Play it safe? Not here

It was a year of taking risks.

In Los Angeles, theaters tested (and tested) the boundaries of audience appetite for the avant-garde. CalArts’ Center for New Theater made a splashy debut with its nearly four-hour production of “King Lear,” directed by Travis Preston and starring an all-female cast. The $450,000 production had been slated to take place at Walt Disney Concert Hall amid the construction of the REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater) space that will serve as home to the Center for New Theater. But conflicts sent the production to a 30,000-square-foot warehouse in the hip Brewery Arts Complex in downtown L.A.

Across town, David Sefton created a season of bold, daring productions with UCLA’s first International Theatre Festival. Among the offerings were Italy’s Societas Raffaello Sanzio, with the surreal horrors of “Genesi” and the solemn hallucinatory “Giulio Cesare”; Heiner Goebbels’ quirky Beach Boy-infused “Hashirigaki”; and Compagnie du Hanneton’s “The Junebug Symphony,” with its violin-playing roller-blader.

Some smaller venues continued to embrace issue plays, intentionally goading audiences and challenging them to become more than just passive observers.

Actors’ Gang imported the post-Sept. 11 play “The Guys” with a rotating cast of celebrities, as well as the anti-death-penalty play “The Exonerated,” which earned the playwrights an Ovation Award and is now playing to sellout crowds off-Broadway in New York. And the Evidence Room brought on more of its signature cutting-edge theater with David Edgar’s epic “Pentecost,” as well as a series of biting world premiere plays about Tinsel Town -- “Hot Property” by Justin Tanner, “Hollywood Burning” by Michael Sargent, and “Cringe” by Peter J. Nieves.

A few shows tested their mettle here with pre-Broadway tryouts: “Into the Woods” played to enthusiastic audiences at the Ahmanson and “Imaginary Friends” premiered at San Diego’s Old Globe.

A number of new small companies quickly made their mark, among them the Chautauqua Theatre Alliance, which opened quietly with Ray Proscia’s “Imitating Sam,” and later joined forces with Taylor Negron and Justin Tanner for a revival of Negron and Lawrence Justice’s 1993 “Gangster Planet.” Six youthful newcomers to L.A. burst onto the scene as the Furious Theatre Company, staging U.S. premieres of “Saturday Night at the Palace” and “Noise” at their space at the Armory Center in Pasadena. And a group of stage and screen veterans, including Mary McDonnell, Randle Mell and Max Mayer, launched a West Coast version of the long-established New York Stage & Film theater company and called it -- what else? -- L.A. Stage & Film.

Several names familiar to Southern California audiences weighed in this year, among them Neil Simon, who updated his 1965 “Odd Couple” for a Geffen Playhouse production of “Oscar and Felix,” and Richard Greenberg with “The Violet Hour,” written to inaugurate South Coast Repertory’s new Julianne Argyros Stage. These new or revised works gave audiences a taste of something fresh without being too jarring.

Did the year’s risks pay off? Financially, not always. Creatively, sometimes. The real payoff came in exposing audiences to new adventures in theater.

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Theater reviewers’ notable shows of 2002

So many productions, so little time. For this year’s list, The Times’ 10 primary reviewers were asked to choose their favorite shows and assess why they thought each was noteworthy. Of course, because of the volume of productions that went up in the past year, no one person could see more than just a small slice of the offerings. So we acknowledge that this consensus list is by no means scientific. And yes, there are 11 shows on our top 10 list -- there was a tie. Here’s the list, in alphabetical order:

After the Fall, Fountain Theatre. Arthur Miller’s deeply personal, rarely produced play benefited from Stephen Sachs’ insightful staging. Powering the production were two of the year’s best performances: Tracy Middendorf’s heartbreaking disintegration as the Marilyn Monroe character and Morlan Higgins’ portrayal of the guy who’s powerless to prevent it from happening.

