December 15, 2011

From the Past, but Looking Forward By BEN BRANTLEY

THIS was a year for celebrating both the enduring power of traditional theater and the creative stealth bombs that can be planted within it, for putting new and explosive life into classic vessels. “The Book of Mormon,” the year’s biggest hit, is on one level as cheerful and predictable an organic musical as anything Rodgers and Hammerstein might have come up with. But it’s also a sustained act of gleeful subversion. And while plays like “Jerusalem,” “The _______ With the Hat” and “Other Desert Cities” are anything but experimental in form, each seduces its audiences into traveling into places that they hadn’t expected (or thought they wanted) to visit. With one notable exception (the Belarus Free Theater’s galvanizing “Being Harold Pinter”) the shows listed below have the pleasingly familiar surface appearance of the Broadway of decades ago. What lurks in the hearts and minds of the original productions here (the revivals are another matter, but only just) is very much of the 21st century.

‘THE BOOK OF MORMON’ In what was generally a weak year for new musicals this audacious portrait of missionary innocents abroad managed all by itself to generate the energy and excitement to light up a whole season. Impudent, scurrilous, impious it may be. But this collaboration among Trey Parker and Matt Stone (the creators of “South Park”), the composer Robert Lopez and the director Casey Nicholaw is also a starry-eyed, lace-trimmed valentine to the good old-fashioned musical that grandma and grandpa used to fall in love with.

‘JERUSALEM’ Jez Butterworth’s drama about a drug-dealing, middle-aged Pied Piper in a bucolic corner of England, directed by Ian Rickson, was almost Aristotelian in its adherence to symmetries of time and place. But with a brilliant Mark Rylance in the central role, this production soared beyond “real time” into a primal, ageless realm of myths and giants that a spiritually impoverished world hungers to believe in, whether it knows it or not.

‘OTHER DESERT CITIES’ The long-promising American playwright Jon Robin Baitz finally delivered the complete drama his fans had been hoping for: a carefully plotted, hyper-articulate portrait of a raging family that discovers heroism — and a kind of blessed tranquility — in places where you never expected Mr. Baitz to find it. Joe Mantello oversaw the finest ensemble of the year.

‘BEING HAROLD PINTER’ Simply getting to New York (with the aid of the Public Theater and La MaMa) was a cloak-and-dagger adventure for the Belarus Free Theater, which is banned from performing in its own country. The show this troupe presented here in January — an inspired exploration of Pinter’s work as an anatomy of totalitarian oppression and the sadistic will to power behind it — was a searing, profoundly inventive reminder that theater can still be revolutionary, in all senses of that word.

‘THE __________ WITH THE HAT’ The season’s unlikeliest Broadway hit, Stephen Adly Guirgis’s foul-mouthed comedy about love and addiction (and love as addiction) dared to turn the language of 12-step programs inside out, reminding us that what draws people together and tears them apart (and sometimes makes them destroy themselves) is way too complex to be contained by a set of inspirational rules. Anna D. Shapiro oversaw a red-meat cast that seemed stark naked even with their clothes on.

‘THE NORMAL HEART’ A play that everyone expected to register as, at best, a worthy dinosaur — Larry Kramer’s 1985 drama about the early plague years of AIDS in New York — turned out to be a very-much-alive, inexhaustibly angry dragon that still breathed fire.

‘GOOD PEOPLE’ David Lindsay-Abaire’s quiet, seemingly uneventful drama about former sweethearts from South Boston who (briefly) reunite in middle age turned out to be a trenchant assessment of the divisive power of class in this country. And as an obdurate blue-collar gal who kept her secrets to herself, Frances McDormand provided a master class in beneath-the-skin acting in Daniel Sullivan’s deceptively easygoing production.

‘FOLLIES’ Four decades after it first dazzled and baffled Broadway, Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman’s musical about a reunion of former Ziegfeld Follies-style performers returned in a heartfelt production (from the Kennedy Center) that reconfirmed its status as the greatest show-biz eulogy — and benediction — ever written. Eric Schaeffer directed a starry cast to die for that found the emotional transparency in the shadows of spectacle past.

‘THE CHERRY ORCHARD’ A Chekhov tragicomedy that nobody ever seems to get right was done full, revelatory justice in a tiny Off Broadway theater (the Classic Stage Company). Andrei Belgrader’s funny, sad and freshly conceived interpretation opened the walls between Chekhov’s then and our now. Rarely have this play’s endlessly frustrated Russians (played by a cast that included Dianne Wiest and John Turturro) seemed to speak so directly and affectingly to an audience.

‘SWEET AND SAD’ The unspeakable resonated beneath and within the everyday conversational prose of Richard Nelson’s quiet, eloquent drama about a family that reunites in a town in upstate New York on the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. This work’s gentle indirection, given life by a perfectly melded ensemble at the Public Theater, made it the most affecting play to date to deal with the events of Sept. 11, 2001.