The Year in Theatre

This year’s Ten Best List might be called “Lahr’s Last Huzzah.” When I began as Senior Critic, in 1992, the second show I reviewed was Clifford Odets’s “Awake and Sing,” in Chicago. Odets seemed to me a woefully overlooked major writer. Over the decades, I’ve also reviewed Odets’s “Flowering Peach,” “The Country Girl,” and written a Critic at Large about him. The last show of my twenty-year New Yorker joyride was Odets’s “Golden Boy”—Lincoln Center’s masterly production which indisputably puts Odets in the pantheon of great twentieth-century playwrights. In a good theatregoing year, you’re lucky to get one production of such exhilarating high quality; this year, I got two—the second being Mike Nichols’s inspired revival of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.” They share first place.

  1. Golden Boy.” Odets’s tale of Joe Bonaparte, who gives up the violin for the boxing ring, is a meditation on the conflict in Odets between celebrity and integrity. Odets had an ear for piquant American speech; his dialogue crackles with humor. (“I’m versus you. Completely versus.”) The plot is full of exhilarating psychological surprises and moral conundrums; the uniformly well-cast production is impeccably directed by Bartlett Sher. On the final evening of my twenty-year watch, I stood to bravo the show, one of the best examples of American ensemble acting I’ve seen. “Golden Boy” deserves, and will win, a bag full of Tony Awards.

  2. Death of Salesman.” Mike Nichols’s penetrating interpretation of Miller’s masterpiece was, for the director, the theatrical equivalent of a walk-off home run. The revelation of this production—drawn out by Nichols’s seamless and limpid orchestration of Willy’s disconcerting flights of imagination (Miller’s original title for the play was “The Inside of His Head”)—is that Willy, for all his fervent dreams of the future and his fierce argument with the past, never, ever, occupies his present. Even as he fights, fumes, and flounders, he is sensationally absent from his life—a kind of living ghost. It is existence, not success, that eludes him. He inhabits a vast, restless, awful, and awesome isolation, which is both his folly and his tragedy. Nichols’s achievement was to flush out into the open the envy which drives Willy mad. As Willy, Philip Seymour Hoffman found all the crazy music in Willy’s disappointment. He was robbed of a Tony, but the entire cast and production were luminous. The best production of this play I’ve ever seen.

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  1. Peter and the Starcatcher.” A larky prequel to the Peter Pan story written with terrific verve by Rick Elice and playfully directed by Alex Timbers and Roger Rees. This effervescent romp is part British pantomime, part story theatre, and all delight. We learn how Peter got his name and his flying mojo, how Captain Hook lost his hand, and how the crocodile got its tick-tock; the play is exceptional for the charm of its storytelling as well as its outrageous story. The central feature of the hijinks is the pirate captain Black Stache, the dyslexic Prince of Darkness, played to a high-camp T by Christian Borle, who actually got paid for having all this fun. Full of mischief and malapropos, he cuts up like the low-comics of yore. (He even sports Groucho’s painted mustache.) After he names Peter, he tells him: “You need to connect, Peter. No man is an archipelago.” As he exits the show, Stache warns Peter that he will return. “For just when you least expect it, there I’ll be! The Stache right under your nose!” He starts to leave, then stops and turns to us. “Clap if you believe!” We do.

  2. Title and Deed.” Will Eno’s ironic title refers to a specific place on earth. In a game of hide and seek with the audience, this sharp and funny monologue teases the notion of place and home. “I believe my life happened,” says Eno’s narrator, who is called Man (played by the superb Irish actor Conor Lovett). Man, who is an existential sad sack, is journeying in a foreign land, bringing news of his sense of dislocation. Man is between cultures; in other words, he is nowhere. Eno’s play is an exploration of this liminal psychic space; his story is all quandary and no conclusions. Neither the narrator nor his tale has a dramatic trajectory. As channelled through Lovett’s nuanced and canny presence, “Title and Deed” does the theatrical business: it is daring within its masquerade of the mundane, spectacular within its minimalism, and hilarious within its display of po-faced bewilderment. Eno’s voice is unique; his play is stage poetry of a high order. In this tale’s brilliant telling, it is not the narrator who proves unreliable, but life itself. The unspoken message of Eno’s smart, bleak musings seems to be: enjoy the nothingness while you can.

