My Best of the Year Theater List for 2020 - Part II

And now, here is a list of the best virtual plays I saw during quarantine.

Best virtual play that virtually no one saw: The Mountaintop, American Players Theatre

All summer it was a treat to see Gavin Lawrence, one of American Players Theatre’s newest core company members, tearing up the screen in the “Out of the Woods” staged reading series. Most of the plays were recorded live via Zoom, then made available for free viewing on PBS Wisconsin for several weeks or months. But due to a rights issue, APT’s reading of Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop was only available for one night, which is heartbreaking since the production was so compelling.

The fictionalized story takes place on the night before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. After delivering his sermon, “I Have Been to the Mountaintop,” Dr. King (Lawrence) is trying to unwind in his hotel room when he strikes up a conversation with Camae (Sola Thompson), a maid who brings him room service. Over the course of the evening the two flirt, argue about politics, and discuss religion. Finally Camae reveals her real reason for visiting — she is the angel who has been assigned to escort the civil rights leader to heaven.  

Lawrence and Thompson had undeniable chemistry in the roles, and brought such polish and depth to the characters that I wasn’t surprised to learn they had played them previously in a production at the Ensemble Theater in Cincinnati in 2014. Hopefully, many more audience members can see these two reprise these fascinating parts again, onstage at APT in an upcoming season.

Best play about race: three-way tie:

Pass Over, original play by Antoinette Nwandu (2017), adapted and directed by Spike Lee. (Available on Amazon Prime). 

When the world premiere of Antoinette Nwandu’s play Pass Over opened at Steppenwolf in 2017, it caused a stir for all the wrong reasons. Although the play was partly inspired by the wrongful death of Trayvon Martin, a white critic dismissed the production’s premise that young Black men live in constant danger from gun violence by white men and white cops. It is imperative that we are not distracted from the work by a critic who is clearly out of touch. To ensure that larger audiences find the play, and the stellar cast’s gobsmacking performances, Spike Lee filmed the performance. 

Nwandu’s script is loosely based on Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. It centers on two Black men, Moses and Kitch (Jon Michael Hill and Julian Parker) passing time on the street with nothing in particular to do. They play. They fight. They wrestle. They wait. And when two different white men show up, they are on their guard. One of these interlopers is full of empty promises, and the other is a cop. 

Anyone familiar with the source material or the chain of events that led to explosive Black Lives Matter protests this year will have a disturbing feeling from the start that this story will not end well. And it doesn’t. But watching it play out is captivating, if also harrowing. Miserably timely, it is a genius production that Lee frames beautifully.

Pipeline by Dominique Morisseau (available on BroadwayHD)

Filmed in 2017 at a performance in Lincoln Center, Dominique Morisseau’s play, Pipeline, grabs you like a panic attack and will not let you breathe until the closing bows. The title refers to the historic, shameful pipeline that funnels young Black men from public school to incarceration, and it is a fate that Nya (Karen Pittman) is desperately trying to save her son from. But Nya’s opportunities to “be the change she wants to see in the world” seem to be slipping away one by one. Her job as a public school teacher is so fraught, it feels like a battleground: Violence threatens her and her students every day. Nya’s relationship with her ex-husband is strained at best as they argue about what’s the best way out of this cycle of failure for their 18-year-old son, Omari (Namir Smallwood). Communications with Omari are at a breaking point after he’s expelled from his private high school for attacking a racist teacher. And Nya is also struggling, just to get through each day. 

Pipeline is relentless in illustrating the impact of systemic racism on young Black men and those who love them. But it also has plenty of humor, from Nya’s colleagues at the school and from Omari’s ridiculous girlfriend, Jasmine (Heather Velazquez). The play raises many more questions than it answers; but more important, it urges the audience to seek solutions. 

Nat Turner in Jerusalem, American Players Theatre

Another one of APT’s “Out of the Woods” play reading series, Nathan Alan Davis’s Nat Turner in Jerusalem was an ideal choice for a virtual performance, since it focused on three characters created by two actors; La Shawn Banks played the jailed and condemned leader of an 1831 uprising of enslaved people, and Nate Burger played both the prisoner’s guard and a lawyer named Thomas Gray, who was hoping for a juicy, eleventh-hour confession that he could include in a tell-all book, to be published after Turner’s execution. Directed by Gavin Lawrence, the somewhat static play was aided by a cappella men’s voices providing interstitial music and pen-and-ink drawings that brutally illustrated the context of the story.

