Curtain calls 2003 standing ovations BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

THE WE WILL NOT STAGE A PLAY BEFORE ITS TIME AD HOC "LETS PUT ON A SHOW!" AWARD

It’s a lot of trouble for a group of actors without a permanent space to put on a production — look at the stutter steps of NewGate Theatre in the years since they lost their space. But First Stage Providence producer Cait Calvo takes her time and waits for the stars and actors and venues to align before nailing up the posters. This year her company, which usually puts on only one play a year, has doubled efforts quite successfully. Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker and Stephen MacDonald’s Not About Heroes both shone. Both are intimate plays with only two or three characters, just the sort of light baggage for an itinerant troupe. Let’s hope First Stage carries on.

THE FAILURE IS NOT ONLY POSSIBLE, IT’S A RUSH AWARD

New plays are a thrill to put together, but are also risky business. That’s why most theaters take them in moderation, like other controlled substances. Perishable Theatre, however, seems to be addicted. But let’s not plan any intervention, even though this year things have gotten out of hand. In addition to the annual Women’s Playwriting Festival, there were Aishah Rahman’s three trenchant one-act wows, and the development and premiere of both the poetical The Long Journey to Whereto, by Oana Maria Cajal, and Cynthia Hopkins’s musical and epistemological exploration, Accidental Nostalgia. All these plays reached far, and most managed to grasp what they went after. We don’t need such plays, of course; we can give them up any time. But let’s hold off on rehab for Perishable for at least a few seasons more.

THE WHO SAYS IRONY IS DEAD? AWARD

How wonderful that Waiting for Godot, by arch atheist Samuel Beckett, was performed so respectfully and thoughtfully at Catholic Providence College, as staged by director Mary G. Farrell. An essay in the program connected the ex-Catholic playwright’s futile search for God(ot) with the foolishness of solipsism instead of, more accurately, with the more credible Existentialism. But the performance itself, in allowing humanity as well as cruelty to shine through, allowed Beckett to make his humanistic case that compassion and clinging together is what saves us.

THE IT’S ABOUT DAMN TIME AWARD, WITH PROZAC CLUSTERS

Finally. A theater around here has gotten around to tapping Trinity veteran Bob Colonna for Willy Loman, the life-trounced Everyman, in Death of a Salesman. He nailed the racing-on-fumes nature of the guy without making him pathetic. Good old 2nd Story Theatre. (In Of Mice and Men, artistic director Ed Shea also nailed the casting by pulling in Marvin Novogrodski as Lenny, in another potent production.) The clusters are for 2nd Story also slam-dunking Betty’s Summer Vacation, by a playwright, Christopher Durang, whom I’ve rarely seen staged in a way that gets at the scary darkness behind the faltering smiles his characters maintain in the face of life’s absurdities.

THE BRAVE DIE YOUNG AWARD, WITH CHILD ACTOR CLUSTERS

Theatre-by-the-Sea is Dead. Long Live Whoever Sets Up Shop on the Grave. The producers wanted to go on to other things, after they’d been in charge for 15 of the theater’s 70 years. So why not stage Chicago while people were still forming lines at Blockbuster for the video, even though audiences would be looking at the dancing through a Catherine Zeta-Jones scrim? And since the producers were giving themselves a hard time for their closing season, they also took on The Secret Garden, which is based on the children’s book and lives or dies on the tricky matter of casting child actors who can carry the show. It was lively indeed, thanks to young Michigan veteran Casey McIntyre as the central character and Tristan Viner-Brown, a student at Wheeler School, who played the shut-in boy.

THE BREATHLESS ANTICIPATION AWARD

Not only Providence but also the American theater world at large was looking forward to the world premiere, at Trinity Repertory Company, of The Long Christmas Ride Home. It was the first play from Brown’s Paula Vogel since winning the Pulitzer for drama five years ago. The wait certainly was worthwhile. Vogel took chances, such as using bunraku-style puppets to complement the acting. Vogel dug down to the dysfunctional-family roots at the base of her How I Learned to Drive, and Trinity’s artistic director Oskar Eustis took it from there.

THE PHOENIX PHOENIX AWARD FOR RISING FROM FINANCIAL ASHES

It made good sense for the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre to take a season off and nurse the wounds left where its money bled out. They reopened in the Pawtucket Armory annex this winter, now calling themselves The Gamm. But we knew earlier that they were in fine shape, when they did Arthur Miller’s The Crucible in September at La Salle Academy. Under the direction of Trinity’s Fred Sullivan Jr., the performances of Anthony Estrella and Jeanine Kane, as the central tormented couple, were subtle and layered.

THE MESSAGE IN AN AMPHORA AWARD

URI Theatre and director Bryna Wortman will have to share this one with Sophocles, for his original Antigone, and Jean Anouilh for his adaptation done in Nazi-occupied France, and Lewis Galantiere for his adaptation of that. What came through was a powerful piece of theater for our time, speaking to the moral ambiguities that accompany moral decisions in any age. In the title role, Courtney Lynne Edge maintained a fraught tension as her fate twisted in the wind of a tyrant’s rage. But the hardest job was accomplished by Sean Michael McConaghy as King Creon, giving empathy and humanity to a character who invites posturing one-dimensionality.

THE PULLING AN AVANT-GARDE CHESTNUT OUT OF THE FIRE AWARD

When Luigi Pirandello wrote Six Characters in Search of an Author back in 1921, dramatized ruminations about individuality and free will were hot stuff but nowadays can fall flatter than yesterday’s soufflé. Brown University Theatre/Sock and Buskin, under the direction of Steve Kidd and Trinity’s Kevin Moriarity, made blue-book answers come alive with such context-apt inventions as a Britney Spears production number, an angry discussion between the playwright and the translator that ends in a wrestling match, and audience participation via cell phones. We couldn’t have had more fun if we learned that the Absurdity of Human Existence has all been a joke.

THE WHO SAYS YOU CAN’T BE IN TWO PLACES AT ONE TIME AWARD

I wish that meant that Casey Seymour Kim were able to be cast at more than one theater’s production at once. But it was fun enough to settle for her contributing to two of the three plays in this year’s Women’s Playwriting Festival at Perishable Theatre. In one she was an office temp, harried to surreal excess in Mary F. Unser’s Temporaria. Her character held on to a banked-fire temper that was hilarious to watch glow and sputter. In Kathryn Walat’s Johnny Hong Kong, she may have perfected her signature exasperation as a stoic mother humoring a zigzagging lightning bolt of a five-year-old. Kim is the most nuanced dramatic comedienne around here, and missing anything she’s in is a sad mistake.