The Year In Review
Sixteen Most Outstanding Shows of 2009

I had a terrible/wonderful problem this year: there were more outstanding shows in 2009 than I knew what to do with. In previous years I’d cited as few as 8 or as many as 12 shows; this year I agonized just to get the list down to 20. Even then I was omitting shows I’d highly recommended during the year. Finally I made my peace with naming 16 shows as the year’s Most Outstanding and 4 as honorable mentions.

As with the other lists, the caveat that I have yet to see Race, Fela, The Last Cargo Cult and Let Me Down Easy. As I named Hair as one of the best of 2008, I didn’t include its Broadway transfer this year.

REVIVALS

Arguably August Wilson’s finest play, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone was finally revived on Broadway with a top-drawer production directed by Bartlett Sher. The year’s first must-see was David Cromer’s brilliant, stunningly executed revival of Our Town. Thanks to faith and trust in the material, the revival of Finian’s Rainbow delivered the kind of old-school musical comedy lift that Broadway hadn’t seen in years. Twelfth Night, presented by The Public as one of last Summer’s free Shakespeare In The Park productions, was a hugely entertaining, buoyant joy.

GO LONG

Derek Ahonen’s vibrant The Pied Pipers of The Lower East Side held me in rapt, fascinated attention for 3 hours. Taylor Mac’s overwhelmingly fabulous and wickedly smart super-epic The Lily’s Revenge clocked in at 5 hours with never a dull moment. The Broadway revival of the three-play cycle The Norman Conquests, imported from the Old Vic, soared to dizzying comic heights and actually got funnier the longer it went on. (6? 7 hours?) As of now I’ve seen only the first 6 of 9 hours of Horton Foote’s beautifully detailed Orphans’ Home Cycle and that’s all I need to count it among the very best not only of the year but of the decade.

TECH

Sarah Ruhl’s delicately drawn In The Next Room, or the vibrator play, set at the dawning of the age of electricity, vibrantly captured fully rendered people who lived in the dark about sexuality. Mac Rogers’ brilliant Viral commented on the potential for dehumanization in both fetishism and internet culture. Foundry Theatre’s poetic, artistically sublime Telephone opened with the invention of the telephone before provoking questions about the limits of all human communication.

MORE NEW PLAYS

Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer-prized Ruined was that rare piece of theatre both consciousness-raising and theatrically absorbing. I was excited and moved by August Schulenburg’s thought-provoking, deeply felt The Lesser Seductions of History which followed more than a dozen characters through each turbulent year of the 1960’s. Alan Aykbourn’s My Wonderful Day, imported for the annual Brits Off Broadway festival, employed the comically brilliant device of contrasting the playwright’s typical adult neurotics with a wise-beyond-her-years 8 year old. Joyous and poignant would be how I’d describe Colman Domingo’s largely autobiographical solo play A Boy And His Soul. It would be reductive to call Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation a comedy about an acting class; the play (a hit for Playwrights Horizons) is that but then more.

Honorable mentions: MilkMilkLemonade, Penny Arcade’s Old Queen, Sam Mendes’ production of Winter’s Tale at BAM, and F#@king Up Everything at NYMF.