Best Theater For Drama

What made Coconut Grove Playhouse stand out this season is the same phenomenon that made the birth of the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup a hit -- the pairing of two things that normally don't go together. In this case two kinds of theater: the big-name, high-profile stars and full-scale productions the mainstage puts on, and the more intimate and diverse productions found in the Encore Room. This season each produced an outstanding show: Art and A Bicycle Country. Yasmina Reza's award-winning Art took satire beyond the limits of comedy into the hilarious drama of the human heart and its feckless sidekick, ego. The excellent acting and superb script transformed the Playhouse's mainstage into a blank canvas redolent with the gradations of comedy and drama essential to interesting theater. Cuban-American playwright Nilo Cruz made his Miami debut of A Bicycle Country, and the Encore turned out to be the perfect space for three balseros adrift at sea. The Encore's theater-in-the-round staging for the set heightened the sense of confinement, especially in the second half of the play, when the stage becomes a makeshift raft. (Set designer Steve Lambert used a hydraulic system to rock the stage as if it were on water in a subtle yet effective visual device.) While the playhouse has been teaming up its mainstage and Encore Room for at least a decade now, this season hit an especially winning combination.