Of the 60 or so productions covered...

Of the 60 or so productions covered from this corner (I joined Stage Beat in late spring), more than a quarter of those shows linger in my memory either because the acting was sufficiently burnished, the theme disturbed my nerves or the production contained artistic surprises. That’s a high percentage--and the upbeat theater news for the new year--if you’ve caromed through the haunts of Equity Waiver.

Two of those productions remarkably are still running, more than six months after they opened (David Mamet’s cue-ball hard “Sexual Perversity in Chicago” at the Ensemble Studio Theatre and the polished comedy improv show “Midnight Madness” at the Company of Angels).

What’s interesting is that the shows with the best acting were most often ensemble pieces, works that were directed with an eye toward seamlessness rather than showcasing. Emblematic were Philip Barry’s “Animal Kingdom” at Theater 40, A.R. Gurney’s “Scenes From an American Life” at the Skylight Theater, and Ray Bradbury’s “The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit” at the new Margot Albert Theater in Lincoln Park.

More notable is that the dominant theme among the best on the beat focused on changing male-female relationships. Most of those (such as D.B. Gillis’ “Men’s Singles” at the Cast, Jerry Mayer’s “Almost Perfect” at the Santa Monica Playhouse and the aforementioned “Sexual Perversity”) conveyed their bite through the durability of sex and humor.

One show (a non-Waiver SRO black hit at the Beverly Theatre which L.A.’s white community didn’t even hear about until it had apparently left town) was the touring “Diary of Black Men.” It scorched home the point that black men must use black womanhood to help make them men enough to win back their black women. Now there’s a message, regardless of race.

Another strong theme in our rounds burst out of an otherwise uneven production of playwright John Hans Menkes’ “The Last Inquisitor” at the Fig Tree Theater. In essence, the play said, “Don’t ask how the Holocaust could have happened--look in the mirror.”

Artistically, three shows knocked me out: the contemporary Greek parlor room comedy on the discourse of love, “Plato’s Symposium” at the Powerhouse; “Early Tennessee” (early Tennessee Williams’ one-acts, also at the Powerhouse) and a bewitching solo piece, “Alligator Tails,” in the colloquially rich, swamp-tongue of performance artist Jan Munroe.

The East West Players continued to impress with both traditional (“Chikamatsu’s Forest”) and realistic (“The Gambling Den”) fare. The Cast premiered a sublime charmer, “Stooplife,” and the Melrose Theater promisingly launched its Eugene O’Neill Theater Festival with a rarely staged and autobiographical O’Neill curiosity, “Before Breakfast” (1916). L.A. Waiver is cooking a lot of the time.