Here then is this year’s very diverse list of From the Ledge ten best stage productions, comprised of eight full length plays, an opera, a staged reading of a play, and a ten-minute short play performed within a collection of short plays. They all demonstrate why Chicago is not just a regional, or a North American, but a global capital for the arts.

1. Our Town (the Hypocrites) – David Cromer, both directing and performing as the Stage Manager, breathed unexpected life into a play that had ignobly borne the reputation of cobwebby chestnut over the years, proving that amidst all that misconception, was one of the truly original, resonant, emotionally affecting pieces of American drama. His knockout conceptual staging of Act III ferociously defied expectations, and deposited the shell-shocked audience somewhere south of Antartica.  New York audiences will see this production off-Broadway in 2009, and they are in for another Chicago surprise.

2. The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of Edward the Second, King of England, with the Tragic Fall of Proud Mortimer (Chicago Shakespeare) – The Hypocrites’ Artistic Director, Sean Graney, on the other hand, was rambunctiously taking down the elegant rafters at Navy Pier with a balls-out, bitch-slapping, absolutely riveting version of Christopher Marlowe’s sixteenth-century classic staged with the actors in the middle of a milling walkabout audience, the theatrical equivalent of being in an Ultimate Fighting ring. Jeffrey Carlson, as Edward, and especially the jaw-dropping Karen Aldridge as Isabella, led a cast that stunningly balanced control of the text, their performances, and the crowd’s stunned heavy breathing. And I’m sure Judd Apatow would be shuddering at the thought that a mass of twentysomethings would proclaim Christopher Marlowe “awesome!” (actual quote heard after a performance).

3. Caroline, Or Change (Court Theater) – It’s very rare to have the privilege of seeing a perfect play, and the Court Theater’s version was one of those unique times. Everything came together beautifully, from Charlie Newell’s strong-handed direction, to Doug Peck’s perfectly calibrated musical staging, to a pitch-perfect (both literally and figuratively) ensemble cast anchored by a legendary performance from E. Faye Butler. When she sang, no, lived, the eleven o’clock number, “Lot’s Wife”, you were left speechlessly reaching for your neighbor’s oxygen tank. If you were at the last performance of the show, you’d be battling it out for that tank with playwright Tony Kushner and composer Jeannine Tesori, who attended that performance and were as moved as everyone else in the room, the ultimate honor for this one-of-a-kind production.

4. Titus Andronicus (Court Theater) – Charlie Newell was on a roll, since he started 2008 with this truly innovative take on Shakespeare’s tragedy, set during an initiation rite for students of an exclusive male prep school. It was a from-far-left-field conceptual take which infuriated purists, such as some of my theater-savvy friends, but which I thought was refreshing, courageous, and totally apt for material that ultimately made pungent points about class warfare, elitism, and entitlement. Its young, hip, uber-sexy male cast also proved that the phrase ”talented Shakespearian actor” could elicit visions, not just of Stacy Keach, but also of Robert Pattinson.

5. A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Chicago Shakespeare, World’s Stage Series) – British director Tim Supple has been touring the world with this beautifully-devised, powerfully-staged, highly-theatrical version of one of the best-known Shakespearian comedies of all time. Performed in seven languages, English and six from the polyglot Indian subcontinent, without any projected subtitles, this colorful, hypnotic Midsummer clearly demonstrated the universal joy of live theater, and it’s ability to cross, and overcome, cultural divides.

6. Gatz (Elevator Repair Company at the MCA Stage) – It was seven hours in physical time, but a nanosecond in theatrical impact time. Chicago was fortunate to see The Elevator Repair Company‘s acclaimed adaptation/reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s seminal novel, The Great Gatsby, a production that still cannot be produced in New York due to rights and licensing issues with the Fitzgerald estate. Gatz held Chicago’s most battle-scarred, been-there-done-that, jaded theatergoers enthralled and entranced throughout its running time, proving that text is king, and that the best theater is evoked, takes root, and truly lives in the imagination.

7. Speech and Debate (American Theater Company) – On the surface, Stephen Karam’s play about three marginalized high school students forming a Speech and Debate club, seemed like the equivalent of Facebook for the theater: of-the-moment, quip-filled, ADD-paced, smartly caustic. But its well-etched out themes of alienation, loneliness, friendship, and longing for human touch were timeless, not just for adolescents, but for everyone. And Sadieh Rifai as Diwata, the zany, hectoring, absolutely heart-breaking lifeline of the production, was one of the brightest stars of a Chicago theater season full of acting supernovas.

