Best Playhouse/Theater

Wandering among three performance spaces, staging shows only in the deadest weeks of winter and summer and bravely believing that good scripts acted well would be enough to draw a paying audience, the Actors Theatre of Kansas City demonstrated this year, in its third season, that it's no fluke. Full-bodied shows such as Brian Friel's Translations and Ronald Harwood's Taking Sides matched muscular storytelling to brainy ideas, never falling too far toward one side or the other. Then, in eccentric, angular evenings of theater like Alan Bennett and Samuel Beckett one-acts, or Desdemona (Paula Vogel's serrated response to Othello), the Actors Theatre invested the goodwill it had earned to push its subscriber base further still. Only season closer A Lesson From Aloes failed to achieve excellence, and in that case it wasn't hard to see that the fault lay in the play itself, not the strong production. Nobody in town has staged so many strong shows in a row. As the Actors Theatre preps for year four, this promising former rookie of a theater is now batting at a hall-of-fame pace.

Source: The Pitch

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