The Top Ten Moments in Theatre of 2009 Posted by John Lah

December 15, 2009
The Top Ten Moments in Theatre of 2009 Posted by John Lahr

The late hatchet-faced British comedian Max Wall used to have a gag where he'd try to speak to the audience only to be interrupted by his pianist. Finally, after one interruption too many, Wall scowled at the guy, then turned to us: "While he's playing, I'm decaying." As I get older, when I find myself trapped at a dismal production, that's exactly how I feel.

Except for the hours I spent watching the craven self-congratulation of "Liza at the Palace," most of my time on the Rialto this year has not felt wasted. The kleptocracy in Afghanistan and the right-wing idiocracy at home seem to have lifted the theatre's spirits. The stage is one place in our noisy republic where you can go to think. As a result, 2009 has turned out to be a damned stimulating year.

1. Sarah Ruhl's "In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play." Set in the eighteen-eighties, this play deals with the innovation of the vibrator and the sexual politics of women taking their pleasure into their own hands (pun intended). Ruhl does not leer at her innocents, who are strangers to their bodies, but watches them as they struggle with ecstasy and ignorance. Ruhl's benign detachment, her astute mind, and her capacity for wonder turn this evening into an indelible pleasure. In Les Waters, who directed her exciting "Eurydice" a few seasons back, she has found an expert collaborator. The play builds from a comedy of manners into a vision of sexual harmony. In doing this, it actually moves the comedy of manners into new aesthetic and thematic territory. "In the Next Room" is not only Ruhl's best play in her short, distinguished career, but time may prove it to be a great play. If "In the Next Room" doesn't win the Tony for best play—it's Ruhl's first Broadway show—I'll eat my shorts.

2. Cate Blanchett in Tennessee Williams's "A Streetcar Named Desire." Blanchett's performance is a kind of piñata of emotion: with each humiliating blow Blanche takes, Blanchett gives out a bounty of illuminating complex feelings: flirtatious-aggressive, desolate-hopeful; beleaguered-intrepid, exhausted-manic. Her performance is gorgeous and rare and indelible. She makes Williams's bittersweet poetry sing, even if Liv Ullmann's production sometimes loses the tune. For all its pleasures, Ullmann's version has some memorable lacunae: like for instance, not having a stove on the set to cook the meat that Stanley hands over to Stella in his first entrance, or—a much more egregious absence—overlooking Williams's actual ending. No matter: the cast is almost uniformly excellent and the dazzle off Blanchett blinds all but sourpusses like me from its vulgarities. Blanchett's characterization is brilliant; in this version, however, the final meaning of the play is lost.

Ullmann's omissions are nothing compared to the jaw-dropping additions in Rob Ashford's overpraised Donmar Warehouse production of "Streetcar" this year in London, starring another Academy Award winner, Rachel Weisz. In this Fourth Division version, Blanche's memory of her late husband and her disastrous discovery of him in a homosexual embrace was materialized. With the Varsouviana polka playing in the background, invented apparitions danced around Blanche like a sort of conga line of delusion. Oy vey!

3. Wallace Shawn's "Grasses of a Thousand Colors." New Yorkers will probably see this exhilarating production—Shawn's first new play in a decade—next year in an even better streamlined version than the elegant Royal Court production, where Shawn again teamed up with his superb interpreter, the director Andre Gregory. Shawn is a pint-size provocateur whose plays pack a real intellectual wallop. Here, myth and reality merge in a tale told by Ben, the most unreliable of Shawn's many famous unreliable narrators. He's a sort of earth-eater who's grown rich by poisoning the food chain. As the world dies around him, Ben indulges his gargantuan desires. Shawn's play does for onanism what Rabelais did for drink. By turns hilarious, unsettling, and brilliant, the play blurs the distinction between the natural and the civilized: it's a model of the grotesque, which Edgar Allan Poe once described as "much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible and not a little of that which might have excited disgust." Besides Gregory's fine direction, the production had the benefit of a cunning set by Eugene Lee and beautiful, extraordinary projections by Bill Morrison.