8. The Laramie Project reading (About Face Theater) – In a one night only event to commemorate the tenth year anniversary of Matthew Shepherd‘s death , About Face theater, revitalized by its new Artistic Director, Bonnie Metzgar, reminded us that theater was ultimately about community. This simple but powerfully moving staged reading of The Laramie Project, directed by co-creator Leigh Fondakowski, and with co-creator Kelly Simpkins and Tony winner Deanna Dunagan as part of the cast, was theater as memory and as tribute, but it also ably demonstrated theater’s ability to bond people together.

9. Don Giovanni (Chicago Opera Theater) – Opera is very close to theater as an artistic medium, so I feel very comfortable including one on my top ten list. And this sexy Don Giovanni was opera that subverted normal preconceptions about a night at the opera. Set in a, ahem, S and M sex club, a setting that was not just showy conceptual, but felt totally apt and organic for this opera, with its themes around sexual powerplays, this production was fresh, out-of-the-box thinking. And which proudly card-carrying gay guy wouldn’t be enamored of seeing something on stage that had lots of leather-clad sopranos and tenors singing arias while perched on a stripper pole? Fabulous!

10. “Cowboy Birthday Party” (Collaboraction) and The Mysterious Elephant and the Terrible Tragedy of the Unlikely Addington Twins…who kill him (Strange Tree Group) – Emily Schwartz is one of the Chicago playwrights whose career I am very excited about after seeing these two works.  The first one was a 10 minute play that was part of this year’s Sketchbook about, well, a surreal cowboy’s birthday party, while the other one was a full-length play that had music, wacky characters, and a textured Edward Gorey-like visual look. “Cowboy” was compact and muscular, while Mysterious Elephant was messy and outrageous, but fascinating. Both demonstrated a young playwright’s surprising creativity and boundless imagination.

Steppenwolf Theater opens its 33rd season with Frank Galati’s new adaptation of Haruki Murukami’s incandescent novel Kafka on the Shore (September 18-November 16), which I read a couple of years ago and loved.  It’s a beautiful novel of memory, wish fulfillment, and mastery of one’s destiny – I am very excited to see how Galati translates Murukami’s poetic and haunting images to the stage.  I really liked his last adaptation of a Murukami work, After the Quake, which also premiered at the Steppenwolf a couple of years ago, but which unfortunately received mixed reviews.  It’s either you get Murukami or you don’t, and Galati is a superb interpreter.  Kafka on the Shore also marks the return to Chicago of the excellent ensemble member Francis Guinan after his acclaimed Broadway performance in August:  Osage County.

Some of the most brilliant, blistering, jaw-dropping live performances this fall will be seen at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s performance series.  I think the selections are particularly strong, and in my opinion, should atone for the atrocity the MCA foisted on Chicago audiences last year, Societas Raffaello Sanzio’s Euro-trash corn, Hey Girl!  Renowned African choreographer Hedy Maalem, who works mostly in France, is presenting his unique take on Stravinski’s Le Sacre du Pritemps (The Rite of Spring), running from October 17-19, which has already been well-received at the Spoleto Festival this year.  Maalem has assembled an eclectic group of dancers from West Africa, and given them a dance piece meant to evoke the time he spent in Lagos, Nigeria and his reflections on the cross-cultural clashes and search for identity, set to Stravinsky’s classical masterwork, and incorporating multi-media and film.  My other MCA performance pick is something that will be unrivalled by anything you’ll ever see in Chicago this year:  the acclaimed New York experimental theater group Elevator Repair Company’s Gatz, a seven and a half hour performance that has a full reading (yes, reading, as in read by an actor with a book in hand) of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby at its center.  Yes, I’ll be giving up seven and a half hours of my life, hours that could have been spent on a variety of activities such as napping, playing mahjongg, reading Perez Hilton’s blog, and getting a Brazilian wax, but hey, Gatz could be a once in a lifetime experience (as many of the reviews have pointed out) or the theatrical equivalent of waterboarding. I gotta take risks sometimes! Gatz will be playing from November 14-16.

