Ten most wanted

ELECTRIC LAUNDRY The titular maid in Caroline, or Change was famously played by E. Faye Butler.

Photo: Michael Brosilow

1. Caroline, or Change (Court Theatre)
Two mothers—one a miserable, illiterate laundress in 1963 Louisiana and the other her buoyant, conscientious employer whose bratty stepson carelessly leaves change in his pockets—were the hardest ticket to score in Chicago theater in 2008. That’s because they were the unlikely subjects of playwright Tony Kushner and composer Jeanine Tesori’s peerless rhythm-and-blues opera about the treachery of American wealth and the weariness of them without. Cunning director Charles Newell and yeoman musical director Doug Peck probably did most of the work, but it was their pitch-perfect cast, led by shattering Kate Fry as a conflicted Jewish homemaker and E. Faye Butler, soul music’s dramatic aristocrat, as her Herculean black washwoman, that made Caroline Hyde Park’s second-best export of the year.

2. Our Town (The Hypocrites)
Skeptics rolled their eyes when this project was announced; by the curtain call of the Hypocrites’ urban, rigorously unsentimental Our Town, few of those eyes were still dry. Under the fleet command of director David Cromer, who also brandished the audacity/wisdom to play the narrating stage manager himself, an all-storefront cast (led by starkly radiant Jennifer Grace as Emily) made a compelling case that Thornton Wilder’s meditation on futility is one of the most important plays in the canon. The infamous third-act appearance of frying bacon was the only fat on Cromer’s stunningly realized choreo-poem.

3. Speech and Debate (American Theater Company)
In his first move as ATC’s new artistic director, PJ Paparelli swapped out a revival of the ’40s boulevard comedy Born Yesterday for something a little more up-to-date. Stephen Karam’s crackling high-school farce of sex, lies and YouTube featured the sharpest comic ensemble of the year: Patrick Andrews, Jared McGuire and Sadieh Rifai, as misfit teens blackmailing one another into friendship, deftly juggled Karam’s blend of silly and salacious. If Paparelli was announcing a new era at ATC, the youthful, cerebral Speech was loud and clear.

4. Uncle Vanya (TUTA Theatre Chicago)
Was melancholy ever this pleasurable? Director Zeljko Djukic made hay out of heartbreak in this revelatory revival. Without removing Chekhov’s tale of regret and disappointment in the Russian provinces from its context, Djukic emphasized the timeless and placeless natures of those most human conditions. A terrific new translation by Yasen Peyankov and Peter Christensen helped, as did a warm, vibrant ensemble. Designer Martin Andrew, meanwhile, found yet another astounding way to look at the Chopin basement. The one thing you don’t have to regret is missing it: TUTA’s remounting Vanya in the spring.

5. Miss Julie (The Hypocrites)
Fringe-theater proprietor Sean Graney had a big year, including well-received projects at some of the city’s largest theaters. But Graney’s promenade Hypocrites staging of Miss Julie—Strindberg’s iconoclastic play about the wealthy girl (prime, raven-haired filly Stacy Stoltz) who’s randy for the lowborn servant (a turn of rough-trade elegance by Greg Hardigan)—was the director’s most confident and slyly class-conscious work to date. The ambient live music, the postcoital junkyard row and all that nakedly explored Victorian gender weirdness made Julie the closest Graney has come to creating something nobody else can.

6. Titus Andronicus (Court Theatre)
Eleven months later, we’re still pondering the implications of Charles Newell’s many-faceted reinvention of Shakespeare’s revenge tragedy. Turning Titus into a play-within-a-play, framed by what appears to be a secret-society induction ceremony, Newell fashioned an exhilarating psychodrama about pack mentality and cycles of violence. Anchored by leads Timothy Edward Kane and Hollis Resnik’s steely commitment to the conceit and stocked to the gills with the city’s finest young-dude actors, this wasn’t a Titus for purists. But Newell’s refractive take proved an invigorating puzzle.

7. Fake Lake (The Neo-Futurists)
We’ve heard arguments that the extraneous segments in Sharon Greene’s aquacade play—snarky Dr. Science–like bits that explained water ecology to the crowd—held back her otherwise winning bio play about an ill-advised road trip. And we don’t necessarily disagree. But Greene elevated the normally navel-gazing Isn’t My Life Quirky idiom of public-radio essays and made her tale of an early-20s screwup into a soaring pop-verse parable. And as gorgeously staged by Halena Kays at dusk inside the glass-windowed Welles Park pool (with a fly musical assist from Mikhail Fiksel), it was 2008’s best street theater.

8. Breathing Corpses (Steep Theatre)
Happily, Steep moved into a better-equipped space this fall. But before it did so, the company put its shoe box on Sheridan to great use for young Brit playwright Laura Wade’s Chicago debut. For this taut thriller, in which five seemingly unrelated scenes are slowly revealed to be parts of a chilling whole, Marcus Stephens’s creepy aluminum-siding set put us so close to the actors we could have been sharing a coffin. Director Robin Witt’s intelligent handling of the reveals and a Steep-standard top-notch ensemble were totally goosebump-worthy.

9. Million Dollar Quartet (Goodman Theatre, Apollo Theater)
We usually hate jukebox musicals because their Scotch-taped pastiche scripts and tacky, souped-up arrangements of songs you once loved tend to assume a lower common denominator than actually exists. But the simple, noncondescending book about the day Elvis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis all met in Sun Records’ studio; the quiet acknowledgment that great white rock & roll first came from the kids of sharecroppers; and the electrifying, stripped-down musicianship of Levi Kreis’s uncanny Lewis, Lance Guest’s haunting Cash, Rob Lyons’s dead-sexy Perkins and Eddie Clendening’s modest, fame-shocked Presley made Quartet a justified hit. There. Was that really so hard?

10. As Told by the Vivian Girls (Dog & Pony Theatre)
In an act of breathtaking ambition, director Devon de Mayo and a small army of Off Loop actors and designers took over the Theater on the Lake and took us inside the childlike visions of outsider artist Henry Darger. The old saw that no two audience members experience a play exactly the same way has never been truer than with this strange tale of orphan girls battling child slavers: With interconnected action taking place simultaneously throughout the building, we were free to wander and discover on our own. It was a theatrical ride unlike anything else this year.

NEXT> The top 5 worst plays in 2008