  3. “Timon of Athens.” Nicholas Hytner’s splendid, modern dress production of “Timon of Athens,” at the Royal National Theatre (and broadcast worldwide on NT Live), made thrilling connections with Timon—the deep-pocketed sugar daddy whose mortgage crisis pauperizes him and turns him from benefactor to misanthrope—and the fragility of the contemporary British economy and its ruling élite. As Timon, Simon Russell Beale, who is one of the outstanding Shakespearean actors of his era, took the character well beyond the parameters of a “vivid cartoon.” Beale’s Timon was a prissy bundle of sexless congeniality. For all his palaver about “true friendship” and the heroics of largesse, the gifts that he hands out like nuts at Christmas are the manner in which he seduces, possesses, and controls the world. Not one of Shakespeare’s best plays but one of Hytner’s best productions, which is saying a lot.

  4. “Tribes.” The British playwright Nina Raine is one of her generation’s most promising talents. In this scintillating and subtle play about the hearing impaired, well directed by David Cromer, silence is the shadow that lends brilliance to the hubbub around the bohemian, intellectual upper-middle-class British family dining table where the play is set. Raine shrewdly builds a dense canopy of sound around her deaf hero, Billy (well acted by Russell Harvard), in order to make the narrative of his oppressive solitude and his subsequent liberation from it more than just a problem play. The patriarch of the household, Christopher, is a prolix, well drawn lord of the house, a sort of poltergeist of fulmination and cogitation. “Tribes” turns out to be as much about the tyranny of language as it is about the misery of not being able to hear it.

  5. Kevin Spacey in Shakespeare’s “Richard III.” The best and last of Sam Mendes’s Bridge Project productions—Kevin Spacey’s version transformed the horrible homunculi into a sort of Barnum of barbarity. From his first speech, Richard’s scandalous confessions, at once humiliating and astonishing, riveted attention like boldfaced headlines. Richard III’s protean quality tapped into Spacey’s deep seam of ambivalence and called out his expertise at dissimulation. The masquerade seemed to fuel Spacey’s ferocity, as well as his sense of fun. “Richard III” has all the narrative earmarks of the work of a young playwright: too long, too plotty, too repetitive. Nonetheless, as events tumble out of Richard’s control, Shakespeare brilliantly contrasts the civil war being played out on Bosworth Field with the psychological war raging inside Richard.

  6. Clybourne Park.” The winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Bruce Norris’s subtle play got a deserved lap of honor on Broadway, with its original 2010 Off Broadway cast (directed with conviction by Pam MacKinnon). “Clybourne Park” is as beautifully constructed as it is eloquent. Norris—taking as his starting point the householders in the white Chicago neighborhood who sell their home to the black family dramatized in Lorraine Hansberry’s 1957 “A Raisin in the Sun”—examines the racial tensions of the segregated fifties. He astutely turns the tables to show the house being repurchased by progressive whites in what is now a black neighborhood in 2009 Obama-era America. The racial terrain is by turns explosive, thought-provoking, and hilarious.

  7. “The Whale.” Samuel D. Hunter’s compelling, psychologically complex play is about a six-hundred-pound gay man in his early forties who is dying of congestive heart failure and who teaches English composition online from his disheveled apartment. The unspoken question raised is whether Charlie (a vivid Shuler Hensley) is actually capable of being loved. Hunter is a young playwright and his play is clumsily organized; nonetheless he challenges himself with a number of fascinating characters who are infrequently seen on the stage: a bad mother, a hate-filled child, and Charlie, who is eating himself into oblivion. Hunter seems to me to be a genuine dramatic storyteller and a talent to watch.

  8. August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson.” Ruben Santiago-Hudson is the foremost keeper of the great Wilson’s flame. His excellent revival of Wilson’s ghost story catches all of Wilson’s theatrical panache—his sense of fun and of African-American history. “The Piano Lesson” takes its time, but the songs and the saga of Boy Willie and his sister Berenice and their fight over the family’s hand-carved piano is quietly mesmerizing. Once you’re in Wilson’s compelling theatrical universe, you never want to leave.

Photograph by Ethan Levitas.