An astonishing year for performance art in its broadest sense – every Columbus troupe was hitting, supplemented by killer work I was lucky enough to see in Chicago and New York. Also celebrating the 10th anniversary of Columbus Underground publishing my more formal thoughts, so all thanks to Anne and Walker Evans and everyone else I work with and I’m happy to call friends.
As usual, in chronological order and in Columbus unless otherwise specified.
- Fairview by Jackie Sibblies Drury, directed by Aviva Neff; Available Light – A decade ago, before I had an outlet, I was so struck by my introduction to Jackie Sibblies Drury’s plays I felt compelled to blog about it on my old Blogspot spot as part of the season that cemented my affinity for Available Light. In January, Available Light set the bar high for my 2024 with her powerful, uncomfortably hilarious satire Fairview. In Columbus Underground, I said, “Fairview is a Philip K. Dick-inflected MAD Magazine special with a full Three Stooges episode nested inside about race in America, how the act of looking twists both the observer and the observed, the impossibility of truly knowing other people, and the Sisyphean quest for ‘Fairness,’ to accomplish it and even define it.” In December, I’m still citing and thinking about this amazing feat of creation.
- Second Servings by Nancy Shelton Williams, directed by Sue Wismar; eMBer Women’s Theatre – Sue Wismar’s long been one of my favorite actors in town; on that short list where I can have no interest in subject matter or a writer, but when I hear she’s involved? Now I’m interested. This first exposure to her directing delivered on those expectations and then some, finding breathing room and also a coiled tightness that felt right for these characters in this world. As I said for Columbus Underground, “I’ve seen all three of these actors be very good in many things over my years of seeing theater in town; I’ve never seen them better. The tenuous chemistry of the three, the layers of shifting alliances, feel like they go back decades and are as fresh as an open wound.”
- You Will Get Sick by Noah Diaz, directed by Eleni Papaleonardos; Available Light – The fact that all three of the Available Light productions I saw this year ended up on this list isn’t an act of intentional favoritism; it’s because all three of them sent me out into the night not just rethinking my perceptions of theater but of the world. Nowhere was that more evident than in this piece, which I called in my CU review, “A play I haven’t seen before, a rare blend of commentary, voice, characters, and love—leavened with appropriate disgust—for the world.”
- Night, Mother by Marsha Norman, directed by Michelle Batt; eMBer Women’s Theatre – Ember Women’s Theatre had an excellent year – I still regret not being able to make their third production because of family and job travel responsibilities and this bracing, note-perfect production of a great play no one’s done in Columbus for a very long time was a shining example. I said of Melissa Bair’s scorching Thelma, for CU, “Everything feels natural and also like an accumulating snowball in a way that’s as dark and dazzling as a Goya painting.”
- Purpose by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, directed by Phylicia Rashad; Steppenwolf, Chicago – It was a good year for Branden Jacobs-Jenkins as he further cemented himself as one of our two or three finest voices for the stage and a hell of a year for me as a theater-goer as I got to see two brand new works. Purpose took the black family drama as microcosm, with a civil rights leader patriarch (Cedric Young the week I was there) trying to keep his reputation spotless, with children who took varied paths. The wire-tight pacing given life by Rashad’s direction, the whiplash blending of distance and immediacy, and the best performances I’ve ever seen by actors I’ve been watching for a very long time – including Alana Arenas, Glenn Davis, and Jon Michael Hill – meant this is still reverberating around in my bones.
- An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen, directed by Amy Herzog; Circle in the Square, New York – My favorite Ibsen, adapted and tightened without losing any of its ferocious ambiguity as the intensity ramped up, by Amy Herzog whose 4000 Miles killed me at Lincoln Center in 2012, and directed by Sam Gold deploying all of the fascinating experiments that haven’t always coalesced in his recent work firing on all cylinders this time, centered around volcanic performances from Michael Imperioli and Jeremy Strong.
- Legally Blonde by Heather Hach, Laurence O’Keefe, and Nell Benjamin, directed by Dionysia Williams Velazco; Short North Stage – This was a stellar year for Short North Stage – their The Color Purple, Ain’t Misbehavin’, and Jersey Boys were all also evidence of a company working at the height of its powers and perfect versions of the material – but Legally Blonde stuck with me both because of my surprise (I knew it was a musical and I saw the movie years ago, but didn’t know a single song) and because it was one of the purest distillations of delight I had all year, one of the key tenets of the stage, centered around jaw-dropping performances from Laura Overby, about whom I said, “Doesn’t just rise to that challenge; she sails into space, making it look easy,” and Vera Cremeans, whose “Virtuosic performance [let] the character’s hard-won wisdom, wit, and charm shine brilliantly,” (both from Columbus Underground) and a consistently killer ensemble.
- An Iliad by Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare, directed by Cat McAlpine; Actors’ Theatre of Columbus – Actors Theatre was a mixed bag for my taste this year – their Twelfth Night was also beautiful, other two didn’t work for me – but this was the apotheosis of the risks they’re taking and the more adult subject matter they’re working with over the last few years and left me a blubbering mess. I’ve been a fan of Cat McAlpine’s work both as an actor and a director for years, but this sailed over those high expectations. For Columbus Underground, I called it “A riveting night of theater that’s a reminder of the challenges inherent in telling stories, in showing up for and with people, and how easily everything can fall apart.”
