A Critical Overview: The Best of Theater ’89

“How do you keep all those plays in your head?,” non-critic friends will occasionally ask us critics. Easy: There’s so much mediocrity, and so much worse, that the good work holds on in the memory bank, like anything that’s rare.

And there was good work in 1989, plus a few discomforting trends. Compared to 1988, the number of fine new plays plummetted during my Stage Beat rounds this year. An interesting sub-trend was that the Cast Theatre, which has always made a mission out of nurturing young playwrights, housed much of the good work.

A big reason is because the Heliogabalus theater company was in residence there, producing John Steppling’s drama by the Salton Sea, “Teenage Wedding,” and Kelly Stuart’s hypnotic descent into female hell, “Taxi Dance.” The Cast also presented a completely different hell, Justin Tanner’s keen spoof, “Still Life With Vacuum Cleaner” (later in the year, Tanner had another funny but lesser spoof at the Cast, “Zombie Attack”).

Elsewhere, the tradition of humanistic drama was nobly carried on by Elizabeth Hansen’s “A String of Pearls.” This wasn’t a trend, though, not like the string of revivals or imports we saw. Most were from Britain, by gifted directors: Michael Peretzian’s staging-for-the-ages of David Storey’s “Home,” Allison R. Liddi’s vital, semi-arena revival of Caryl Churchill’s “Cloud Nine,” and James Gardner’s fierce production of a fierce David Halliwell comedy, “K.D. Dufford Hears K.D. Dufford Ask K.D. Dufford How K.D. Dufford’ll Make K.D. Dufford.”

It was David Mamet year at the Gnu Theatre: “American Buffalo” is a far better play than “A Life in the Theatre,” and Jeff Seymour’s stagings were as good as the plays allowed.

The biggest trend, one prays, is short lived: the one- and two-person show. If it means living with the following, though, we’ll be very happy: John O’Keefe (“Shimmer”), Beth Lapides (“Globe-O-Mania”), David W. W. Johnstone (“Gargoyle Jam”), Tulis McCall (“What Everywoman Knows”), Joe Frank (“Work In Progress”), John Fleck (“Blessed Are All The Little Fishes”), Barry Yourgrau (“Brand New Show”), Neill Gladwin and Stephen Kearney a.k.a. Los Trios Ringbarkus (“Rampant Stupidity”), Suzan Hendershot and Mitch Carter (“The Wes and Jane Show”), and Peter Cook and Kenny Lerner (“Flying Words Project”).

By contrast, ensemble groups were becoming an endangered species. Only The Zeta Collective, with their politicized and atmospheric “Freedom of Information,” gave the sense of a group mind.