Two outstanding holiday shows cap a year of diverse and captivating theater in the Chestnut Hill region. Quintessence Theatre rocks the house with "Kiss Me Kate," the groundbreaking musical, with witty and urbane songs by Cole Porter and energetic ensemble dance routines by director Todd Underwood.

The audience at Act II Playhouse nearly shook the walls with laughter in Tony Braithwaite's "Christmas in the Catskills, A Star is Borscht", which celebrates and recreates the heyday of the renowned comedy venue.  

All four area theaters produced vital shows throughout the year, drawing on various genres. I want to cite one play from each theater that I found especially memorable.  

Stagecrafters

Jane Toczek directed a sterling production of Yazmina Reza's "God of Carnage." Two married couples meet to settle differences after their respective sons get into a fight. Henry loses a tooth in the brawl, prompting his mother to exclaim, “How many parents standing up for their children become infantile themselves?” Guess what happens next!

Playwright Reza was born in France, but both her parents were East European Jews forced to flee Nazi persecution. You suspect the viciousness of this experience informs Reza's dour outlook on human nature. In London and  Paris, she was well-established as an eminent playwright in the 1980s. American theater was slow to recognize her work until "Art" won the Tony in 1998.

"Toczek's four-member cast excelled in laying bare the parochial consciousness of each character. At one level, the show was a delicious send-up of middle-class mores. Against the backdrop of contemporary genocide in Western Darfur, it also suggests the line between "civilization" and "barbarism" is merely situational. Unlike the nervous titter you hear at most situation comedies, the audience exploded in laughter at the finale of "Carnage" on opening night.

Old Academy Players

"Our Town" by Thornton Wilder won the Pulitzer Prize in 1938. Taking a meta-theatrical approach, it follows people's lives in the imaginary town of Grover's  Corners, New Hampshire, where folks with their ordinary cares are too harried to appreciate the joyous rarity of human existence.

Director Jane Jennings assembled an outstanding show. On the stage eaves, a striking Stage Manager introduces the people of Grover's Corner. With costumes by Helga Krauss, they cross the stage one by one in a stately march. Each character has their basket of minor woes --- the newspaper editor, the milkman, the professor --- but none recognize their mortality.

The stage was nearly bare, with walls showing exposed wooden jambs like you were in an unfinished building. With few props, characters were ghostly at times as they mimed activities. Sound effects were like something out of an old radio drama, and the core actors were convincing.

Towards the end, one of the stone-faced dead in the cemetery asks Stage Manager if anyone living appreciates life's small joys. Stage Manager said, "No, the saints and poets, maybe. They do some." As I left the theater, I wanted to smell the wildflowers in the bushes. The thought even stayed with me for a day or two.

Act II Playhouse

In "Tea For 3: Lady Bird, Pat & Betty", Mary Martello directed a tour-de-force one-woman show starring Sabrina Profitt as Lady Bird Johnson, Pat Nixon, and Betty Ford. With help from wig designer Bridget Brennan and costume designer Mary Folino, you felt like you had met three former First Ladies and experienced entire eras of American history. 

Lady Bird proudly announces she is not a "modern woman" and looks past LBJ's philandering. She was surprisingly plucky in campaigning for LBJ in the Deep South, deemed too dangerous for the President, and endured many  "N-lover" assaults.

Pat Nixon wonders how many she has to inflect the same dumb clichés to media reporters, paces her White House quarters like a caged animal and bristles at the sanctimony of the Watergate inquiries. Betty Ford is an unabashed party girl, once married to a traveling salesman,  who lounges in a bathrobe with a glass of Bourbon and a 71 percent public approval rating.

Quintessence Theatre

Director Alex Burns crafted "Macbeth" with cinematic splendor. Smoke effects, balletic sword fights, and the eerie presence of Banquo’s ghost heightened the production’s atmosphere. With its spectacle-driven flare, the show suggests that Macbeth, rather than being purely evil, is swept into action by circumstance. 

Macbeth was not an evil-doer at the onset. But the force of events, such as the witch's prophesy, urges him on. The show's smoke and light effects are so arresting Macbeth often seems to watch his life unfold, just like the audience. The production rejected an ethical reckoning of good and evil in that the "good" people in the play were so insouciant and bland that it took the "evil" vitality of Macbeth to spur them into action and bring about justice.

Our theaters explored a variety of genres, from comedy and tragedy to satire, musicals and mystery-suspense. The revived Drama Group of Germantown produced "The Importance of Being Earnest" and plans to produce "Romeo and Juliet" this Spring. I look forward to all of next year's theater offerings.