- Black on Earth by Orlando and Riccardo Hunter-Valentine, Brother(hood) Dance; Wexner Center for the Arts – Brother(hood) Dance’s first collaboration between OSU’s dance department and the resources of the Wex made my Best Of list last year and the wider lens they took to grapple with Black farming and integrated society took my breath away. This year had more of the “I can’t picture this anywhere else in Columbus” feeling the Wexner Center’s performing arts program used to give me constantly than I’ve had in years – all props to Elena Perantoni and Kathleen Felder – and this was a prime example.
- Lunch Bunch by Adrian Einspanier, directed by Eleni Papaleonardos; Available Light – This was another of the most exciting playwrighting voices I’ve ever seen brought to vibrant, touching, and hilariously vicious life by Eleni Papaleonardos with a perfect cast – I was especially struck by Wilma Hatton, Michelle Schroeder-Lowrey, and Whitney Thomas Eads. I said in Columbus Underground, “[It’s] a reminder that we’re all trying to get through and be better, and some of us have to try much harder than others. A reminder of how easy it is to turn into a bully with just a little bit of power. And an uproarious workplace comedy. And it’s more than all those things.”
- Max Roach 100 by Ayodele Casel, Rennie Harris, Ronald K. Brown, directed by Ayodele Casel, Rennie Harris, Ronald K. Brown, Torya Beard, and Kit Fitzgerald; Wexner Center for the Arts – This was another example of what the Wex does better than anyone else when it clicks – co-commissioning with New York’s Joyce Theater; finding the perfect curator for this, Richard Colton who I interviewed for a preview in one of my favorite interviews this year; and bringing together film, three of the finest choreographers, and astonishing dancers in tribute to one of the great composers of the last century.
- Good People by David Lindsay-Abaire, directed by Pamela Hill; Tipping Point – First time in 10 or 11 years anyone had done this gut-punch, sadly-even-more relevant gritty poetic look at Boston’s working class from David Lindsay-Abaire, and Pamela Hill and a terrific cast led by a warm, powerful performance from Sonda Staley, broke me with this terrific production that (as I said in Columbus Underground), “Refreshed and deepened my understanding of this play I love while making me dig deeper into my assumptions and reflexive responses to luck, choice, and how I treat other people.”
- Wife of a Salesman by Eleanor Burgess, directed by Leda Hoffmann; The Contemporary Theatre of Ohio – This was a stunning home run, born of the Contemporary’s keen eye for new plays and recontextualizing some of the American theater history CATCO made its bones on, with two knockout performances from Megan Lear and Teri Clark Linden at its heart, that I said in my CU review, “Give the density of ideas – the value of duty, the ephemerality of choice, the conflicting approaches of different waves of feminism, the commonality between people if we let our guards down enough – a visceral punch that kept me on the edge of my seat.”
- Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 by Dave Malloy after Leo Tolstoy, directed by Melissa Lusher; Otterbein University – I tried to review a lot of college theater in my first couple of years writing for CU. I think it’s important and the two great programs here – OSU and Otterbein – are a lot of people’s introduction to live theater; including me, the first play I remember seeing that wasn’t a Broadway Across America was at OSU (I think; that same High School year also had my first Actors’ Theatre performance). A professor made the great comment on one of my reviews that sometimes a “watchable play” isn’t the best yardstick, sometimes it’s necessary to remember kids are trying their hardest even if I couldn’t recommend something to anyone else, so I backed way off and try to choose what I cover from these programs more carefully. But Otterbein’s musical theater pedigree and the fact this was the first time anyone in central Ohio did this Dave Malloy masterpiece gave me confidence in signing up to review it and I was blown the hell away. Some work fits perfectly with college students and I definitely had that sense the overheated emotion, complicated melodies and harmonies, and large cast all aligned in this phenomenal production. In my CU Review, I said “It drove home the way scale and scope excavate different feelings than smaller-scale work and how beautiful that scope is when everything comes together.”
- Give Me Carmelita Tropicana! by Alina Troyano and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, directed by Eric Ting; Soho Rep, New York – Of any non-Columbus venue, I’ve seen the most change-my-head-around work at SoHo Rep’s tiny Off-Broadway space on Walker Street. Beyond what I’ve personally seen and been blown away by there, it’s also been a huge source of the work that made Available Light the theater company that reinvigorated my love of theater in Columbus. So when a New York trip coincided with not only the final production before they search for a new home but also a collaboration between Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and downtown performance art legend – and Jacobs-Jenkins’ former professor – who I’d never gotten to see live, Alina Troyano – made this a no-brainer. With rapid-fire wit, Troyano (as herself and longtime alter ego Camerlita Tropicana) and Jacobs-Jenkins (played brilliantly by Ugo Chukwu) pay loving tribute to experimental theater, a shifting and sometimes hard-to-find “downtown” sensibility, the various characters in Troyano’s Tropicana-verse, and the sense of possibility that hits differently being in a room full of strangers and loved ones seeing it live. There was an almost karmic sense of a circle closing in this being the final play I saw of the year being a perfect summation of what I’m hoping for any time the house lights go down. May this set the tone for another year of wonder and possibility.
Screen of Distance 