Peter Marks’s best theater of 2011

Of all the Top 10 lists I’ve assembled over the years, compiling this year’s drove me the craziest. That’s how strong 2011 has been for Washington theater — the best, in fact, in my decade of steady theatergoing in the region. As a result, some productions that might have easily topped the list in other years could not even be included on this one. I offer my congratulations and regrets to some that barely missed my cut — namely, the Kennedy Center’s “Follies,” Folger Theatre’s “Othello,” Studio Theatre’s “Penelope,” Shakespeare Theatre Company’s “Old Times” and “Krapp’s Last Tape,” Arena Stage’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” Theater J’s “The Chosen” and Forum Theatre’s “Mad Forest.” — Peter Marks

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10. “The Heir Apparent,” Shakespeare Theatre

A thoroughgoing delight from the cheeky laptop of David Ives. Performed in a priceless cavalcade of rhymed couplets, Ives’s rowdy adaptation of an early 18th-century comedy by Jean-Francois Regnard was the year’s funniest play. That it had sophisticated patrons of Shakespeare Theatre Company in stitches suggests that as inspirations for humor go, the bathroom remains the most uproarious room in the house.

Scott Suchman / Scott Suchman

9. “Photograph 51,” Theater J

Here’s a wonderful example of what you might call Washington theater’s greenhouse effect: Anna Ziegler’s sharp play about British DNA researcher Rosalind Franklin received a vital early staging by tiny Active Cultures theater in Prince George’s County, then moved up to a lively Theater J production, directed by Daniella Topol. Let’s hope for more such examples of far-sighted cooperative breeding.

Stan Barouh / Stan Barouh

8. “A Bright New Boise,” Woolly Mammoth

Howard Shalwitz, Woolly Mammoth’s artistic director, has a thing for plays forecasting and/or imagining the end of the world. This one, written by Samuel D. Hunter and directed by John Vreeke, is by a wide margin the best one he’s ever decided to produce. Michael Russotto, portraying a man hollowed out by life and aching to understand why, was simply superb as its agonized protagonist.

Tracy A. Woodward / The Washington Post

7. “Ruined,” Arena Stage

Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about the suffering of Congolese women caught in the chaotic crossfire of armed conflict received even more vibrant and affecting treatment at Arena Stage, under Charles Randolph-Wright’s direction, than it had in its fine original incarnation in New York.

Astrid Riecken / For The Washington Post

6. "Return to Haifa," Theater J

The remarkable play by Boaz Gaon that the Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv delivered to Theater J may have been more noteworthy for its conciliatory outlook on relations between Palestinians and Israelis than for the potency of the staging. But it emerged as a document of enormous symbolic importance; the D.C. Jewish Community Center deserves nothing but praise for welcoming it.

Stan Barouh / Stan Barouh

5. “King Lear,” Synetic Theater

Synetic Theater continues to startle with its wordless investigations of Shakespeare. For “Lear,” director Paata Tsikurishvili conjured a Fellini-esque world filled with bombed-out buildings and grotesque clowns, and the effect was breathtaking.

Graeme B. Shaw / Graeme B. Shaw

4. "Trouble in Mind," Arena Stage

Bravo to Arena Stage for recruiting director Irene Lewis and her trenchant illumination of Alice Childress’s 1955 comedy-drama about the tense racial divide in the cast of an unwittingly humiliating Broadway-bound play. And an extra huzzah to the ensemble that performed it with such dexterity.

Richard Anderson / Photo © Richard Anderson

3. "Black Watch," National Theatre of Scotland at the Shakespeare Theatre

Shakespeare Theatre Company has become a net importer of brilliance, as evidenced by its presentation of the National Theatre of Scotland’s imaginatively enthralling story of a Scottish regiment dispatched to Iraq — the best play to have emerged as yet about the incursions into Iraq and Afghanistan.

Manuel Harlan / Manuel Harlan

2. “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” Woolly Mammoth

Woe unto you if you missed Mike Daisey’s captivating, consciousness-raising monologue at Woolly Mammoth Theatre about Apple’s irresistible product lines and the inhumane Chinese assembly lines on which they are manufactured.

Joan Marcus / Associated Press

1. “Uncle Vanya,” Sydney Theatre Company at the Kennedy Center

Cate Blanchett and her Sydney Theatre Company swooped into the Kennedy Center with a version of Chekhov’s plaintive portrait of rural Russian life that had the mesmerizing power to stun an audience out of complacency over the classics and transform one’s view of a masterpiece.

Lisa Tomasetti / The Kennedy Center

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