Interludes

2014’s Best in Theater (Plays)

• By drediman
• January 19, 2015
• No Comments

2014 was another busy and excellent year of play-going, chock-full of memorable and exciting new plays and revivals. Over the course of the 12 months of the year, I attended more than 250 plays (this excludes musicals, which I will be covering in a separate upcoming post). Given the large volume of productions I attended, it seems unfair to relegate my theatrical highlights to a top ten list, let alone a top five list that I’ve been using for other performing arts genres. Therefore, to accommodate the breadth of the highs of 2014, what you’ll find below is a recap of the year in chronological order, without the constraints of a numbered list. Enjoy!

In January, I caught two extraordinary revivals: Bedlam’s breathtakingly inventive downtown, 4-actor rendition of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan (which opened in 2013 but I only caught in early 2014). Andrus Nichols in the weighty titular role was ferocious in one of the most tremendous performances of the year. Uptown, courtesy of Roundabout, I marveled at the technical brilliance and sustained mood attained by Lyndsey Turner’s masterfully-staged revival of the expressionistic Machinal by Sophie Treadwell. Rebecca Hall impressively matched the production’s level of intensity note by note.

Although I nearly froze to death in February, I was warmed by Caryl Churchill’s hypnotic and structurally daring Love and Information at the Minetta Lane Theatre in a New York Theatre Workshop production. As with Machinal, I marveled at the production’s technical prowess (James Macdonald directed the piece, which he had previously helmed at the Royal Court in London), particularly its precision and relentless pacing. The considerable work of the New York-based cast contributed to the seamlessness of the experience.

March saw Will Eno’s magnetic and chilly (a compliment) The Realistic Joneses open on Broadway to wildly mixed reviews. I personally thought it was the best play to open on Broadway during the 2013-2014 season, despite being shut-out of the best play category at the Tony’s. The sensational cast included Toni Collette, Michael C. Hall, Tracy Letts, and Marisa Tomei — all in top form. March also saw the transfer of the Young Vic’s superlative revival of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House at BAM, directed with eye-opening freshness by Carrie Cracknell and which featured a brittle, career-defining performance by Hattie Morahan as the door-slamming Nora.

The busy month of April brought New York theatergoers a number of fantastic new plays, particularly Off-Broadway.  The Mysteries at the Flea was a memorably ambitious five-and-a-half hour retelling of the Bible featuring 48 playwrights and 48 actors in a theater with just as many seats. Kudos to director Ed Sylvanus Iskandar for helming the mighty uneconomical affair. Over at the New York Theatre Workshop was the singular Red-Eye to Havre de Grace, which depicted the hallucinatory last days of Edgar Allen Poe. I’d rarely seen opera, dance, and theater converge in such an intoxicating manner as in this brilliant piece of devised theater. Lastly, uptown at the Mitzi Newhouse Theatre via Lincoln Center Theater, I caught the well-constructed and politically-minded The City of Conversation by Anthony Giardina. Jan Maxwell was exquisite here (as always) under Doug Hughes’ pitch-perfect direction.

In late May and early June, I had the great pleasure of taking a week-and-a-half-long theater trip to London and Stratford-upon-Avon.  In terms of new plays, I was astonished by the urgency and searing theatricality of Mike Bartlett’s speculative and biting King Charles III (scintillatingly directed by current artistic director Rupert Goold) at the Almeida and Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan’s knockout, ultimately haunting adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 in the West End (also originally hailing from the Almeida). I also saw some outstanding revivals during my trip, particularly Gregory Doran’s rich and insightful staging of Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2 (which featured a delicious performance by Antony Sher as Falstaff) for the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, and two noteworthy productions at the National – Howard Davies’ massive and emotionally potent revival of Sean O’Casey’s rarely-seen expressionistic anti-war play, The Silver Tassie, as well as the great Simon Russell Beale’s uncompromising take on King Lear, intensely directed by Sam Mendes (I saw FIVE Lears this year, likely because 2014 marked the 450^th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth).

Back home in New York in June, the Anglophile in me continued to be satisfied. A highlight of 59E59’s essential Brits Off-Broadway festival was an uncharacteristically dark yet deeply satisfying production of Alan Ayckbourn’s 1992 play, Time of My Life. In addition, at the Park Avenue Armory, I saw Rob Ashford’s gargantuan production of Macbeth, which featured an impassioned performance by Sir Kenneth Branagh. The immersive use of the epic armory space took my breath away the moment I stepped in; a convincing world had been created before the play even started (take that, Sleep No More!).

