A tie is a terrible thing, but there was simply no way that either of these performances couldn't win. Todd Allen Durkin is a veteran actor who, year after year, blows minds in theaters across Florida. He has won every award known to man, save for a Tony, a Nobel, and a Darwin. And in this spring's Blasted, he turned in a performance that made everything he has ever done before look like amateur hour. As a sociopath journalist/soldier, he was a man seemingly incapable of feeling, but he turned his cold placidity to pain without seeming to try. Later, when he was degraded beyond all measure — when he is lying next to a dead baby in a hole in the floor of a bombed hotel room, newly eyeless and recently raped — he bellowed for redemption, and it was a sound that haunted your car ride home. As the sensitive yet surly — and more than a little deranged — young protagonist of Equus, David Hemphill delivered the year's most surprising and most career-making performance. Nobody had played Alan Strang better. In the play's long and wrenching final scene, Hemphill was more naked on the stage than any actor we've seen — and his lack of clothing was the least of it.