Hath Not A Year Highlights? Even This One?

by Ben Brantley

O.K., so the big picture wasn’t all that pretty. At times 2010 seemed intent on recapping everything that has been least appealing about New York theater in the first decade of the 21st century. Big, empty-headed musicals that coasted on brand-name appeal (“The Addams Family”); tepid revivals of mothball-scented hits from another era (“Promises, Promises”); star-heavy productions on Broadway of shows that didn’t belong there (Patrick Stewart and T. R. Knight in “A Life in the Theater,” James Earl Jones and Vanessa Redgrave in “Driving Miss Daisy”); spectacles in which frantic technical design upstaged the performers (“Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown”).

Yep, we had ’em all this year, to the point of suffocation. Add to that infra-dig works from some of the best dramatists writing in English (John Guare’s “Free Man of Color,” Martin McDonagh’s “Behanding in Spokane”), and it’s enough to make a constant theatergoer think about switching to a more fulfilling pursuit, like collecting stamps used on e-mails.

But as Blanche DuBois, a woman who knew from disappointment, immortally observed, “Sometimes there is God so quickly.” This was also the year that gave us two productions that by themselves made you forget the prevailing mediocrity of Broadway and remember the singular power of theater to astonish. They begin this list. Among the eight productions that follow, I have not included two wonderful shows seen on Broadway in 2010 — “Brief Encounter” and “Next Fall” — because they were on my list last year for their Off Broadway incarnations. In the meantime let’s be grateful that this year of creative drought still provided enough bounty to allow this critic to count to 10.

 

• • 1. GATZ: The most remarkable achievement in theater not only of this year but also of this decade (which, gee, means this century too). The Elevator Repair Service’s word-for-word presentation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Great Gatsby” captured — in inventively theatrical terms — the unmatchable, heady rush of falling in love with a book. And Scott Shepherd, as a common reader seduced by a great American novel, gave — hands down — the year’s most heroic performance.

 

 

• • 2. THE MERCHANT OF VENICE: Daniel Sullivan’s ravishingly melancholy production found a cohesive bittersweetness in a notoriously sour and troublesome play. This offering from the Public Theater, first staged in Central Park, is the most savory slice of Shakespeare served on Broadway in years, thanks in no small part to its magnificent stars: Al Pacino as Shylock and Lily Rabe as Portia.

 

 

• • 3. BLOODY BLOODY ANDREW JACKSON: Another rara avis: an utterly original musical, also courtesy of the Public Theater (which produced “Gatz” too, so thank you, Public Theater). Alex Timbers and Michael Friedman’s emo-rock musical about American populism and a maverick who would be president (played by the new-born-star Benjamin Walker) found in Jackson’s U.S.A. a funny, scary mirror for this rowdy, sulky and undyingly adolescent nation as it is today.

 

 

• • 4. A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE: Gregory Mosher’s fine-tuned revival of Arthur Miller’s powerful common-man tragedy reminded us that Liev Schreiber and Jessica Hecht, who played an uneasily married blue-collar couple, are two of the most skillful and subtle actors around, while introducing us to an improbably accomplished new stage star in (who’d a thunk it?) the screen goddess Scarlett Johansson, in a smashing Broadway debut.

 

 

• • 5. CLYBOURNE PARK: The year’s slyest and bravest political comedy was Bruce Norris’s diptych on race relations in suburban America, which dared to riff on the landmark drama “Raisin in the Sun” and more than got away with it. Pam MacKinnon directed the happily fractious ensemble for Playwrights Horizons.

 

 

• • 6. LA CAGE AUX FOLLES: An import from the Menier Chocolate Factory of London, which has a knack for rejuvenating old war horses, Terry Johnson’s emotionally rich, deliberately seedy-looking revival made Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein’s 1983 musical feel as fresh as its sassy transvestite chorus line.

 

 

• • 7. RED: The agony and ecstasy of Abstract Expressionism, per the painter Mark Rothko, brilliantly embodied by Alfred Molina (and ably assisted by Eddie Redmayne) in Michael Grandage’s production of John Logan’s turbo-charged bio-drama, which had the courage of its clichés and style to burn.

 

 

• • 8. A LIE OF THE MIND: Ethan Hawke (yes, him) delivered the goods as a director in this intensely acted revival of Sam Shepard’s fiery “American Gothic”-style drama of domestic meltdown, which featured an ensemble to die for.

 

 

• • 9. PENELOPE: God bless the Irish, who continue to produce originally, exhilaratingly word-drunk playwrights like Enda Walsh, whose mind-spinning variation on Homer’s “Odyssey” came to St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn from the Druid Theater of Galway.

 

 

• 10. THE COLLECTION and A KIND OF ALASKA: Karen Kohlhaas’s tart and tender productions of two short plays by Harold Pinter, for the Atlantic Theater Company, proved that American actors can speak fluent Pinterese and, in Lisa Emery’s portrait of a woman waking from a coma, featured one of the year’s most poignant performances.