The Court Theater production that everyone is buzzing about is the season opener, the long-delayed Chicago premiere of Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change, currently in previews, but the one play I am eagerly anticipating is Anne Bogart and the SITI company’s Shakespearian take, Radio Macbeth, which marks the cutting-edge New York theater group’s return to Chicago after presenting Hotel Cassiopeia, also at the Court, a couple of years ago. Radio Macbeth, which was shown at the Public Theater’s extremely bleeding (not just cutting)-edge Under the Radar Festival in 2007, is about a group of actors rehearsing the Scottish play who gradually realize that they are being haunted by ghosts of the play’s performers from long past.  Oh, and it’s staged as a radio drama!  Lovely.

The savvy Lyric Opera is aggressively pushing the traditional operas Manon and Madama Butterfly, as well as the Gershwin musical Porgy and Bess in its promotional materials, knowing full well that these would be the ones that would naturally appeal to it’s uhmm, mature, audience.  But for me, the one opera this season that could possibly bring in the new audiences that the Lyric craves and leave us, uhmm, less mature, operagoers, breathless, is Alban Berg’s Lulu, directed by the on-the-ascent Scottish director Paul Curran.  The story of Lulu constantly lends itself to highly stylized concepts (think Pabst’s silent film with Louise Brooks or even Chicago’s own Silent Theater Company’s recent production), so I’m really excited to see what Curran is going to do with the piece- will it be hip, over-the-top, eye-poppingly innovative?  It’s a new Lyric production, so we’ll have to wait until November 7 when it opens (it runs till November 30) to find out.

After his stunning re-imagining of Our Town at the Hypocrites last spring (which is also being remounted this fall), even if OBIE-winner David Cromer is directing the gutting of a three-flat, I’ll be buying a ticket.  He is directing a couple of plays in Chicago this season, but the one I am most intrigued by is the Chicago premiere of Itamar Moses’s Celebrity Row at the American Theater Company, which deals with issues around homeland security, and its impact on individual rights and liberties.  It should be quite the provocative theatrical experience! Celebrity Row runs from October 16-November 9.

Fresh off its Tony Awards win as Best Regional Theater, the Chicago Shakespeare Company raises the bar for all theater groups in the city by putting together a season full of many shows you won’t be able to see anywhere else.  Sean Graney, who is currently wowing the city with his mezmerizing production of Brecht’s The Three Penny Opera, will direct a production of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, staged promenade-style, with limited seats available for those who want to see the play seated (which is an absolute necessity at Chicago Shakes, since the number of canes, walkers, and artificial hips at any given performance there rivals the Lyric Opera).  Jeffrey Carlson, who I saw in the original Broadway production of Edward Albee’s The Goat or Who Is Sylvia?, is playing the petulant, delusional, super gay lead character.  I am sure this Edward II, which runs from October 1 to November 9, is going to be explosive.  The other Chicago Shakespeare entry I am very much looking forward to is British director Tim Supple’s Indian subcontinent-set A Midsummer Night’s Dream which has already dazzled Europe, India, Australia, and Canada.  It is supposedly quite the unique experience, clarifying and deepening Shakespeare’s text with its use of seven languages (including Tamil and Sanskrit), Bengali music, circus acrobatics, and a dash of Bollywood fervor.  Anyone who calls themselves a theater lover but fails to see this production I will personally banish to theater cluelessness-land (or Wrigley Field).  See this Midsummer from November 25-December 7.

Bonnie Metzgar opens her first season as About Face Theater Artistic Director with a bang:  she is bringing to Chicago for the first time the acclaimed New York theater performance artist, self-described “pastiche artist”, Taylor Mac, who has been sighted performing raunchy, politically-charged songs in drag while strumming a ukulele, in a full-length piece called The Young Ladies of.  According to Mac’s website, this piece about his soldier-father, “bridges the gap between masculinity and femininity, fathers and sons, and red and blue states.”  I’m there!  The Young Ladies of plays from September 26-October 26.

The Chicago storefront theater scene is always electric but it’ll probably reach it’s blinding apex this fall with TUTA Chicago’s The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, onstage from November 20-December 21.  Messrs Piatt and Vire at TimeOut Chicago have already selected this as the one to watch this season in their Fall Preview issue, and I couldn’t agree more.  Director Zeljko Djukich is supposedly focusing on the violence and cruelty, and not the romance and frilly adolescent antics of this Shakespearian classic, which will probably make this less Baz Luhrmann and more Ivo von Hove…terrific!

