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Stories and characters worked best on a small scale

2011: The year in theater

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

December 25, 2011|By Don Aucoin

Miranda Craigwell, Hampton Fluker, and Natalia Naman in Marcus; Or the…

If ever there was a year to make a theatergoer want to resurrect the old counterculture slogan “Small is beautiful,’’ this was it.

In New York, the bloated, steroidal spectacle known as “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark’’ finally opened. Even though “Spider-Man’’ was large in every way - cost, cast, hype, controversy, calamity, box-office lucre - the musical by Bono and The Edge ultimately spun nothing more than a web of tedium.

By contrast, tiny theaters hereabouts spun gold.

Not always, but often. Enough so that as 2011 draws to a close, a host of productions by small or fringe theater companies in Boston, on the Cape, and in the Berkshires occupy a secure place among the year’s most memorable events. The plays unfolding in these snug venues were often challenging, even daring, while the casts - whose collective salaries probably wouldn’t match Bono’s annual budget for sunglasses - invariably threw themselves into their performances as if the fate of the American theater depended on it.

The bad news is that so few of you - the audience - were there to see them. Too often, many seats were empty; in fact, at a few performances, the critics in the audience seemed to outnumber the civilians. On a couple of levels, that has got to be a discouraging sight for those working hard onstage and behind the scenes.

So a good New Year’s resolution for you theater devotees out there might be to increase the number of shows you see at small or fringe companies in 2012.

Why? Well, apart from the allure of the underdog, there’s this: When the actors are literally in your face (and when you can practically count the pores in theirs), the theatergoing experience has a visceral immediacy not available to you when you’re squinting at the stage from the balcony of a big house or cupping your ear to hear dialogue murmured from far, far away.

There is - almost by definition - no such thing as a bad seat in a small theater. Said seats can often be had for the cost of a few double lattes, and are much more nutritious.

Let’s count a few other reasons you should think small if you’re a curious theatergoer.

1) To hear the voices of important young playwrights.

By any measure, one of the high points of the theater year in Boston was the staging by Company One of “The Brother/Sister Plays,’’ by Tarell Alvin McCraney.

McCraney is all of 31, so in a larger sense he’s just getting started. But this trilogy - “In the Red and Brown Water,’’ “The Brothers Size,’’ and “Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet’’ - is a significant piece of work. Boston audiences needed to see it, and Company One, under the leadership of Shawn LaCount, made sure they did.