It was a year for comebacks: After last season's financial setback, Famous Door scored a long-run hit with Ghetto, followed by an all-star The Homecoming, to finish out the year with the currently-playing Early And Often. City Lit recovered from its organizational difficulties to re-open in a new space with the imaginatively-crafted Alice In Wonderland. And Raven Theater, evicted from its Rogers Park home, announced its resurrection in spacious new quarters.
What with the closing of the venerable Ivanhoe (special never-say-die awards to Hellcab, Late Nite Catechism and the Free Associates) and the opening of Goodman II, the next season looks to be an adventurous one. In the meantime, some of the highlights of 2000:
1. Police Deaf Near Far, Stage Left Theater -These were not your Jerry's Kids! David Rush's docudrama of a deaf bad-boy activist pulled no punches in its gritty depiction of social alienation, its bilingual cast lending added poignancy to their narrative through its rendering in simultaneous voiced and sign language.
2. Among The Thugs, Next Theater - The ecstasy and the agony of surrender at the soccer games as related by Bill Buford via Tom Szentgyorgyi's elegant adaptation and director Kate Buckley's vigorous direction of a steel-muscled cast. Who knew testosterone could be so intoxicating?
3. Zoot Suit, Goodman Theater - Thirty years after its premiere, Luis Valdez' call for justice still defines its genre with power undiminished by social change. Henry Godinez' direction painted a searing portrait of Pachuco life in a society riddled with racial tension.
4. Pistols For Two, Lifeline Theater - not one, but three Georgette Heyer regency romps dancing daintily between fiction and reality, fiction and fiction, and somewhere 'twixt the two -- all performed by a mere six actors in ninety minutes. Lifeline's resident romantics Christina Calvit and Dorothy Milne have done it again!
5. A Dybbuk, Red Hen Productions - a rigidly orthodox Jewish community in a remote turn-of-the-century village was an unlikely setting for a tale of spectral stalking, but Curt Columbus' cast so immersed us in the lore of this mystical sect that when the ghosts prepared to speak, we listened.
6. The Ballad Hunter, Chicago Dramatists - The Appalachian mountains are America's Avalon, and Jenny Laird's sweet tale of progress triumphing chivalrously over poverty and isolation wove a delicate enchantment under the sensitive direction of Robin Stanton.
7. Slavs, European Repertory Company - The USSR might be an empire in a state of disintegration, but the company assembled by director Yasen Peyankov for Tony Kushner's whirlwind tour was the very definition of integrated ensemble work in both concept and execution.
8. The Cover Of Life, Circle Theater - The boys may have been away fighting Hitler, but the wives they left behind in Huntsville, Louisiana were fomenting their own revolution in R.T. Robinson's showcase for a squadron of virtuoso actresses.
9. Alice In Wonderland, City Lit Theater - Kelly Nespor's adaptation of the classic Victorian fantasy, assisted by a catalogue of low-tech legerdemain, retained all of its surrealistic magic and wonder right down to the grass growing in the aisles.
10. The Duel, European Repertory Company - Frank Galati's briskly efficient script expanded Chekhov's ironic tale of egotistical young lovers into a panoramic picture of fin-de-siecle Russian society at play on the Crimean beaches.