Arts & Entertainment: Theater

BEST ACTOR

Jack Holloway

Holloway has only recently started his professional career, but in three plays for Stageworks he showed himself to be a hugely talented character actor. His best work was in Lanford Wilson's Talley's Folly, where he played Matt Friedman, a courtly, self-deprecating Jewish accountant devoted, in the year 1944, to romancing the overcautious Gentile, Sally Talley. But he was also terrific in Arthur Miller's All My Sons as mercurial George, oscillating between love and hatred of the Keller family; and in The True History of Coca-Cola in Mexico, where he played everything from a conquistador to an old, tired farmer about to be moved off his land.

BEST ACTRESS

Katherine Tanner

American Stage gave Tanner a terrific part a few months ago, and the result was a performance that will linger in the mind for years. Tanner was Catherine in David Auburn's Proof, a play about the daughter of a famous mathematician, and about her troubled inheritance -- of her father's genius and, perhaps, his madness. Tanner took this complex part and didn't miss a contradictory detail: She was brilliant, impulsive, angry, sarcastic, subject to depression, worried for her mental health, funny, compassionate, irritable and tender.

BEST PLAY

The Chairs, Stageworks and Gorilla Theatre

"The theme of the play," said Ionesco of The Chairs, "is nothingness." And in one important regard he was certainly right. The Chairs is about the nothingness of the theater: of the impossible act of communicating past the footlights, and the impossibility of having the audience communicate back. An Old Man and Old Woman welcome a crowd to a performance; but the crowd is made up of imaginary figures, and the Orator who finally speaks can only mumble gibberish and write nonsense. As directed by Anna Brennen on R. T. Williams' cubist-inspired set, Richard Coppinger, Midge Mamatas and Adam Belvo were nothing short of brilliant. This was difficult theater, intellectual and uncompromising, taking a postmodern stance to the very end of its logic. Nothing on Tampa Bay stages last year was anywhere near as provocative.

BEST DIRECTOR

Anna Brennen

For years, Brennen has shown herself to have a sharp understanding of the psychology of characters in realistic dramas. But last season she directed not only the realist All My Sons and Talley's Folly, but also the absurdist The Chairs, and in each case her work was intelligent and truthful. In All My Sons, she choreographed 10 characters so ably that Arthur Miller's moral parable unfolded with riveting efficiency. In Talley's Folly she managed to make an underplotted duet hold an audience's attention for an hour and a half. And in The Chairs she demonstrated a mind-blowing, microscopic command of wacky detail. Brennen's well-known for her prickly personality, but she ought to be known for something else too -- as a deeply talented theater artist.

BEST COSTUME DESIGNER

Amy J. Cianci

Cianci is an inspired designer, with a perfectionist's eye for detail and a range that reaches from realism to surrealism. Her costumes for Anna in the Tropics at American Stage placed us in Ybor City of the 1920's, among the workers at a cigar factory whose lives are changed by the hiring of a handsome "lector." For Bill Leavengood's Crossing the Bay -- a story set in the 19th-century Tampa Bay area -- she dressed the wealthy characters in colorful togs befitting their social stratum; and in the comic Golf With Alan Shepard, again at American Stage, she outfitted four eccentric golfers and a fully suited astronaut. Finally, in Proof, Cianci brought us the typically unfashionable denizens of a college town and the better-dressed older sister who comes for a visit from out of town.

BEST SET DESIGNER

R. T. Williams

R. T. Williams is one of the best things that ever happened to Stageworks. Years of unimpressive environments finally came to an end when he became Stageworks' set designer, and from the day he signed on, he's never been second best. For Arthur Miller's All My Sons, he gave us a super-realistic backyard area in an upper-middle-class neighborhood, featuring the Keller family's back porch, a picnic table and a tree damaged by lightning. For Lanford Wilson's Talley's Folly, Williams' set featured a boathouse, a long wooden walkway and even a workable rowboat. And for Eugene Ionesco's The Chairs, Williams solved the problem of Gorilla Theatre's shallow stage with a backdrop of lopsided doors and windows and variously-sized triangles -- absurdism in three shades of gray. Bravo, Williams! We only wish you'd gotten here sooner.

BEST THEATER COMPANY

Stageworks

Stageworks keeps getting better and better. Its most noticeable defect in recent years -- the lack of quality set designers -- has been solved with the work of R. T. Williams and T. J. Ecenia, and Anna Brennen's programming has increasingly featured the best of Off-Broadway, regional theater and the world stage. Last year's lineup was deeply satisfying: Every production was top-notch in directing, acting and design, and happily, there were no silly crowd-pleasers for "balance."

