[NOTE: Visit us on Wednesday, Dec. 24 for our top 10 musicals of 2014]
10. Tryst (Palm Beach Dramaworks)
The first act of this intimate, atmospheric two-hander, about a confident man and his vulnerable prey circa early 20th century England, didn’t move like gangbusters. But the second act was another story, a dramatic seesaw of revelations, backtracks, denials, confessions and tears that pushed actors Claire Brownell and Jim Ballard to emotional extremes. The latter delivered an unshakeable, sociopathic tour de force that ranks among his best work to date.
9. Clark Gable Slept Here (Zoetic Stage)
Michael McKeever’s latest world premiere took satirical, pungent aim at Hollywood in all its sordid behind-the-scenes machinations, its secrets and lies, its vanities and delusions. McKeever’s writing reflected a pop-savvy understanding of today’s Hollywood, while the rest of the show suggested the madcap spirit of yesteryear, when characters were characters—more archetypes than people, played broadly and hilariously by a perfectly curated cast.
8. The Whale (GableStage)
In a performance of resigned, understated poise, Gregg Weiner played a 600-pound Idaho man, in what seemed like the final week of his life, in this unflinching drama by Samuel D. Hunter. Clad in an enormous fat suit from costume designer Ellis Tillman that never ceased to amaze, Weiner’s transformation was emotional and mental as well as physical. Matching him every step of the way was Arielle Hoffman as his estranged daughter Ellie, a misanthropic high schooler oozing resentment toward her absent father. Faith, sexuality, loneliness, and the potential for human transformation colored Hunter’s literary canvas, translated with sobering excellence by director Joseph Adler.
7. Church (Thinking Cap Theatre)
Probably the year’s most singularly unique theatrical experience, Thinking Cap’s site-specific production of Young Jean Lee’s “Church” was staged as an outdoor tent revival, where its four reverends delivered a weird cocktail of sanctimony and satire that was as much a performance-art installation as it was an enjoyably retrograde variety show. As the leading reverend, Scott Douglas Wilson peppered his parables with pregnant pauses of Barnumesque proportions, creating sermons that were incoherent, doom-laden, sometimes oratorically dazzling cautionary tales rife with non sequiturs, unfinished stories, and cartoonish voice impersonations—the crazed ramblings of a bumptious raconteur drunk on the blood of Christ.
6. Bad Jews (GableStage)
In dramatizing a family conflict over a priceless Jewish heirloom, this bold, provocative, shockingly funny play by Joshua Harmon addressed such subjects as religious versus cultural Judaism, fidelity to family, Israel/Palestine, the Holocaust, the Jewish diaspora, and the specter of hypocrisy. Riveting for nearly every second, up to and including its shattering denouement, the production featured a breakthrough performance from Natalia Coego that was so fierce, so persuasive and so thrillingly infectious that you don’t have to agree with her viewpoints to concede her victory in the battle for the soul of Judaism.
5. Gidion’s Knot (New Theatre)
Put two people who vehemently disagree about everything in a space they cannot escape, and watch what happens. That was the approach Johnna Adams took in her dark, jolting 2012 play, which received a New Theatre production so gripping— so excoriating—that it ranks among the company’s best work in years. A teacher played by Christina Groom and a mother portrayed by Patrice DeGraff Arenas verbally jousted over the suicide of the latter’s young son, with results so emotionally wrenching that most dramatic descriptors don’t do it justice. The existential, in-the-round staging only intensified this heated tet-a-tet.
4. The Foreigner (Maltz Jupiter Theatre)
“The Foreigner” is a dusty, perhaps corny piece of comedy—one of those ludicrous, overextended, mistaken-identity narratives that proliferated among the films and stages of a bygone era. So what a surprise that Maltz Jupiter Theatre’s mounting of this tired chestnut nailed it on every level, finding beauty (in the spare-no-expense set design of a rustic cabin), suspense (in its climactic presentation of a Klan home invasion) and much humor, successfully conveyed by a cast that rode the show’s silliness full-bore. Its brightest star was Andrew Sellon, a rubbery actor with more than a passing resemblance to comedian Colin Mochrie, whose nearly silent performance spoke volumes.
3. Miss Julie (The Naked Stage)
With this bracing and urgent production—its only show of the year, in fact—Miami’s Naked Stage proved that August Strindberg’s 1888 masterpiece about class, gender and sexuality is still as relevant as ever. Chronicling a night of passion and its devastating aftermath, director Margaret Ledford created a smoldering hothouse of carnal imprisonment. Katherine Amadeo was irrepressible and coquettish, acting as both the architect of her own demise and the play’s most tragic victim. Matthew William Chizever was a fount of repressed animalism regularly— and convincingly— surprised by his own outbursts. This was a show rich enough to warrant seeing more than once.
2. Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (GableStage)
Outside of musical theater, this was the year’s most brilliantly executed example of sheer, unqualified pleasure. In this soothing and bottomless repository of pop-culture and high-culture esoterica (from Anton Chekhov to Senor Wences), nothing happened for the longest time, yet in the hands of a flawless cast and Joseph Adler’s extraordinary direction, it was perfection. Avi Hoffman and Laura Turnbull, as the first two title characters, flawlessly conveyed their characters’ increasing lunacy and self-pitying defeatism, and the supporting cast likewise embodied their archly stylized, larger-than-life characters. It was nothing short of bliss.
1. Mothers and Sons (GableStage)
Like a lot of attendees to GableStage’s “Mothers and Sons,” I walked out of the theater shaken and stirred on opening night, in the sort of teary daze reserved only for the very best productions. Written by Terrence McNally, this belated encounter between the repressed mother of an AIDS victim and his then-boyfriend, some 20 years later, yielded a profound inquiry into the human condition, delivered in a sweepingly emotional experience that proved why theater exists. Director Adler built McNally’s lengthy, unbroken scene with the patience of an architect overseeing a building’s construction one brick at a time, but the performances of Angie Radosh and Michael McKeever were his towering accomplishment. Both actors’ climactic breakthroughs were moving beyond words, so I’ll stop trying to come up with any.
