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YEAR IN THEATER With a grateful nod to former colleague Brad Rosenstein, we re-inaugurate a system of accolades and nah-ccolades celebrating some memorable highs and lows of the rapidly closing year in theater and performance.

Most Memorable Food Fight

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THEATER The immigrant experience has some familiar familial dynamics across the board. Parents, for instance, can easily discover their Americanized children becoming embarrassed by the older generation's "foreign" ways. Un-hip parents are the bane of any child's existence, but dad walking around the mall in a gallibaya doesn't make it any easier (as hip as that may sound to you or me). Allegiances potentially strain much further, however, when the immigrant story gets entwined with a little narrative called the "war on terror."Read more »

GOLDIES An air of perspiration-inducing mystery attends an appearance by Philip Huang. Something in the playfully relaxed mien of this queer performance artist just whispers loose cannon. A notable short story writer who reinvented himself a few years ago with help from artist friend Khalil Sullivan, Huang now crops up in a variety of contexts — including a steadily expanding parade of YouTube high jinks — but is inclined to épater le bourgeois whatever the occasion. And when fired up he's got an edge like a rotary saw.Read more »

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THEATER A single black armchair center stage and one big fat "Now" projected on the back wall signal our anticipation pretty neatly — of a famous opening line, of the famous actor about to utter it, and in the feeling that it is something more than a history play unfolding here, at this moment, in a city and country thoroughly and unprecedentedly "occupied" with political matters. A big, pungent production of Richard III? Yes, now sounds about right.Read more »

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THEATER The company members onstage had started out just a couple of hours ago in literal harmony, joined in song. Now everyone appears spent, heated, and confused. They wonder what has happened to them. They wonder if they've lost their way; if their extraordinary effort and success over recent years has been worth anything. It's a moment of truth, fraught with personal and collective drama, overshadowed by desperate and tumultuous times. The Group Theatre, arguably the most influential theater in American history, is about to disband.Read more »

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THEATER New plays are usually big selling points for theaters, and they have a certain pizzazz for audiences too, but their power to renew interest in theater is a different matter. The best play seen on a local stage so far this season is not a new play, as it happens, but an old one, with a big name attached and a Pulitzer in tow. But Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance (1966) reminds you why people go to the theater in the first place.Read more »

THEATER Here's a preliminary accounting from the San Francisco Fringe Festival, which remarkably turns the big two-oh this year. (There's a nifty 2012 wall calendar to mark the occasion available somewhere in the Exit Theatre complex, traditional nerve center for the lottery-based festival started by Exit stalwarts Christina Augello and Richard Livingston.)Read more »

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THEATER A sweet, normally placid Southern working-class wifey named Nan Carter (Erin Gilley) — no relation to Jimmy, but oh how for some reason she wishes! — takes revenge on her abusive husband Kyle (Patrick Jones) with the help of two close friends, a roll of duct tape, a fresh deer carcass, and a working knowledge of the dramatic arts in Crowded Fire's world premiere of playwright Lauren Gunderson's light but witty comedy.Read more »