4. Yazmina Reza's "God of Carnage." "God of Carnage" seemed to me Reza's best play so far: a dark and hilarious satire that succeeded in the French's favorite game—exposing in the haute bourgeoisie the thin carapace between civility and barbarity. The play is cruel and therefore hilarious: without a killing, no feast. Reza managed the hard strategic task of making her characters' behavior so ugly that every wild piece of farce business—the ripping up a vase of tulips or projectile vomiting over art books—was the author's side-splitting, vindictive revenge on their middle-class smugness. Matthew Warchus's direction and Christopher Hampton's adaptation were superb. It was an extra pleasure to watch James Gandolfini transition out of being America's great TV heavy into a deft stage comedian.

5. Noël Coward's "Blithe Spirit." For my money, Michael Blakemore is the best director of farce in the English-speaking world. Coward's enduring comic ghost play explores connections between memory, mourning, and the erotic; Blakemore's production teased out all the class humor in this comedy of bad manners where the dead's aggression toward the living confronts the aggression of the living toward the dead. As Madame Arcati, the zany medium who calls back the dead wives of Charles Condomine, Angela Lansbury got all the press (and a Tony) for her performance. However, for me, the revelation was Rupert Everett, who in tuxedo and pompadour cut a fine Coward figure, hitting every upper-middle-class note of the Master's teasing nonchalance with swaggering languor. Everett's Condomine is as droll a Coward performance as I've seen in years. Delicious, I think, is the word.

>6. Arthur Laurents's production of "West Side Story." I liked Laurents's gritty restaging and his innovation of having some of the great score sung in Spanish. It was a thrilling production that deserved more admiration from the public and the critics than it got. Karen Olivia, who played Maria's sparky sidekick, won a Tony for her flamboyant performance. But, for me, the standout, whose spirit gave the musical a new dimension of tragedy, was the charismatic Josefina Scaglione, a sweet-faced, twenty-one-year-old Argentinean who brought a depth of passion, playfulness, and womanliness to Maria. She radiated decency and desire. A star, or I'm a Dutchman.

7. Helen Mirren in Racine's "Phèdre." In this tale of the Athenian Queen fighting against her incestuous feelings toward her son, Mirren discovered deep seams of emotional truth that transcended Racine's structural contrivances. In Mirren's hands, Phèdre is turned into a sensational emotional terrorist. Mirren parsed Phèdre's brazen abasement and managed to suggest both self-destruction and sensuality. The evening was also memorable for Bob Crowley's spectacular set: a monumental low-angled, marble palace roof set against a cerulean sky: a cunning correlative for a play in which heat and hiding are central.

8. August Wilson's "Joe Turner's Come and Gone." We still don't have the measure of August Wilson, whose theatrical accomplishment in the twentieth century is surpassed only, in my view, by Tennessee Williams. Of the ten plays in Wilson's Century Cycle—which bear witness to the African-American experience in each decade of the twentieth century—"Joe Turner's Come and Gone" (revived, for the first time since its Broadway premiÿre, in 1988, under the deft direction of Bartlett Sher) was his favorite and his masterpiece, the one in which the historical, the mythical, and the autobiographical reach their most ravishing equipoise. Wilson wanted his plays "fat with substance," and "Joe Turner" makes astonishing connections both to African-Americans' adaptation to their new freedom and to the white world. A beautiful, poetic play given an appropriately impressive production.

9. Geoffrey Rush in Ionesco's "Exit the King." Although the supporting cast was uneven, Ionesco's capriccio about death gave the irrepressible Geoffrey Rush a field day. Rush's slapstick cavorting—at once poetic and hilarious—was a happy melding of lowbrow and highbrow. The show honoured frivolity's refusal to suffer; it was vivaciously directed by Rush's Australian cohort, the expert Neil Armfield.

10. Lily Rabe in Richard Greenberg's "The American Plan." Greenberg's clever tale about a sadomasochistic mother-daughter relationship opened early in 2009. But Lily Rabe's performance as the hysterical daughter has stayed with me as one of the outstanding events of the season. Here, as the beautiful, nervy daughter of a wealthy German Jewish émigré, Rabe managed to be at once fragile and fanatic. She's a cunning actress, blessed with a deep, compelling voice, whose authority powerfully registered all the mercurial half notes of acerbity and panic. In this show, she was pitch-perfect and distinguished. The seductiveness of her sound and the alertness of her mind successfully masked her character's disturbed aggression. Rabe was new to me; I won't be missing any of her future performances. You know the goods when you see it.
The Top Ten Moments in Theatre of 2009: The New Yorker Blog : The New Yorker (26 December 2009)
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/tny/2009/12/john-lahrs-top-ten-moments-in-theatre-from-2009.html
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