The Best Theater of 1994

1. Three Tall Women.

This is Edward Albee's comeback drama: it signals his triumphant return to New ! York theater and to the acclaim that was his 30 years ago. But in this poignant, formally exciting memory play he also comes back to the issue of family, which energized Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Albee faces his demon -- his adoptive mother -- in a dazzling act of exorcism and forgiveness.

2. Love! Valour! Compassion!

Eight gay men on three summer weekends: a simple device for Terrence McNally's elegant meditations on manhood and friendship, maturity and mortality. This witty, generous, intimate epic (in a pristine off-Broadway production directed by Joe Mantello) follows McNally's Lips Together, Teeth Apart and A Perfect Ganesh. By now he has to be rated our most consistently satisfying playwright.

3. As You Like It

Adventurous directors love to bend and spindle Shakespeare to make contemporary points. Declan Donnellan, of Britain's Cheek by Jowl company (on display in Brooklyn this fall), uses the most traditional means -- a bare stage, an all-male cast -- for radical ends. Does cross dressing lead to tatty camp? No, it's an apt way of addressing the crises of eros and identity at the heart of the play, where comic ingenuity escalates into poetic rapture.

4. Broken Glass

She (Amy Irving) is crippled with obsession over Hitler's mistreatment of Jews. He (Ron Rifkin) is a raging, gelded bull. And Arthur Miller, in a scalding play that brought him back to Broadway 50 years after his debut, is still pursuing his theme: that connecting with other people is at once our most destructive and redemptive condition. Brilliant, remorseless drama.

5. Mystere

Broadway isn't the only place for grand spectacle. At the Treasure Island hotel in Las Vegas, that Mecca of excess, the Montreal troupe Cirque du Soleil has created a gorgeously surreal, thrillingly theatrical pageant. Acrobats mingle with Adam and Eve, spaceship Earth and a giant snail in a fantasy of rebirth. It plays like the fever dream of some millennial impresario. Call him Siegfried Roy Webber.

6. Show Boat

Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II put Edna Ferber's panoramic novel onstage in 1927. It keeps on rollin' in Harold Prince's vigorous Broadway version of the old paddlewheel musical. The story still works, the great score is well sung, and Lonette McKee makes for a lustrous, heartbreaking Julie.

7. All in the Timing

Even with a mountaineer's ax stuck in his head, Leon Trotsky (Philip Hoffman) can find nine ways to muse on life and death. And even in a 10-minute sketch, playwright David Ives can find a dozen ways to aerobicize the playgoer's brain. Six pieces in one dazzling off-Broadway evening display Ives' verbal gifts and humanist brooding. These are breathless sprints that the heart makes over the high hurdles of language.

8. Communicating Doors

Play is a verb to Alan Ayckbourn, the consummate games player among modern writers for the theater. This time (in a production that brought his Scarborough company to Chicago) the stage is a time machine, carrying women 20 years forward or backward in their hectic lives. But beneath the formal ingenuity, Ayckbourn finds depth, despair and, finally, redemption. A serious farce from a man who takes comedy into the shadows.