Regular readers of LA Stage Watch know that I usually try to make connections between productions instead of reviewing them in isolation from each other. So I’ve divided my list of 26 highlights of 2010 into 10 categories. Here goes, alphabetically by category:

ALLEGORIES GONE WILD! Ron Sossi ignited Max Frisch’s The Arsonists, at the Odyssey Theatre, in a way that made the play seem applicable to a wide variety of contemporary situations in which foxes are invited into henhouses – depending on who you think are the foxes and who are the hens.  Marya Mazor took Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? to a level of intimacy at the little Chance Theater that had been missing in the Taper’s grander production in 2005.

Albert (AJ) Meijer in "Wounded"

IRAQ PLAYS: THE HOME FRONT: Tom Burmester’s Los Angeles Theatre Ensemble created Wounded and A Nation of Two (formerly known as Survived) separately, in earlier years, but this year the company revived them in a riveting but too-brief repertory season, at the Powerhouse in Santa Monica. Because they have yet to get the attention they deserve, I’m plugging them yet again. Wounded is a devastating examination of a group of soldiers and their loved ones at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, while A Nation of Two is a harrowing look at a dead soldier’s survivors trying to sort through their conflicting claims on his memory.

Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo Photo by Craig Schwartz.

IRAQ PLAYS: THE IRAQ FRONT: Howard Korder’s In a Garden, at South Coast Repertory, nimbly illustrates the macrocosmic U.S.-Iraqi partnership through the microcosm of the relationship between a Middle Easter culture minister and the American architect whom he hires to create a garden retreat. Part of Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo is also set in a garden, but Rajiv Joseph adopted a much more lyrical, magically realistic style in his intertwining story of the title character and an Iraqi translator for the American forces. Center Theatre Group deserves credit for bringing back a slightly improved version to the Taper after the play’s 2009 premiere at the Douglas.

The 25th Annual Putnam-County Spelling Bee

LAUGHING OUT LOUD: These productions made me laugh the loudest in 2010: The 25^th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee at La Mirada Theatre, Troubadour Theater’s A Wither’s Tale and The First Jo-el at the Falcon, Ann Randolph’s Loveland at Santa Monica Playhouse and Kidnapped by Craigslist: The Graveyard Shift, a SpyAnts production at Elephant Lab Theatre.

Ramon de Ocampo and Diarra Kilpatrick in SICK

NEW PLAYS SET IN LA: The title character in Luis Alfaro’s Oedipus el Rey is a young ex-con who returns to Pico-Union and becomes its “king,” thanks in part to a red-hot romance with an older woman. In Erik Patterson’s Sick, a motley assortment of LA characters struggle with several kinds of sickness – both real and imagined – in a lightly ironic style that belies the subject. Both plays are lyrical yet lean, and both received dynamic stagings. Jon Lawrence Rivera directed Alfaro’s play for Theatre@ Boston Court, and he produced Patterson’s, which Diane Rodriguez directed, for Playwrights’ Arena at Los Angeles Theatre Center, so Rivera deserves the title of LA New Play impresario of the year.

Kareem Ferguson, Kathleen Mary Carthy and Frank Ashmore in Charles Smith's Free Man of Color

19th CENTURY AMERICAN ADVENTURES: Charles Smith’s Free Man of Color tells the challenging and fascinating tale of a freed slave in the 1820s who’s drafted by his white benefactor to help lead the campaign to ship slaves back to Africa. Then he gradually realizes that “next year, in Freetown” isn’t what he has in mind for his life. Set about 60 years later, Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room or the Vibrator Play examines a doctor’s promotion of the use of vibrators to cure women’s “hysteria,” while he tries to keep his sheltered wife in the dark. Both of the productions – at the Colony and South Coast Repertory, respectively — brought wonderfully detailed characters to life in ways that resonate in the 21^st century.

CAROUSEL set by Tom Buderwitz

OLD MUSICALS THAT START WITH ‘CA’: This category isn’t quite as randomly whimsical as it might appear. Pasadena Playhouse’s Camelot – its last production before it shut down for most of the year – and Reprise’s Carousel later in the same month, were both admirably stripped–down versions that combined costs savings with lucid aesthetic concepts. The directors were David Lee and Michael Michetti, respectively.

Geoff Elliot in "Measure for Measure"

OLD PLAYS THAT START WITH ‘M’: This category, on the other hand, is about as randomly whimsical as this list gets. At South Coast Repertory, Martin Benson re-visited George Bernard Shaw’s Misalliance, using the same glittering set design that graced a 1988 SCR production, and once again the play felt like one of Shaw’s masterpieces. At A Noise Within, Michael Murray brought Measure for Measure, Shakespeare’s complicated comedy about sex and power, into the contemporary age with assurance.

Curt Hansen, Alice Ripley and Asa Somers in NEXT TO NORMAL. Photo by Craig Schwartz.

SONGS OF SOLIPSISM: Five superb productions of very different musicals dissected  characters who are trapped within their psychological prisons. Calvin Remsberg’s staging of the Stephen Sondheim/Hugh Wheeler Sweeney Todd, produced by Musical Theatre West at the Carpenter Center, was an astonishingly big and bountiful production for these economy-strapped times, with an ability to hear and understand the lyrics that you might not expect in such a large venue. Likewise, Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along worked its usual wonders in two tiny productions, at Chance Theater and Actors Co-op. Center Theatre Group introduced Next to Normal to L.A. at the Ahmanson Theatre, and the Tom Kitt/Brian Yorkey rock musical about a bipolar woman and her family demonstrated a sly wit as well as a frightening undertow, directed by Michael Greif. Meanwhile, at one of LA’s smallest venues, the Blank Theatre, Michael John LaChiusa’s absorbing chamber trilogy See What I Wanna See probed different perspectives on “the truth,” under Daniel Henning’s direction.

(L to R) Chris Pine and Brett Ryback in The Lieutenant of Inishmore. Photo Credit: Craig Schwartz

TORTURE COMEDIES: Can we laugh about torture? Well, maybe about the torturers, if not the torture. Blank Theatre (and Henning, again – see above) ably took us on Christopher Durang’s wild ride through Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them, at the Stella Adler Theatre. And Center Theatre Group gave us the belated but still penetrating satirical mayhem of Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore, staged by Wilson Milam at the Mark Taper Forum.