By Robert Avila

WHILE REFLECTING ON this year's theatergoing, just tallying up the sheer number of performances, experiences, images, ideas, and $2 cookies proved overwhelming. I'll speak to an accountant about the cookies. To make things worse, aspects of performances have a tendency, after a while, to dislodge and float around, reordering themselves into what seems sometimes like one big sprawling, synthed-out multimedia horse parade. Unless that was Cavalia.

Even the shows that do stay fixed in the mind's eye can be unusually hard to sum up. Take Denzil J. Meyers's Zippy the Pinhead in Fun: The Concept. I can explain that it came courtesy of a Bill Griffith-blessed production by the Dark Room's Jim Fourniadis and Erin Ohanneson, and featured a sporting cast headed by an uncanny and committed Bryce Byerly in a clown suit and three-day beard. I can also acknowledge that in channeling cartoonist Griffith's particular brand of anti-humor, Zippy produced bouts of hearty laughter and force fields of blank silence – a strangely memorable combination. Beyond that, things would be infinitely easier if I had recourse to an icon-based rating system. Zippy would merit three coffee cups, a bong, and a horse munching a large tablet. In other words, the following desultory thoughts come more from the gut, where that tablet is even now dissolving, than from the head (not to put too fine a point on it).

Much as they did the map of disunited red and blue states, a series of coups and anticlimaxes dotted the year in theater. The first big coup was also the biggest letdown. Talking Heads sang of heaven as a place where nothing ever happens, but have they seen David Mamet's Dr. Faustus? The great American playwright redefined hell in very similar terms for all of us who sat through the world premiere at the Magic Theatre. (To see such an artist fail so thoroughly carried a little frisson of terror, but it lasted, regrettably, only a short time. The next thing you noticed was that the audience, so understandably bubbly on the way in, had started listing in their seats like a room full of blow-up dolls with slow leaks.)

Nevertheless, the premiere was truly a coup for the Magic. Mamet was also directing, and preshow buzz reached a pitch not equaled since the Magic's all-star premiere of Sam Shepherd's The Late Henry Moss in 2000. Striking out in a brand-new direction, however, the master of the short staccato line went boldly headlong into a brier patch of stiffly ornate and artificial language – a brand of English invented for his bluntly philosophical characters who seemingly, by their dress and indefinite surroundings, occupied several centuries at once. Actor David Rasche as Faustus had the worst of it. Struggling most of the way with Mamet's twisting locutions, he resembled not so much the egotistical genius wooed by the devil as a tanned, fair-haired naturalist talked into wearing a 12-foot anaconda for the camera. And it didn't help that Mamet kept the stage as static as a stop sign.

The other theatrical coup of the year went much more smoothly with its updating of the Faustian legend. American Conservatory Theater hosted The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets – a remounting of the 1990 collaboration between avant-garde director Robert Wilson, writer William S. Burroughs, and composer Tom Waits – on its only American stop. Featuring a seductively sympathetic Marianne Faithfull in the devilish title role, it was an inspired homage to German expressionism, in which Burroughs's inimitable noir-inflected night-desk poetry unfolded against Wilson's lavish scenic compositions and a dark carnival ambience fed by Waits's wonderfully fractured melodies, abrasively percussive lines, and craftily romantic lyrics. The atmosphere was fun, and the effects could be startling, though looking back the most impressive aspect of the meticulous production was the perfect blending of sensibilities it demonstrated, without any clash or competition between the three principal agents. Not to mention how wonderful Waits's music sounded as played by the first-rate if highly unconventional orchestra.

But if Satan and the satanic were fashionable onstage this year, among other places, the most compelling exploration of evil was Denis Johnson's Psychos Never Dream, a cannibal picnic laid out over the American flag. His latest collaboration with Campo Santo at Intersection for the Arts, Psychos offered up a sordid backwoods tale, an allegory of the present-day descendants of the pioneers that blazed like moonshine, burning and tickling, surrounding one in a heady and highly flammable ether. Its mix of the macabre and the mundane matched anything by the Coen brothers and Martin Scorsese, while director Darrell Larson's phenomenal four-person cast (John Diehl plus Campo Santo stalwarts Catherine Castellanos, Cully Fredricksen, and Alexis Lezin) brought the playwright's richly imagined characters and incandescent dialogue to life.

Happily, the striking five-year collaboration between Johnson and Campo Santo shows no signs of slowing. In fact, Campo Santo's Open Process series last month featured a reading of Johnson's latest project. Written in verse and structured as a series of furiously funny vignettes that move backward in time, Purvis is ostensibly about the G-man who got John Dillinger, but along the way it brilliantly unfolds a larger tale of individual and state violence tangled together in the roots of America's libertarian and totalitarian tendencies. In Purvis, as elsewhere, Johnson's poetic and prophetic wrestling with American history and the American psyche has a scope and sensibility about it – an anger, an affection and horror, a sureness and grace – that recalls, for example, Robert Lowell's dramatic soundings of American literature in The Old Glory. If you haven't seen any of these remarkable pieces yet, keep an eye out for Purvis.

Campo Santo and Intersection also collaborated this year with Philip Kan Gotanda on Fist of Roses. A remarkable act of collaboration as well as a rewarding departure for Gotanda from the fine narrative dramas he's built his reputation on, this often very powerful dissection of domestic abuse skillfully wove, under Gotanda's direction, Erika Shuch's choreography and Tommy Shepherd's musical accompaniment into a thematically and stylistically diverse set of vignettes converging on specific patterns of male violence. The play also spotlighted one of the year's best ensemble efforts, a terrific five-man cast whose "guy's guy" personae seamlessly gave way to a clever subversion and interrogation of masculinity.