In the wrong hands this could have been a talky play about a crazed preacher who heard voices telling him to lead a bloody insurrection against slave owners that ultimately killed 65 people. But Banks drew a deeply spiritual, intelligent, measured and complex picture of Turner, who wields most of the power in the conversations the night before his hanging. Burger’s characters have a long way to travel emotionally over the course of the night — they are both fascinated and frustrated with Turner. Men from very different backgrounds who desperately want to understand the prisoner’s actions are left only with his prophecy: “This country will cease its injustice or it will fall to ruin.”

Best thing to happen in 2020, hands down: Hamilton (Available on Disney+)

It’s no secret that I am a Hamilton super fan and worshipper at the altar of Lin-Manuel Miranda. I saw this incredible show the night after it opened on Broadway (with the original and largely unknown cast, at the time) before the cast album was out, before the internet knew about it, and before it became a phenomenon. Since then, I’ve seen it once in Chicago and twice on tour. I’ve read the Hamiltome cover to cover. I know the songs by heart. I own several LMM-designed T-shirts. I have lived and breathed the show since it debuted. 

So yes, I was excited to see a filmed version of the musical, and doubly excited that it was being released online early, due to the pandemic. And I think it was actually helpful to see quite a few low-quality recordings of performances before soaking up the brilliance and joy that was the filmed Hamilton, because I could appreciate how hard their task was and how well they accomplished it. The camera work was simply extraordinary. Instead of sanitizing the experience or flattening it, the movie version actually allows audiences to appreciate the production in greater depth and detail. 

While there are plenty of “big picture” shots to remind us of the scale of the production and the unbelievable choreography by Andy Blankenbuehler, there are also camera angles from upstage, and zooms on the amazing chorus of dancers, with plenty of moves we may have missed the first time. 

Shot at the end of the original cast’s year-long contract, it’s also fascinating to see and hear how performances evolved over time. This is not the Hamilton gang lip synching to the soundtrack. It’s them reinventing their characters for every performance and letting us in on what the show looked like on one specific night. 

The other obviously awesome thing about the Hamilton movie is how accessible it is. Yes, it’s on Disney+ and there is a cost for that, but it erased geographical barriers. Now people in Butte, Montana, and Big Spring, Texas, and Crabapple Cove, Maine, all had the opportunity to see one of the greatest Broadway shows of all time. The fact that sales of the cast album soared in July meant a lot of people new to the show did just that — and that’s thrilling to me.  

Best one-person show: tie

Fleabag, written and performed by Phoebe Waller-Bridge

(no longer available online, formerly https://www.amazon.com/adlp/fleabagforcharity )

Millions of people have fallen in love with Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s slightly off-center, horny, and damaged titular character in two seasons of the BBC series “Fleabag.” But before there was a hot priest, a full cast, or a big budget, there was simply an actress trying her hand at writing a ten-minute play. Waller-Bridge developed her initial idea into a 75-minute, one-woman show that she performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2013 to great acclaim and some wringing of hands at all the frank, female sexual content. In 2019, after the TV series wrapped and before she cleaned up at every awards show on both sides of the Atlantic, Waller-Bridge went back to the character’s roots and performed the original script solo once again, in sold-out runs in London and New York. 

As a writer, it’s fascinating to see the evolution of characters and story as Fleabag was translated from one medium to another. But as an audience member the play is a revelation about just how talented Waller-Bridge is. With only a chair and a spotlight accompanying her onstage, her physical comedy skills are on full display, as is her ability to mime dozens of props and assume a generous handful of distinct characters in between narrating directly to the audience. There are plot twists and relationships not included in the TV show; some relationships are simpler, some are more complex. But even if you’ve never seen an episode, you will laugh loudly and often at Waller-Bridge’s antics and you will occasionally be shocked – by how much you feel and how large a story one woman can tell.

Sea Wall, written by Simon Stephens, performed by Andrew Scott

Available from https://www.seawallandrewscott.com/buy-sea-wall-film-starring-andrew-scott/ (streaming from $5). 

“There’s a hole running through the center of my story, through the center of me. You can see it, can’t you?” 

