Spontaneous Shakespeare -- In the prologue of the all-male Cheek by Jowl production of "As You Like It," seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the fall, one actor abruptly smeared another's cheeks with mud. With that gesture, a blank white stage, inhabited by a corps of identically dressed men, was transformed into a pulsing, spontaneous-seeming world: an instant metamorphosis that defined the elemental magic at the root of all theater.
Albee Reborn -- Early in the first act of "Three Tall Women," which opened at the Vineyard Theater in February, there was a jubilant moment when it became clear that Edward Albee had discovered a brilliant, barbed cosmic poetry in the wandering rhythms of a mean old woman's senile speech and that in the magnificent Myra Carter, he had just the right actress to put it across. Even for those who had written off Mr. Albee, it was a luminous signal that this major playwright's career had been reborn.
The True Voice of Friel -- In the last monologue of Brian Friel's "Faith Healer," in the Abbey Theater production at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven in April, there was a point when the audience realized that it had been listening to a tale told by a dead man. As portrayed by the incomparable Donal McCann, the title character envisioned his own end with a voice that seemed to come from an unending purgatory of self-inflicted pain. The life-stirring details of author's text and actor's performance meshed here in a seamless way playwrights can usually only dream about.
Special Effects -- In "Movieland," at the Ridiculous Theatrical Company in April, Everett Quinton scaled the purplest peaks of Western cinema, recreating major motion pictures with minor resources. The crowning moment to remember: Mr. Quinton's turning from Princess Anne Baxter into Yul Brynner's Ramses, using nothing but dirty laundry, an empty Clorox bottle and a very fierce will to believe.