Big Love, Pacific Resident Theatre. Love and independence, in their myriad forms, were indelibly presented in Mel Shapiro’s staging of a Charles L. Mee play that turned a dusty Greek drama into a bracingly contemporary comedy. And you have to admire any production that makes such great use of overripe tomatoes, wedding gowns, splattered blood and white wrestling mats.

Big River, Deaf West Theater at the Mark Taper Forum. A genuine watershed event, this electrifying “Huckleberry Finn” musical fused American Sign Language with show-business savvy to unforgettable effect. Jeff Calhoun’s staging ingenuity combined with an extraordinarily talented cast of hearing and deaf actors made this show one of the most moving productions of the year.

Crossings, Cornerstone Theater Company. In the refreshing, emotionally direct “Crossings,” Cornerstone tackled the subject of the immigration of Catholic cultures to Los Angeles. The cracked and peeling St. Vibiana’s provided a mournfully beautiful backdrop for these stories, presented in areas as varied as the church rooftop and the inner sanctuary. Using representatives from immigrant populations as well as professional actors, Cornerstone created a series of magical, resonant moments about life in both L.A. and the greater world.

Into the Woods, Ahmanson Theatre. For this pre-Broadway presentation, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine cleverly reworked their witty, fairy-tale musical, in part by giving it more of a storybook feel amid lush, colorful sets. And the cow. Bringing the cow to life gave new life to this revival.

Marcel Marceau, Geffen Playhouse. What can you say about a mime? If it’s Marcel Marceau, quite a bit. Even at 79, this still-life master artist proved that age is only a state of mind as he unforgettably transformed a bare stage into poignant, nostalgic, comedic and even epic universes of silent movement. His appearance at the Geffen represented not just the chance to see a great mime, but the acknowledged greatest mime in the world.

Nickel and Dimed, Mark Taper Forum. How often do we see the working poor represented on L.A. stages? Yes, the guilt factor may have weighed in for the Taper audiences, but the characters’ struggles were presented in a style that maintained a sense of humor even as it brought home their sense of desperation.

Side Show, Colony Theatre. Nick DeGruccio’s staging delicately revealed this unusual musical’s themes of family, career and learning to be comfortable with being different. The show was impeccably sung and acted, particularly by Misty Cotton and Julie Dixon Jackson as Siamese twins Violet and Daisy Hilton.

Times Like These, Padua Playwrights at 2100 Square Feet. John O’Keefe’s harrowing drama about star-crossed lovers pulverized in the mechanism of Hitler’s Germany offered dual statements on the extremes of love and hate. Loosely based on a little-known tragedy of the Holocaust, the two-character play captured a moment in history to agonizing effect.

Trainspotting, Seat of Your Pants Productions at Theatre/Theater. This unflinching stage adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s novel of Edinburgh heroin addiction was in-your-face theater, literally. This was theater-in-the-raw -- nudity, violence, profanity, body fluids. Under Roger Mathey’s masterful guidance, the marriage of poetry, violence and scabrous humor was absolute, with the authentically unintelligible ensemble committed to their marrow.

War Music, Playwrights’ Arena and Echo Theater Company at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. Bryan Davidson deftly examined three situations in which war and music intermingled, and director Jessica Kubzansky created a dreamy production one would expect to see at a much larger and better endowed theater.

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Disappointments

The biggest disappointment of the year? It was a tie:

Follies, Reprise! Broadway’s Best at Wadsworth Theater. Even given the concert format limitations, Stephen Sondheim’s 1971 musical was woefully mishandled and ultimately infuriating. Between Arthur Allan Seidelman’s non-direction and some staggeringly poor casting, the show resembled outtakes from various STAGE benefits over the years -- only far less entertaining.

The House of Bernarda Alba, Mark Taper Forum. Chay Yew’s adaptation infused urgency and passion into Federico Garcia Lorca’s dark drama of repression and obsession, but Lisa Peterson’s stiff, stylized staging leached all of that urgency and passion back out.