Serendipity started Second Story in May 2002 initially as a two week festival of storytellers and musicians.  Over the past few years, it has evolved into monthly readings, with the two week festival in the spring as centerpiece of the program.  It’s usually held at the second floor event space of Webster Wine Bar, but it has since expanded to include evenings at Red Kiva in the West Loop (which is actually an apt venue, in my mind, since the circular aspect of the kiva-like design of the lounge heightens the community experience, sort of a metaphorical sitting around a campfire).  In the course of around two and a half hours, three to four storytellers get up in front of the group and tell (or more appropriate read) their tale, which roughly lasts from 15-20 minutes each.  In between the storytelling sets, a musical guest performs and the audience orders more wine and cocktails and exchanges stories of their own (the Second Story name doesn’t really refer to the Webster Wine Bar space, which is what I initially thought, but rather to the stories that we, attendees of the event-who have been moved, provoked, reminded, inspired by the storytellers-tell each other after we hear their stories read out loud).  In last week’s event, I actually thought the stories were just ok, except for the first one, told in a really riveting style by the storyteller, about how her 30^th birthday played out like a noir movie.  Of the three stories told that night, I thought that this was the one that had the clearest point of view, the best narrative structure, and the most interesting writing.  But I think more than the stories themselves, Second Story is so memorable and quite a gem in the Chicago arts scene, because of the audience experience.  The audience cheered, laughed, hooted, clapped, and viscerally reacted throughout the readings which both gave the storytellers some more mojo and passion and made their readings more lively and engaging, and the writing more immediately resonant.  But they also paid attention and let their silences matter.  More than a play, more than a sporting event, more than a concert, the audience is so much a part of the act of storytelling.  For me, it was really gratifying to see so many people involved and keenly interested in an art form and a communications vehicle that seems to be on its way to extinction.  Tom and I didn’t get a chance to tell or hear “second stories” in between the storytelling sets, since we were busily and hungrily looking out for a pizza that the kitchen and the Red Kiva waitboys preoccupied with next day’s gym workout, seemed to have only vaguely remembered that we ordered (but that’s a story for another day).   However, I will be back for another round at Second Story to hear more stories both on stage and in the audience, to experience the thrill of community, to help keep an ancient art stay alive in times when short and sweet, faster and faster, do-it-yourself, abbreviations and summarizations define the way we live.  Those folks sitting around a fire eons ago had quite a good thing going!

The 2008 Second Story Festival runs from April 24 to May 8 at the second story of Webster Wine Bar, 1480 Webster Ave. Preview events are scheduled on April 13 and April 20, also at Webster. The Red Kiva series starts up again in June.  Check out the website for the full schedule and all the other events (Looptopia, Literally Sexy at the Victory Gardens) that the storytellers will be reading at.

Keith Huff’s A Steady Rain is simply staged- two characters sitting at or moving around a table talking about events in their lives as Chicago cops.  But no one really needs more than a table and chairs (and in this instance, even these seem extraneous) when you have writing this vivid and sharp, characters this real, and acting this mind-blowingly great.  Randy Steinmeyer and Peter DeFaria start off as bantering, boorish, aggressive Chicago cops that seem familiar from a re-run of “Hill Street Blues” on Nick at Nite.  But over the course of ninety, mesmerizing minutes, they transform into these fascinating, tragic character studies grappling with questions of morality, loyalty and betrayal, self-definition, quality of judgment, flawed natures.  Some can criticize that part of Huff’s writing is not that fresh (I’m perplexed by the use of the Jeffrey Dahmer serial killer events as the catalyst for one of the moral dilemmas, for instance) but I think overall the story is so riveting, the dialogue is so pointedly honest, and the psychological themes (what drives a police officer’s decision-making process?  Why is there a perception among those that are tasked to protect and dispense the law that they are above the law?  What is the nature of male friendship and bonds?) so intriguing, that, in the larger scheme of things, the weaknesses of the script are mere nits.   And with acting this magnificent, these nits disappear.  I haven’t been so transfixed- mouth open, eyes wide, fists clenched, heart pumping- by a performance on a Chicago stage as I was on Saturday with Randy Steinmeyer since Deanna Dunagan’s historic turn in Steppenwolf’s August:  Osage County last summer.  Steinmeyer’s intensity pummels you, but his honesty touches you deep down in your own dark places.  In one scene, Steinmeyer, as Denny, angrily and boldly recounts how he took his injured son to Illinois Masonic using his police squad car, a clear violation of the rules which he feels he had a right to do in order to save his son’s life, and without missing a beat in his belligerent tone and with his strong jaw still proudly set, tears suddenly come gushing down his cheeks.  I think the entire Royal George theater wanted to give him a standing ovation right at that point of the play.  DeFaria (whom I admired in TUTA’s Huddersfield a couple of years ago) matches Steinmeyer’s game word for word, beat for beat, sweat bead for sweat bead.  At the end of the show, the thunderous standing ovation that these guys received was one of the most well-deserved I had seen in this Chicago theater season.