Steamy July brought New Yorkers two very fine new plays. At the Atlantic Theater Company, Stephen Adly Guirgis gave us his best play to date, the astonishing Between Riverside and Crazy, which featured sensitive direction by Austin Pendleton and a masterfully skilled performance from Stephen McKinley Henderson (the production returns this month to Second Stage, a late replacement for the unfortunately cancelled Duncan Sheik tuner, American Psycho). Sam Gold’s production of Penelope Skinner’s brave and devastating The Village Bike for MCC was also a stunner at the Lucille Lortel, thanks largely to Greta Gerwig’s uncanny and unsettling performance.

Despite August being a typically slow month for theater, I caught a couple of worthwhile productions. In Washington, DC, I had the opportunity to take in the Woolly Mammoth’s fast-and-loose and very enjoyable adaptation Chekhov’s The Seagull entitled Stupid Fucking Bird (by Aaron Posner). I’m sure we’ll see a New York production sometime in the near future. Two revivals also caught my eye: Signature’s atmospheric and wonderfully-acted revival of A.R. Gurney’s The Wayside Motor Inn, and the Sydney Theatre Company’s audacious mounting of Jean Genet’s The Maids at City Center (an offering at this year’s Lincoln Center Festival), starring Oscar winner Cate Blanchett, whom I simply could not take my eyes off of. She’s simply regal.

Off-Broadway remained the place to be in September. The astounding Kathryn Hunter broke my heart in Peter Brook and Marie-Helene Estienne’s powerful yet understated The Valley of Astonishment at Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn. In Manhattan, the polarizing avant-garde Belgian director Ivo van Hove shook things up with his highly conceptualized reimagining of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage at New York Theatre Workshop.  I, for one, thought Ivo’s work here was utterly thrilling. Luckily for admirers like myself, he had more up his sleeves for New Yorkers in the month to come …

In October, aforementioned bad boy director Ivo van Hove brought his intimate, streamlined, and balletic version of Angels in America by Tony Kushner (via his company, Toneelgroep Amsterdam) to BAM. The revival, which highlighted the game-changing piece’s universality and downplayed the play’s mythic and fantastical elements like I hadn’t seen before, hit me like a ton of bricks. The month also brought two exciting new plays to New York: Ensemble Studio Theatre’s When January Feels Like Summer by Cori Thomas (a remount from earlier in the year), which yielded some of the most unexpectedly lovely moments in the theater for me all year; and the highly-anticipated Broadway premier of the technically superlative and emotionally engaging UK hit The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Simon Stephens. The New York production benefited from a stellar, much talked-about debut by Alexander Sharp in the play’s central role. Mr. Sharp’s work lifted the production from merely being technically accomplished to being a transcendent experience.

November unveiled MCC’s riveting staging of the tough, swaggering school shooting drama Punk Rock at the Lortel, also by the in-demand Simon Stephens (with electrifying direction by Trip Cullman). One of the very best new plays of the year turned out to be Clare Barron’s extraordinary family drama You Got Older at HERE, directed with grace and truthfulness by Anne Kauffman and led by the performances of the always-impeccable Reed Birney and fearless newcomer Brooke Bloom. The best revival I saw in November was undoubtedly Theatre for a New Audience’s full throttle production of Christopher Marlowe’s lengthy Tamburlaine, Parts 1 & 2, directed by former RSC Artistic Director Michael Boyd. In the title role was the majestic John Douglas Thompson, whose towering performance was a force of nature and one that I will remember for years to come.

December closed out 2014 with a number of strong productions. Red-hot playwright Ayad Akhtar in my mind wrote his best play to date with the emotionally and intellectually involving The Invisible Hand at New York Theatre Workshop (his Pulitzer Prize-winning play Disgraced is currently being presented in a serviceable production on the Great White Way). Two fantastic revivals also caught my attention. Bradley Cooper showed his considerable acting chops as The Elephant Man in Scott Ellis’s elegant Broadway mounting of the oft-done play. Suffice to say, it’s been breaking box office records at the Booth. Also, the revival of David Rabe’s disturbing and untidy Sticks and Bones proved to be quite the event due to Holly Hunter and Bill Pullman’s thrilling no-holds-barred performances.