Fist of Roses only hinted at the connections between violence in the domestic sphere and the violence of society as a whole. Meanwhile, the specific problem of runaway militarism and U.S. war-making inspired two very different but very personalized subversions of the military mentality. One was the Riot Group's insouciant, deftly acted send-up of an Army covert assassination mission against a Middle Eastern dictator, Pugilist Specialist. The other was acclaimed director Peter Sellars's For an End to the Judgment of God/Kissing God Goodbye.

The Sellars work may have had an unwieldy title (stitching together a 1947 text by Antonin Artaud and one by June Jordan written about 50 years later), but the hybrid performance piece, which ran briefly at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, proved transfixing in its purity of conception and execution. Two outstanding performances (by Ruth Forman and John Malpede) bridged the dying Artaud's prescient nightmare visions of war and a new American imperialism (in an inspired stroke, Sellars put them into the mouth of a Pentagon spokesperson at an Afghan war press briefing) and the alternative future eloquently and defiantly articulated by Jordan's famous feminist poem.

Political change requires cultural change, and vice versa. That seemed an underlying assumption in many of the year's more "timely" theater offerings. One saw it again in Steppenwolf Theater's extraordinary revival of William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life, coproduced by ACT for its run at the Geary Theater. Director Tina Landau's set, overflowing with the life of the play, expertly drew the audience into Nick's Pacific Street Pub, the setting for the action, and a vital microcosm of American life amid the domestic and international turmoil of 1939. Landau's expanded stage underlined a subtle parallel between the bar and the theater that underscored the latter's importance as a public space – particularly at a time when the public realm is shrinking beneath a ruling corporate ideology and the mantra of privatization. Theater in this sense has a tangible connection to politics. Like Nick's saloon, it not only brings people together, but it also works on their feelings and speaks to their desires while simultaneously opening up new avenues for both.

Cicada, a new play by Sarah McKereghan and Ripe Theater, placed today's left politics at the heart of its cleverly weird and witty story line: two environmentally damaged environmental activists, living underground as a political protest since Inauguration Day 2001, struggled to maintain focus as the world above moved on without them. Politics hermetically sealed off from life will lose its way, and probably its mind, Cicada argued. When the characters rejoined the world of the living, stepping back into the stream of life, something new began, reborn and reawoken for the tasks at hand.

2004 spotlights

Solo acts

Wayne Harris's Train Stories (The Marsh)

Naomi Newman's Fall Down Get Up (Traveling Jewish Theatre)

Mark Lundholm's Addicted (Marines Memorial Theatre)

Brian Copeland's Not a Genuine Black Man (The Marsh)

Dan Hoyle's Circumnavigator (The Marsh)

Josh Kornbluth's Ben Franklin: Unplugged (Magic Theatre)

Shelley Mitchell's Talking with Angels (Project Artaud Theater)

Jeff Greenwald's Strange Travel Suggestions (The Marsh)

Ron Campbell in The Bone Man of Benares (Encore Theater)

Mike Albo's Spray (Theatre Rhinoceros)

Duets

Nina Wise and Corey Fischer's improvisation (Off-Market Theater)

Sara Kraft and Ed Purver in Woods for the Trees (Noh Space)

Joseph Foss and David Skillman in Mooi Street Moves (TheatreFIRST)

Cindy Goldfield and Richard "Scrumbly" Koldewyn in Goldfield and Koldewyn (New Conservatory Theatre Center)

Yuko Kaseki and Shinichi Momo Koga in Ame to Ame (Candy and Rain) (Yerba Buena Center for the Arts)

Rene Augesen and Marco Barricelli in The Real Thing (American Conservatory Theater)

Danny Wolohan and Sean San Jose in Sacrament! (Campo Santo and Intersection for the Arts)

Keith Davis and Karine Koret in Dybbuk (Traveling Jewish Theatre)

Casts

Levee James (American Conservatory Theater)

All My Sons (TheatreWorks)

The Glory of Living (S.F. Playhouse)

Joe Egg (TheatreFIRST)

Betrayal (Aurora Theatre)

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Actors Theatre of San Francisco)

The Smell of the Kill (S.F. Playhouse)

Mooi Street Moves (TheatreFIRST)

King Hedley II (Lorraine Hansberry Theatre)

Leads

Rita Moreno in Master Class (Berkeley Repertory Theatre)

Francis Jue in Red (TheatreWorks)

John Fischer in A Question of Attribution (Theatre Rhinoceros)

John Mercer in Travesties (Shotgun Players)

Matt Leshinskie in The Designated Mourner (Last Planet Theater)

Michael Cheng in The Duel (Central Works)

Revivals

All My Sons (TheatreWorks)

Rush Limbaugh in Night School (The Marsh)

Master Class (Berkeley Repertory Theatre)

High School (Antenna Theater)

Premieres

Alan Bennett's Single Spies (An Englishman Abroad and A Question of Attribution) (Theatre Rhinoceros)

Hanoch Levin's Murder (Second Wind Productions)

Anne Galjour's Okra, (Brava Theater Center)

Scott Sublett and Jef Labes's Bye Bye Bin Laden (Custom Made Theater)

Zora Neale Hurston and Dorothy Waring's Polk County (Berkeley Repertory Theatre)