There wasn’t any thunderous anything at William Yang’s Shadows, part of the MCA Chicago’s performance series.  Thunderous would have been out of place in this theatrical event given the precise, mellifluous rhythmic patterns of the piece, brought about by the confluence of Yang’s placid speaking style, the ethereal original musical score performed live by composer Colin Offord using indigenous Australian instruments, and the simple, untheatrical photographs that Yang took and which he uses to tell his various stories.  Yang tells his stories simply and directly, accompanied by Offord’s haunting music- stories about an extended aboriginal family that he gets to know very well; or about traveling through New South Wales and learning about the history of German immigrants in that part of Australia; or about visiting Berlin in the early 2000s and comparing its thriving, modern, capitalistic vibrancy with the drab East Berlin he visited in 1981.  The stories are all independent of one another, but as Yang tells them and moves fluidly through them, one is struck by the overarching theme of dealing with the past – either by reconciling with it, making up for it, obscuring it, or letting it determine the course of future opportunities and decisions.  Shadows demands attention and post-performance reflection, it is not an easy work to digest- reactions to the work cannot be immediate or visceral (given the nature of the work, I was surprised, and heartened, by the healthy size of the audience during the Sunday performance).  Yang is an expert storyteller, and as such he does not explicitly present judgments- the audience is challenged to ponder the stories told and come to their own conclusions.  One thing I came away with from this piece is the thought that we can never truly make up for the injustices and atrocities of the past, that true “reconciliation” with our history is not possible.  Yang relates the Australian government’s official apology to the indigenous tribes publicly given earlier this year, but minutes before that he shows us the socially disadvantaged, meandering, poverty-stricken lifestyle of the aboriginal family, a direct result of the colonial policy of the British in Australia.  It’s a powerful counterpoint – today’s Australian government can apologize all it wants, but the historical, unrelenting marginalization of the aborigines have intrinsically affected this group’s ability to live the good life that the regular Australian citizen enjoys.  In the Berlin story, Yang relates going to the Jewish museum in Berlin and being struck by the incongruity of having a Jewish museum in Germany but also by the limited material devoted to the Holocaust, as if the museum’s curators saw it “as just one other event in the history of Jewish persecution”.  It’s an important line in Shadows, because it drives home the point that acknowledgement of the heinous deeds of the past can never be reparation for it.

Chris Jones is the biggest advocate for A Steady Rain- read his incessant raving.  A Steady Rain runs at the Royal George Theatre, 1641 N. Halsted st., until April 27.  Please run and see it before we export it out to vast points unknown.  William Yang has already moved to Boston and the rest of his US tour.  The two-night Chicago stint was definitely not enough.

“The performances themselves are a bit all over the map, but all very “avant-garde.” The short descriptions would go like this: Opera Cabal is staging a chamber opera; Asylum is free jazz; Sonic Inertia is dance with live music; dal niente is a bit more traditional concert-music; Nonsense Company is theater; Third Coast Percussion Quartet is…well…a percussion quartet; and Phyllis Chen plays toy piano with live video accompaniments. Each day offers a totally different lineup of shows surrounding the centerpiece of the opera.”

And the opera is about what again? It’s a chamber piece that “charts the unlikely account of eleven thousand virgins on a sacred journey of death”…. Sounds like fun time for all. I’ll be there! Check out the Opera Cabal blog for more information.

One of my favorite storefront theatres in Chicago, GreasyJoan & Co., is holding a benefit on Friday, October 26, called “boo.scream.thump in the night” at the textartspace gallery in the Fulton Market district. Art, food, drinks, and actors reading ghost stories – not your typical weekender.