Still, I'm copying Wendy (and nearly every other writer, critic, editorial board, website, and borglike crystalline entity that generates year-end lists) by keeping my list to ten (though there is an honorable mention list. So sue me). Here they are, then, in alphabetical order, because coming up with a tippy-top of the top ten is just too hard in my tail-end-of-an-exhausting-year state of mind.
1) Bandstand.
This short-lived musical had trouble finding an audience or selling itself in any plausible way. Who can blame it? "Hey! Come see our really dark, depressing musical about broken, shattered, completely fucked-up GIs home from World War II! There's really groovy period dancing!" I was surprised by how much I loved it, my kid loved it, and the friends we saw it with loved it. Groovy period dancing notwithstanding, this portrait of people coping with PTSD ("shell shock") by forming a band was deeply engaging. I wish very much that it had caught on.
2) Cost of Living.
I am so grateful for the small explosion of plays by, about, and for people with disabilities that has been happening on local stages in the past few years. Martina Majok's four-character piece about disability, intersectionality, and human connections leaned a little hard at times on conventional plot turns, but the characters were real, their situations fleshed out and appropriately complicated, their lives never presented as feel-good disability porn. And gee, wow, what a concept: actors with actual disabilities were cast as the disabled characters!
3) Dear Evan Hansen.
Is Evan a sweet, well-meaning if cripplingly neurotic teenager, or a manipulative, lying little shitbag who should burn in hell for all of eternity? Either way, whatever, the musical totally worked for me. Ben Platt was as incredible as everyone said he was, and the rest of the cast was pretty amazing, too. Also, "So Big/So Small" is possibly the best song about being a mom I've ever heard, and Rachel Bay Jones' rendition of it levels me every single time I hear it.
4) The Glass Menagerie.
A production that was hotly polarizing in local theater circles, Sam Gold's stripped-down Menagerie was hated as much as--if not (alas) more than--it was loved. But it resonated with me like little else did this year. See #2 above for at least a few of the reasons I appreciated it as much as I did. Thanks to everyone involved for taking the risks you did with this. You can't win 'em all, but for what it's worth, you won me over in a big way.
5) Jesus Hopped the A Train.
Stephen Adly Guirgis has been around for a long while now, but for whatever reason, I never got around to seeing The Motherfucker with the Hat or Between Riverside and Crazy, or any of his other many plays that are staged frequently in New York. Big ups to the wonderful Signature Theater for beginning a retrospective of his older plays this fall; I can't wait to see more.
6) Jitney.
A gorgeous revival of one of Wilson's most accessible plays. I grew up in a very different (read: white, affluent) Pittsburgh, which remains as stubbornly segregated as it was when I was a kid (feh, name an American city that isn't.). Still, I love the complicated, endearing, real characters in this show, I love the town the characters live in, and I have always thrilled at Wilson's references to various neighborhoods and local institutions (Damn it, Turnbo, Monroeville's houses are no nicer than the ones in Penn Hills!).
7) Mary Jane.
OK, so I maybe lied when I said above that coming up with a tippy-top favorite of the year was impossible. I loved absolutely everything about this show--every finely-wrought character, every honest if difficult depiction, every directorial choice, every nuanced performance. An added, if random bonus: Jake Gyllenhaal sat a few rows behind us in the small New York Theater Workshop, and it was fun watching other audience members devise increasingly inventive ways of casually checking him out before and after the show.
8) People, Places and Things.
An import from London, this harrowing piece about an actress trying to get and remain sober was not nearly as conventional as I feared it would be. Denise Gough's tour-de-force performance was certainly worth the price of admission, but then, the rest of the cast was pretty brilliant, too. No trite, feel-good play about beautiful, fragile addicts triumphing over adversity, People, Places and Things instead emphasizes just how incredibly hard sobriety is, how much emotional work goes into it, and how very easy it is to get sidetracked by everything the play's title suggests.
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| Zbigniew Bzymek |
The Wooster Group's multimedia re-enactment of Chris Hegedus and DA Pennebaker's 1971 documentary Town Bloody Hall says a lot about second-wave feminism and its discontents in the course of one fleeting hour. I recognize that we're living through an extraordinarily tumultuous, challenging and important period in American feminist history right now; this production made me appreciate the fact that even though we've clearly got miles to go, we've nevertheless come a very long way, too. To that end, the decision to have Norman Mailer played by two guys at the same time was a stroke of fucking genius.
10) The Wolves
How often do you see a play--or any kind of mass entertainment--that perfectly captures the social lives of average American teenage girls? And when you do, how often is what you see ultimately played for condescending laughs, or cheap sexualized thrills or both? Teen girls are almost never taken seriously as three-dimensional human beings, and it's only with brilliant, nuanced shows like this that one becomes fully aware of how very often their conversations, vocal inflections, slang, and cultural tastes are used for cheap comic effect: oh, those dumb little geese! How trivial they are! How shrill! How silly their music, style and social codes are! Like, ohmigoooood, squeeeee, riiiiight? Still, they're so young and perky, let's objectify them! The Wolves, an absolutely dead-on portrait of teenage girls who play together on a suburban soccer team, slides a little too close to conventional theatrical devices near the very end, but who the hell cares? It's funny, affecting, fascinating, and not even the teeniest bit nasty, condescending, or objectifying. More, please.
Honorable mention:
1984 (Broadway), 946: The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips (St. Ann's Warehouse), A Doll's House Part 2 (Broadway), Everybody (Signature), The Golden Apple (Encores), Hamlet (the Public), Hello, Dolly! (Broadway, with Donna Murphy), Meteor Shower (Broadway), Say Something Bunny (UNDO Project Space)
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