In with the old, in with the new
Classics endure; playwrights fill legendary shoes
Two of America's best playwrights passed away this year, Arthur Miller and August Wilson. And England's leading playwright, Harold Pinter, won the Nobel Prize in literature after announcing that he had written his last work for the theater.
Can anyone take their place? This year proved there are great playwrights ready to step into their shoes, and you didn't have to venture past Massachusetts and New York to find them.
The two most talked-about plays were both on Broadway. Playwrights John Patrick Shanley and Martin McDonagh fully realized their potential this year. Shanley, an American who wrote the screenplay for ''Moonstruck," won every award except the Nobel for ''Doubt," a parable about certainty vs. uncertainty. It's a wonderfully constructed play, and one wonders how subsequent productions could ever measure up to New York's, with Cherry Jones as the nun who accuses a priest, played by Brian F. O'Byrne, of sexual abuse.
On the other hand, for a play about uncertainty it feels a little bit too pat. For my money, the play of the year was ''The Pillowman" by McDonagh, an Anglo-Irish writer who has learned how to thrill as well as shock, and how to make us think as well as laugh. Set in an unnamed police state where a writer's dark fairy tales are being reenacted by a serial killer, ''The Pillowman" is a no-holds-barred defense of uncensored writing and a brilliant piece of storytelling.
The Sugan Theatre Company has championed McDonagh's writing along with that of the less-produced Tom Murphy, whom Sugan artistic director Carmel O'Reilly claims is the best of the Irish bunch. She went a long way toward proving it with a lovely production of Murphy's 1975 work ''The Sanctuary Lamp," in which three lonely souls meet in an empty church. O'Reilly and set designer J. Michael Griggs made great use of the Roberts Theatre at the Boston Center for the Arts in bringing that church to life.
O'Reilly also introduced us to another fine writer, Scotsman Gregory Burke, whose debut play about a botched kidnapping, ''Gagarin Way," casts a dark eye on political ''isms" of all stripes as the kidnappers debate about everything from socialism to globalism. Like ''The Pillowman," this 2001 play is full of both menace and mirth, and if it has no answers for the muddle the world is in, who does?
Suzan-Lori Parks proved that she was ready to succeed Wilson as the best black playwright in the country in 2001, with the ultra-bracing, Pulitzer-winning ''Topdog/Underdog." This year Boston and Providence audiences saw a slashing coproduction from New Repertory Theatre and Trinity Repertory Company of the play, in which brothers named Booth and Lincoln are the focus of a street-slang-infused look at violence in America.
More heralded writers showed their stuff as well. Pinter was represented by two excellent productions, ''The Homecoming" at Merrimack Repertory Theatre and ''The Lovers" (which paired his ''Ashes to Ashes" and ''The Lover") at Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater.
The Publick Theatre's ravishing outdoor production of ''Arcadia" outdid the Huntington Theatre Company's ''The Real Thing" in bringing Tom Stoppard back to Boston. But with ''The Sisters Rosensweig," Huntington artistic director Nicholas Martin reminded us what a good writer Wendy Wasserstein is at the top of her game. Martin also directed a lively production of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's ''The Rivals."
Boston got first dibs on ''Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," and if Kathleen Turner was disappointing as Martha, the Tony-winning Bill Irwin was revelatory as George in a production that reminded us that Edward Albee's play is still an extraordinary piece of writing. The Broadway staging of ''Glengarry Glen Ross" did the same for David Mamet. But another great American writer, Tony Kushner, did not have similar luck with Boston Theatre Works' flawed production of ''Homebody/Kabul."
The Lyric Stage Company of Boston shone a spotlight on England's complex Caryl Churchill, bringing her rich new play ''A Number" to Boston with a smart, spare production. SpeakEasy Stage Company and Boston Theatre Works played well together with Richard Greenberg's less abstract play about identity, ''Take Me Out," at the BCA.
Of course, theater isn't just about new plays. When a classic is done particularly well, it is just as much about our world as the playwright's, and the American Repertory Theatre continues to be the place to go for first-class reinventions of the classics. This year saw riveting productions of ''Carmen," ''Three Sisters," and ''Desire Under the Elms," along with lesser though still fascinating takes on Kafka's ''Amerika," Marlowe's ''Dido, Queen of Carthage," and Cervantes's ''Don Quixote" (''The UnPOSSESSED").
When you put these side by side with newer work at the ART -- Robert Lepage's ''The Far Side of the Moon," Edward Bond's ''Olly's Prison," Pamela Gien's ''The Syringa Tree," Pieter-Dirk Uys's ''Foreign Aids," Imago Theatre's ''Frogz," and Neil LaBute's ''This Is How It Goes" (in a sharp ART/MXAT Institute production), and you have a theater to which, as the late Miller said, attention must be paid.
But in terms of bringing new life to the classics, the ART had to take a back seat to the great production of ''Macbeth" that the Out of Joint company brought to Holyoke's War Memorial Auditorium for the Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts. Not only was it great Shakespeare, but it pulled the audience into the action, which was transplanted seamlessly to contemporary Africa. Intriguingly, the ART says it is trying to bring the production to Boston.
It was a good year for Shakespeare in general. The Actors' Shakespeare Project moved to the head of the class among Boston-area Shakespeare outfits with Alvin Epstein's rigorous performance in ''King Lear." Still, no one in Massachusetts does the Bard better than Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, which this year introduced many of us to the little-produced ''King John" in a stirring production directed by Tina Packer. Allyn Burrows shone not only in the title role of ''King John," but in the ASP's ''Lear" and Merrimack's ''The Homecoming" as well.
Sometimes the theater is just laugh-out-loud fun. Barrington Stage Company, which saw last year's ''The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee" move to Broadway without missing a beat, mounted a sensational production this year of Stephen Sondheim's ''Follies." The hilarious but touching ''Souvenir," the story of Florence Foster Jenkins, the opera singer who couldn't sing, moved from the Berkshire Theatre Festival to Broadway this year with Judy Kaye in the title role. When the reverse happens next year with ''Monty Python's Spamalot," let's hope it is as good in Boston as it was in New York.
Ed Siegel can be reached at siegel@globe.com. 