BEST ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

Judith Lisi

The Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center continues to be the most important, wide-ranging theater organization in our area, and the irreplaceable Judith Lisi continues to keep the joint a-jumpin'. Some highlights from last season: the operas Madama Butterfly and Aida; the visit of luminous soprano Jessye Norman; Shawn McConneloug's music/dance/theater piece Stand On Your Man; Leonard Nimoy's tribute to Van Gogh, Vincent; The Acting Company's production of Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona; Steve Solomon's comedy My Mother's Italian, My Father's Jewish and I'm in Therapy; and the wonderfully funny Broadway musical Hairspray. Add Lisi's wisdom in providing a home for the increasingly important Jobsite Theater and her sponsorship of the Patel Conservatory, and you've got a bunch of reasons to be glad she's here.

BEST PERFORMANCE EVENT

Bash, Hat Trick Theatre

The stage at the Silver Meteor Gallery was tiny, the lighting was crude, the air conditioner too noisy; and still Neil LaBute's Bash was a sensation, offering three disturbing one-acts, one of which was as terrifying as any Greek tragedy. This ultra-disturbing play was called "Medea Redux," and was the story of a 13-year-old girl (April Bender) who comes to believe that her junior high school teacher is trying to seduce her. Suspicion gives way to reality, then betrayal, then finally horror -- and suddenly we share an almost unbearable knowledge with the ancient Greeks who, for a moment, we may understand. The other two plays, "Iphegenia in Orem" and "A Gaggle of Saints" were also intense, but oh that "Medea" -- oh the pity! Oh the terror!

BEST PLAYWRIGHT

Bill Leavengood

This last year we've seen a boomlet in works by area playwrights: Sean Sanczel's The Big Finish, Neal Gobioff and Shawn Paonessa's March of the Kitefliers, T. Scott Wooten's Mr. Wooten's Big Night and Aubrey Hampton's Christmas Gremlins. But the best work by a local playwright wasn't produced here at all; it was shown up in New York at the Sanford Meisner Theatre. This was St. Petersburg scribe Bill Leavengood's Little Mary, about an adolescent virgin who finds herself pregnant with seven fetuses. As a cardinal and an archbishop battle over Mary's religious status, Leavengood asks us to think about the overpopulation of the earth, and the responsibilities it places on individuals -- and religious institutions. Leavengood's writing is muscular and efficient, and his handling of intellectual debate is impressive. This year, no one else did it better.

BEST COMEBACK PERFORMANCE

Joanna Sycz, Many Mansions

Five years ago, young actress Joanna Sycz was so formidable in Stageworks' The Cripple of Inishmaan that she looked to be a great new talent in local theater. In fact, Sycz's riveting portrayal got her picked as Best Actress in the Planet's Best of the Bay 2000. Well, five years passed; and again and again Sycz's later performances seemed weak and wrongheaded in comparison with Inishmaan. Until, that is, earlier this summer, when she amazed local audiences in Fresh! Live! Theatre!'s Many Mansions. In Mansions, Sycz was amazingly articulate, intellectual, romantic, skeptical, independent and indomitable. With her ever-so-slight British accent and her remarkable facility with lengthy speeches, she seemed the perfect actress for the plays of George Bernard Shaw, or of any playwright who makes great verbal demands. Now we know Sycz's secret: she excels in plays of language. In any case: welcome back, Joanna.

BEST HILARIOUS THEATER PRODUCTION

The Complete History of America (abridged), Jobsite Theater

If ever a comedy was fit for a theater company, The Complete History of America (abridged) was fit for those wild, kinetic folks at Jobsite Theater. This was satire at its best: pointed, silly, intellectual, moronic, almost scholarly in its scope and often politically incorrect. Acted by gifted comics David Jenkins, Shawn Paonessa and Jason Vaughan Evans, History featured one inspired sketch after the next, from an argument between Amerigo Vespucci and his wife over his failings as a mapmaker, to the rearrangement of Spiro Agnew's name so that it read "Grow a Penis." There was also the slur concerning Great American Women Trading Cards ("Collect all three"), the Dr. Seuss hallucination, some nasty jabs at Ronald Reagan, and a Boston Cream Pie. Diagnosis: delirious. Could make a stone laugh.

mark.leib@weeklyplanet.com