Shortly before the pandemic hit, Tom Sturridge was performing this monologue on Broadway, packaged with another one person play called A Life, featuring Jake Gyllenhaal. They both got stunning reviews and I’m sure Mr. Sturridge was great, but the piece was written specifically for Andrew Scott. As part of an odd commission, Stephens was tasked with creating a 30-minute play for one actor, that could only use natural light. The result was a story about a father who struggles with a sudden death in his family, and the fact that he could see the event unfold, but was so far away he could do nothing to intervene. 

Now you may have been intrigued by Andrew Scott’s devious Moriarty in the BBC’s “Sherlock.” You may have lusted after him in “Fleabag” as the charming, rough around the edges, hot priest. (No judgment.) But you’ve never seen him like this; simultaneously poetic and raw, introspective and incredulous, fascinated with all that is both broken and beautiful. It is a delicate tour de force that will split you open and while I envy everyone who had the good fortune to see it live, I treasure the simply shot film version so we can see the “hole running through” the main character too. It is staggering.

Best locally produced virtual holiday show: This Wonderful Life, American Players Theatre

Created wholly by core company member Nate Burger and longtime APT director William Brown, This Wonderful Life was a pure (online) delight. In this stage version, we are led through the streets of Bedford Falls by the most enthusiastic fan of It’s a Wonderful Life that there has ever been. He doesn’t just know the film, he feels it. He revels in it. He actually re-lives it as he plays all the characters in each scene. And he’s also thought about it — frequently stepping out of character to comment on the filmmaking, the setting, the characters, and the storyline of the original. 

So why watch someone act out parts of one of the greatest movies of all time, instead of just watching the film? Because as the narrator, Burger’s unbridled enthusiasm for the piece was infectious. He made the funny parts funnier. He also made the poignant moments somehow more heartfelt. His conversation between George and his father, proposing that the son take over the family business after college, was even more wrenching than the original, perhaps because all the other elements of the scene were stripped away. The performance was a triumph and the story was nothing short of a holiday miracle.

Best pivot into virtual programming by a professional theater: The Old Vic, London

As we all know, the performing arts have been in a free-fall for nine months, due to COVID and the ban on public gatherings. In response, some theaters have shut their doors. Some have panicked and hurriedly posted low quality archival performances online. Some have hosted non-stop Zoom readings. Then there’s London’s Old Vic and their In Camera series. 

Under the artistic direction of Matthew Warchus, the 200+ year old theater invested immediately in multi-camera broadcasting of live performances of small cast plays. Created with socially-distant blocking and expert editing, notable actors turned their focus upstage for their performances, with rows of empty theater seats receding into the background. The work looks and feels extraordinary.

Each of the In Camera shows allows thousands of people from all over the world to log in and attend the virtual performance in real time. With a mix of new work, classics, and seasonal chestnuts the Old Vic has consistently captured the playgoing experience better than any other company I’ve seen. Recordings of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer and Stephen Beresford’s Three Kings, starring Andrew Scott will be available to view in January. Don’t miss them.

Best Broadway show, recorded in front of an audience: Indecent

BroadwayHD (https://www.broadwayhd.com/movies/AW2GuE0wpx3F9_4Aqevt )

I have already praised this Paula Vogel musical about a traveling group of Jewish actors performing the scandalous play God of Vengeance, both in Europe and America, from the 1920s through the 1940s. Presented in a small, flexible space, with a modest budget, the production by Music Theater of Madison took my breath away earlier this year. For those who missed it, (or would like to revisit the stunning story) there is an excellent filmed version of the Broadway cast, performing at the Cort Theatre in 2017. With exquisite production values and award-winning actors in front of a packed house of 1,000, the New York production feels, rightly, like it’s executed on a very different scale. But the story’s core is exactly the same. It is haunting and harrowing and beautiful, and the tragedy of the true story it’s based on is palpable.

Best pirated Broadway show recording: Spring Awakening, Deaf West

This groundbreaking production got a lot of attention when it transferred to Broadway in 2015. A complete re-imagination of the original version, this Spring Awakening included deaf and hearing actors who signed the entire show in ASL, sometimes splitting roles, while the musicians performed onstage and were often part of the action. In this gorgeous musical about the chasm between generations and a wrenching lack of communication that proves fatal for several struggling youth, juxtaposing the hearing and deaf worlds gives the story another dimension. The cast features award-winning actress Ali Stroker, along with the ridiculously talented Deaf West company, who bring an additional layer of storytelling to an already beautiful show. (The recording on YouTube isn’t perfect, but it was sanctioned by the theater. Viewers are invited to make a donation to Deaf West after they view the show.)