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Best Play: Tie, Everyman's The School for Scandal and the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival's Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged).

In theater, in film -- in fact, in just about all the performing
arts -- awards lists follow an almost religious practice of favoring
tragedies over comedies. Then why, in picking out the top selections
from Baltimore's 2006 theater season, do I have no compunction in
admitting that this year's lighthearted offering simply trounced the
weightier dramas that Charm City's theaters attempted? Both of the
harrowing political plays that Centerstage attempted -- last spring's The Murder of Isaac and this autumn's Death and the Maiden --
were decked out with noble sentiments but crippled by heavy-handed, not
creatively inept scripts. Streamlined selections like the Everyman
Theatre's Opus fared much better. Though in
retrospect even this concert hall drama was too preoccupied with grand
plot design to make its characters anything more than one-tone notes in
an impersonal, though well-wrought composition.

As it turns out, this year's two best plays were also its most
delightful. The first, and more recent, of these was Everyman's
compacted take on Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School for Scandal,
a frenzied and none-too-subtle 18th century high society parody. Tied
with it for top position is yet another dissection of high cultural
pretension, the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival's Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged),
a three-man show that crams snippets of three dozen or so of the bard's
works into two short acts. Behind the outward flippancy of these two
shows, which quickly resolved itself into an intimate hilarity, each
well-cast production achieved a technical ease and lucidity of
presentation. There was not just method, but intelligence, to their
madness.

If this year proved anything, it is that comic pyrotechnics
require their own half-demented but incredibly gratifying brand of
artistic skill. Granted, neither the decades-old Complete Works nor the centuries-old School for Scandal
can be described as a cutting-edge script, although each mirthfully
invaded its audience's space, whether through the BSF's confrontational
into-the-aisles presentation or Everyman's rapidly changing,
outlandishly furnished sets. When so many of a theater season's heavier
dramas fall flat, such comedies, at minimum, provide some sort of
refuge. But these two were not just refreshing alternatives: They were
the two most confidently orchestrated, if the most whimsical, nights of
theater that Baltimore had to offer this year.

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