HIGHLIGHTS OF EQUITY WAIVER YEAR

The entropy seeping out of the Equity Waiver movement and the malaise of the larger commercial theaters have been well-enough documented not to require further mention here. But they did account for a certain grim aftertaste in looking back over a year whose pleasures, in retrospect, rested more in a few performances than in the sense of deliverance one derives from participating in a great theatrical event.

Francis Bay caught the weird angle of emotional light as the mother in John Guare’s “Bosoms & Neglect,” a play in which we saw how unrequited love between parents and their children is infinitely worse than between lovers. After all, you can always choose another lover.

Robert Machray was an unforgettably florid potato-faced Touchstone in the South Coast Repertory’s otherwise overproduced “As You Like It.” The production also included a fine-tuned performance by Jonathan McMurtry, whose world-weariness as Jacques transcended the affectation of dark brooding we normally see in the role. McMurtry is an object lesson to younger actors in his ability to grow as an artist over the years.

Salome Jens was once again a rhapsodic Anne Sexton in “ . . . About Anne” at Stages, a performance that never succumbed to sentimentality. Susan Tyrell was as clamorous and inescapable as a sexual pinball machine in Catalina Productions’ newest version of Tom Eyen’s “Why Hannah’s Skirt Won’t Stay Down” at the Coast Playhouse.

Jennifer Parsons’ Shelley and Raymond J. Barry’s Tilden were standouts in Sam Shepard’s “Buried Child,” directed by Sam Weisman at the South Coast Repertory; she for her distinctly American mix of sexual bravado and timorousness, and he for the stealthy terror he generated as a psychopath.

That production, incidentally, was this reviewer’s favorite of the year, though “favorite” is perhaps not the right choice of words for a work that comes as close as anything we have in this portion of American history to generating a tragic consciousness. “Buried Child” shows how deep, awful and irremediable a family curse can be, and it translates into a brutal social history of transgression.

It reminds one too of just how many pleasures the South Coast Repertory, refreshingly free of an Industry complex, has afforded us over the years; and how, under the cannily low-keyed guidance of its artistic directors, David Emmes and Martin Benson (both excellent directors) it has kept up with its time and place. South Coast is an Orange County operation, but it’s also an American and world theater (the Western world, anyway), and will go down in our history with as much prominence as any cultural institution here.