1 DANCING AT LUGHNASA (Broadway).
The best ensemble cast since Nicholas Nickleby, performing the most elegant and rueful memory play since Broadway Bound, if not The Glass Menagerie. In a weary and mutually tolerant Irish family of five sisters and a brother, playwright Brian Friel finds a whole world, pagan and Christian, ancient and modern, savage and sedate. Through a lifetime of theatergoing, one would be lucky to see acting any better than this.
2. LOST IN YONKERS (Broadway).
A superb tragicomedy in which Neil Simon unflinchingly revisits the time in his childhood when he and his brother had to live as humbled supplicants among richer relatives (an episode more sentimentally imagined in his 1983 Brighton Beach Memoirs). In Grandma Kurnitz (Irene Worth), Simon brilliantly plumbs the sadistic soul of stoic, rugged individualism.
3. MISS SAIGON (Broadway).
Musical storytelling gets no better than this tragic tale of lovers divided by the end of the Vietnam war and, more deeply, by the economic gulf between the U.S. and the Third World. As a Vietnamese hustler and would-be American, Britain's Jonathan Pryce gave the performance of the year in a reprise of his West End triumph.
4. THE SECRET GARDEN (Broadway).
Sweet and sentimental and, yes, a little slow, this adaptation of a beloved children's book is gorgeous and Freudianly evocative to look at, melodic and poignant to hear, innocent and hugely satisfying in its emotional climax. The only worthwhile American musical of 1991.
5. FORGIVING TYPHOID MARY (George Street Playhouse, New Brunswick, N.J.).
This true story of the woman who unwittingly spread a lethal epidemic lifted documentary into poetry. Mark St. Germain's play, part fevered memory, part aborted repentance, was hauntingly staged by artistic director Gregory S. Hurst on a painterly landscape blending hospital confines with the lonely beauty of the dunes. As Mary, Estelle Parsons blazed in denial.
6. UNIDENTIFIED HUMAN REMAINS AND THE TRUE NATURE OF LOVE (off-Broadway).
An MTV drama -- quick, affectless riffs and crosscuts of action in an ambisexual world of AIDS, serial killers and arrestingly etched violence. Playwright Brad Fraser's theme was the anomie that makes it easier to couple in the dark than to voice one's feelings. His underlying mantra: "Everybody lies."
7. THE OLD BOY/THE SNOW BALL (off-Broadway/Huntington Theater, Boston).
A.R. Gurney has moved from lacerating the Wasp world he came from (The Dining Room, The Middle Ages) to exploring his own guilts in this pair of pieces about the disquiets and discontents of his generation. The Old Boy laments unthinking bigotry toward homosexuals. The Snow Ball yearns for bygone male authority and apparent female contentment with it.
8. WHEN WE DEAD AWAKEN (Harvard and Houston).
Ibsen might not have recognized his valedictory in Robert Wilson's visually spectacular and verbally stripped-down version. But this directorial coup of the year reinforced Wilson's nonpareil standing as a sculptor of stage space.
9. FROM THE MISSISSIPPI DELTA (off-Broadway).