John Keats in noble verses praised
The buzz he got from Chapman’s Homer;
We’ll start off, if more humbly phrased,
With local genius David Cromer,

Whose Streetcar, with Natasha Lowe,
And Stoltz, and Matt, was very good;
Who in a feat of rare brio,
Led forty-nine in Cherrywood.

Directors had a banner year:
Up north, Kim Senior staged one heck of
A Pillowman, replete with fear,
Then rushed to Strawdog for her Chekhov.

Ron OJ Parson brought us Fugard,
The Old Settler, Home’s lyric ache;
Staging the Ring might seem too hard
for most, but not Joanie and Blake,

While Tina Landau made us swoon
With Brother/Sister’s fever dream in
Three parts, and, as tragic Ogun,
the incandescent K. Todd Freeman.
Bob Falls had an unseasonable spring
With the garish, awful Johnstown Flood.
Could he still make productions sing?
The Seagull proved, indeed, he could.

The classics yielded fertile ground,
As TUTA resurrected Brecht,
Its Baal a vision of one drowned
In turpitude, by verses wrecked,
While bourgeois life and house repair

Were deftly skewered in The Wedding:
As Hager sang, Trey Maclin’s Herr
Saw glumly where his life was heading.

We got a different drunken night
Across the street from Vicki Quade
When Letts and Morton wove a tight,
Taut take on Albee’s Who’s Afraid?

New work abounded: Pavement Group
Put up in Steppenwolf’s Garage
punkplay by Gregory Moss, a coup
That mixed critique with fond homage;

While Steep U.S. premiered H. Regan,
With Kendra Thulin in the lead;
Its playwright Stephens seemed no vegan,
Carving the marrow of Harper’s need.

Thank TimeLine that at last we might
Give Frost/Nixon an eager look:
A sharp production bared its bite
In Terry Hamilton’s “No crook!”

Re: local playwrights, we were cheered
By the toothsome work of Laura Jacqmin,
Whose dentist play was sanely weird
In a year more tuned to Michelle Bachmann.

It wasn’t Tea alone that gave
The year at times a dismal shade:
Whether the DCA can save
The theater programs that have made

Chicago shine we’ve yet to see,
While up in Evanston they learned
The consequence of piracy:
To dust Next’s Haifa has returned.

Dark spots aside, two-oh-ten had
More riches than a list can tell:
A sprightly all-girl Iliad;
The debut of Detroit’s dark spell;

The Four of Us, quite quick and witty;
The Hypocrites ’ doom-haunted K.;
The time bomb of That Pretty Pretty;
Tom Stoppard’s nifty Night and Day.

And all the artists: Brenda Barrie,
Matt Kahler, Rebekah Ward-Hays,
Sean Fortunato, Brian Parry,
Allen Gilmore, Halena Kays,

So many more. Chicago’s great!
A veritable drama heaven,
The record shows. So let’s not wait;
Into two thousand and eleven!

John Beer writes about theatre at Time Out Chicago.