Photo By Sandy Underwood

Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati offered a powerful tale about justice and dignity in its January-February production of A Lesson Before Dying.

Covering Cincinnati's theater scene, I have a better than average chance to experience moments that bring me back to the theater again and again -- live actors, just a few feet away, evoking powerful emotional responses from audiences, be it laughter, fear, tears or awe. During 2004 there were many such moments.

In Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati's production of A Lesson Before Dying (1/28-2/15), Malik El-Amin started as a horrifying angry child in a man's body, full of tension and blank stares, acting as vilely as everyone expected him to be. He played the "hog" an attorney branded him, getting down on all fours and wolfing food. But a dedicated teacher played by Demond Robertson turns him into "the bravest man in the room" when he faced his unjust execution. These two actors connected and disconnected, bearing witness the fragile tissue of humanity being stretched and strengthened. It was an honest, natural and totally human performance.

Two other actors -- Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival company members Jeremy Dubin and Chris Guthrie -- acted on a bare stage for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (2/19-3/14), Tom Stoppard's play about the existential dismay of two minor characters from Shakespeare's Hamlet. They struggled to understand what their future held. Guthrie, a subtle comic actor with a rubbery face, was a childish clown as Rosencrantz, conveying an optimistic, naive presence, often trying to cheer his dour companion. Dubin's Guildenstern came from the pessimistic end of the spectrum, a bemused cynic with a dry double take, who fears he's going "stark raving sane." The practiced choreography of intellect and emotion between them was a kind of literary "who's on first" routine, as good as any I saw onstage in 2004.

A more violent exchange of emotion was the climax of the Cincinnati Playhouse's Hiding Behind Comets (3/25-4/18), 2004's New Play Prize winner, a searing story about a fierce stranger who totally disrupts a brother and sister managing a bar in Oregon. Or is it the other way around? This Shelterhouse show used powerful acting to tell this ugly tale, one that shook audiences and made them feel both sick and alive.

That attachment to life was the theme of a memorable piece from last May's Cincinnati Fringe Festival, The Pursuit of Happiness, staged by BlueForms Theatre Group from Columbus, a group recently cited by American Theatre magazine as one of the nation's hot young companies. Pursuit, while billed as theater, could just as easily have been categorized as spoken word or dance, blending elements of all three. The 95-minute piece offered cultural commentary, looking at phenomena that occupy our daily lives -- lots of perspectives on television and shopping, in particular -- and how we move through existence mindlessly. However, it never became propagandistic or tedious; its joyous, affirmative conclusion advised listeners to take charge of their lives and feel things more fully."

It wasn't hard to feel things fully at the Cincinnati Playhouse when former artistic director Worth Gardner returned to stage Sing Hallelujah (5/15-6/20). From the show's first moment onstage with five harmonizing Gospel voices was pure electricity, commencing about eight notches above the energy most shows attain after two hours. In fact, the show's first act generated a genuine standing ovation just before intermission, something I've hardly ever seen. It was no small coincidence that during the run of this show the Playhouse learned it was the recipient of the 2005 Regional Theatre Tony Award, something that had everyone singing "hallelujah."

On a lower key, William Finn's collection of songs, Elegies (10/21-23) was a powerful performance at UC's College-Conservatory of Music, directed by Aubrey Berg. Despite the title, Finn's collection of songs he wrote "to not forget," remembering people who have passed on. But by no means is it simply gut-wrenching sorrow. In fact, as ably conveyed by a cast of five at CCM's Cohen Family Studio Theater, the mood was almost celebratory. Elegies circle out from friends and family (especially his mother) to the larger world (a sadly shocking pair of tunes about 9/11), moving from public expressions of grief to moments that are personal and intimate -- and ultimately uplifting.

At midsummer ETC offered two June performances of Jean Genet's The Maids (6/23, 6/26) while the Cincinnati Opera presented its own version of the story of two servants who murdered their mistress. ETC offered an intense, well-clarified staged reading, with the characters played by men, including Todd Almond (to be remembered at ETC as Hedwig in Hedwig and the Angry Inch) and who returns in 2005 as the sole actor in the Tony Award-winning I Am My Own Wife. Although seen by small audiences, Almond's performance with Sam Womelsdorf and Bruce Cromer was searing and memorable, the kind of provocative theater seldom staged in Cincinnati.

While it didn't set your imagination afire, Ovation Theatre Company's offering of summer froth with Noel Coward's daffy comedy, Fallen Angels (7/30-8/7), might have provided the year's comic highlight. Two friends, played by Corinne Mohlenhoff and Sunshine Cappelletti, with their sexual tension aroused to manic levels. In particular, when they dine while awaiting the arrival of a former (and mutual) lover, they get drunker and drunker, sillier and sillier, and more and more jealous of one another. The two channeled the best of comic pairs, like Lucy and Ethel or Laverne and Shirley, keeping audiences in stitches.

Much more sobering was ETC's The Exonerated (9/8-26), although it might have been easy to fret that 10 actors who almost never rose from their seats could not engage an audience. But that never happened: Six death-row prisoners' stories ebbed and flowed with a devastating cumulative effect. But the real wonder of this show is that The Exonerated was no downer. The characters, released and returned to life (having lost large chunks of their lives, served sentences ranging from two to 22 years), each came back with guarded optimism, certainly unjustified by the hand they've been dealt. But humanly reassuring.

A different sort of chemistry characterized A Picasso (9/30-10/24), presented at the Playhouse's Shelterhouse Theatre (and set for Off Broadway production by the Manhattan Theater Club next year). In 1941 Paris the famed but enigmatic painter is interrogated by a mysterious female Gestapo agent, who it turns out, is an art scholar and admirer of his work. It was a tight 85 minutes -- played in one, real-time scene -- that gripped audiences from the opening moment. As the clock ticks and she tries to get the artist to acknowledge which of three works is original, it's what CityBeat critic Tom McElfresh "a schizophrenic dance from persona to persona." That makes for great theater, the kind I'll be seeking more of in 2005.