The Top 10 Everything of 2009

Documentary plays, especially those set in distant African countries, too often seem earnest and dutiful. But Lynn Nottage's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, based on her own interviews with women subjected to horrifying abuses during the Congolese civil war, is both illuminating journalism and enormously moving human drama. Set in a brothel where the war's victims and victimizers alike take refuge, the play (which debuted in Chicago and opened off-Broadway last winter) has an old-fashioned multiplicity of characters and storylines, but it is unified by Nottage's keen sense of outrage and compassion.