Russian estate at the turn of the 20th century, plays out in a deep, dilapidated bunker buttressed by a bar (complete with bartender). Rain- and vodka-sloshed, the production (which continues through this Saturday, December 28) is almost Beckett-esque, its waning gentry like disheveled hangers-on whose business (as is said in the play) is to drink, sleep, eat, and be intellectually and sexually frustrated. The performances, particularly by Thomas Derrah as a bereft and dissipated Vanya and Arliss Howard as a sexually dangerous Astrov, are edgy and strong. It’s hard to imagine Uncle Vanya’s getting a makeover more startling yet of a piece.

Great performances: Eliza Rose Fichter in The Miracle Worker; Paula Plum in Miss Price and Wit; Nancy E. Carroll in Bailegangaire; Anne Scurria in Homebody/Kabul; Stephanie Roth Haberle in Marat/Sade; Annette Miller in Golda; Jeremiah Kissel and John Kuntz in Henry V; Larry Coen in Dirty Blonde; Fiona Shaw in Medea; Miguel Cervantes in Bat Boy: The Musical; Bill Meleady in The Lepers of Baile Baiste and The Blowin of Baile Gall; John C. Reilly in Marty.