The Top 10 Everything of 2008

There's something a little too pat about the posthumous praise being lavished on Sarah Kane, the controversial British playwright who killed herself at age 28. This, the earliest of her four completed plays (now having its first New York production in SoHo), begins as a raw but relatively familiar hotel-room encounter between a middle-aged journalist and his young former lover. But it quickly descends into an apocalyptic nightmare, featuring acts of brutality as shocking as anything ever put on stage. That doesn't necessarily make it good, but Kane was a fearless, original voice, impossible to ignore.