The giddy sophistry of David Mamet's "Romance" (well directed by Neil Pepe, at the Atlantic Theatre Company) is a case in point.
Michael Weller's "Fifty Words" (well directed by Austin Pendleton, at the Lucille Lortel) turns an ordinary marital quarrel into an extraordinary debacle.
"Culture is for living, and art should be about taking part," Lee Hall writes in the introduction to his superb play "The Pitmen Painters" (well directed by Max Roberts, at the National's Cottesloe Theatre, in London).
To the annals of perverse theatrical list-makers we must now add Guy, the successful thirty-something writer in Neil LaBute's "Some Girl(s)" (well directed by Jo Bonney at the Lucille Lortel).
If you want to get high on the fumes of desolation the giddy, furtive, theatrical equivalent of sniffing glue then "The Toxic Avenger" (well directed by John Rando, at New World Stages) is probably goofy enough to get you there.
Where "Wit" depicts a life abandoned to the caprice of illness, Daniel Talbott's "Yosemite" (well directed by Pedro Pascal, at the Rattlestick Playwrights) examines children abandoned to the caprice of their parents.
Bruce Norris's "Clybourne Park," the winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, is getting a deserved lap of honor on Broadway, with its original, excellent, 2010 Off Broadway cast (well directed by Pam MacKinnon, at the Walter Kerr).
The title of Lisa D'Amour's sharp, satisfying comedy "Detroit" (well directed by Anne Kauffman, at Playwrights Horizons) refers not to the city but to the state of collapse that it embodies.
The need for a new kind of story turns out also to be the subtext beneath the Sturm und Drang of Theresa Rebeck's "The Water's Edge" (well directed by Will Frears, at the Second Stage).
Mamet's new Oval Office satire, "November" (well directed by Joe Mantello, at the Ethel Barrymore), is a hilarious demonstration of the fact that we live in an age of equality: all classes are criminal.
