Best of '90: Theater

Cobb Playwright Lee Blessing sees in the spikes-flying style of baseball's Ty Cobb not only the professionalization of an amiable amateur game but also the emergence of an aggressive American Century. He made that thesis work on regional stages without overburdening the life story of a hero detested by his teammates.

Falsettoland The conclusion of composer-lyricist William Finn's brilliant minimalist trilogy about a man's struggle for sexual identity blends the same style of daffy Manhattan humor (about nouvelle kosher cuisine, opulent bar mitzvah parties and "the lesbians from next door") with the newfound and baffling pain of AIDS.

Hamlet In the year's finest U.S. classical revival, at San Diego's Old Globe, Campbell Scott was a revelation -- most memorably when he pounded in rage at being murdered just when he had proved, above all to himself, his worthiness to rule.

The Iceman Cometh No one may ever surpass Jason Robards' Hickey, the salesman who descends from periodic benders into coldly lethal nihilism, but in Chicago's Goodman Theater production of O'Neill's epic tragedy, Brian Dennehy was unforgettable too -- a big man crushed into pathos.

Prelude to a Kiss Beneath Craig Lucas' wry Broadway comedy about a magical identity swap is a haunting metaphoric response to AIDS. It asks the unanswerable question: What do you do when the young person you fell in love with becomes overnight a dying old man?

Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll Call Eric Bogosian a performance artist, monologist, short-story writer or even playwright. By whatever name, he is one of the shrewdest contemporary critics of the phony, the self-serving, the amoral and the damned. This off-Broadway collection of skits is a caustic vision of greed and substance abuse.

Six Degrees of Separation Broadway playwright John Guare muses on the saddest fact of urban life -- how close people are physically while they remain economically and psychologically so far apart. He takes the true story of a young man who entered the homes of the privileged by purporting to be Sidney Poitier's son and brings into collision the normally separated lives of some modern Manhattanites, each yearning to know about some distant and romantic way of life that is actually just an acquaintanceship or two away.

Square One Steve Tesich's futuristic off-Broadway satire of life in a totalitarian state seems outdated by history, but the human impulse to impose orthodoxy persists, so this witty and touching work is likely to be topical again all too soon.

Twelfth Night The most imaginative response to the debate over the National Endowment for the Arts was this La Jolla (Calif.) Playhouse staging, which cunningly conceived the priggish functionary Malvolio as a precursor of Senator Jesse Helms. Far from merely polemic, the production was visually the most ravishing at any U.S. theater all year.

Two Trains Running Two-time Pulitzer prizewinner August Wilson continues to develop on regional stages his cycle of black experience in this century. Outwardly, little happens in this slice of life in a Pittsburgh luncheonette in 1968, yet the play subtly re-enacts the era's black political dialectic. The finale is pure serendipity: a petty street crime at once appalling and ennobling, pointless and profound.