This award could easily have gone to a dozen other actors from Judas Iscariot, whose characters were as big, bright, and sharply drawn as only a three-hour play with an almost perfect cast can allow. But Lela Elam brought it with an intensity rare even for her (which is saying something), as she played both an eternally grieving mother and Saint Veronica. Her mother bit was moving, subtle, fragile, almost silent, but her Saint Veronica was another thing entirely. Veronica was the driving force of the play — an enactment of a long-overdue trial for Judas Iscariot, begun because Veronica believes Iscariot got a bad rap — and she was entirely credible: a personality of such blazing force that you figure, yeah, she could totally reverse a divine judgment. In a single breath, she was bawdy in an entirely 21st-century, hip-hop kind of way; hilarious; trenchant; and scary. It was a hard part that Elam handled with relish. An actress this good probably has a difficult time finding roles worth sinking her teeth into. Thank heavens for Guirgis.

Betrayed was a play about the Iraqis who dreamed of American rescue long before the War on Terror, who loved the West and studied Emily Brontë and watched English-language porn, who were neither Baathists nor especially religious. They were (little-l) liberals, (little-d) democrats, and arts lovers. In other words, they were people much like Antonio Amadeo, John Manzelli, and Ceci Fernandez, the actors who gave them life in Coral Gables. Watching them work, one could plainly see they felt the moral weight of their task: Their portrayals were dignified but not heroic, trenchant but not sappy. In the play, as in the war, these Anglophiles went to work as translators for the Coalition forces, becoming targets of violence in their own neighborhoods and, as the war went poorly, objects of suspicion in the Green Zone. Many were turned out, and many died. When Fernandez, Manzelli, and Amadeo assumed their roles, they spoke their convictions softly and accepted their fates stoically. It was a fitting memorial to those who didn't make it, and a moment of unexpected fraternity with those who wait to make it still.

Tania deLuzuriaga was mixed up with married school board dude Alberto Carvalho while covering school politics for the Miami Herald. Emails that proved the affair were leaked to the media, and our own Frank Alvarado released them to the public. They documented the sexual nature of deLuzuriaga and Carvalho's relationship and the conflict of interest it created in her reporting. When the news hit, deLuzuriaga was working as a general assignment reporter at the Boston Globe. She resigned amidst the hoopla and now works as a senior account executive at a PR firm in Boston. Whatever happened to Alberto Carvalho? Oh, he became school superintendent for Miami-Dade County. He's a politician, so we already knew he'd screw anybody over for his own benefit, but thanks to bad girl deLuzuriaga, we also know about his sexual proclivities.

He cut off one man's penis and left him for dead in a ditch. He poured molten plastic on another. He tore through Monrovia's trash-strewn dirt roads in a custom-made SUV with his despotic "Demon Forces" security team, beheading, shooting, and maiming anyone he wished.

Charles "Chuckie" Taylor Jr. was born in Boston and grew up in suburban Orlando, but in the end turned out to be cut from the same cloth as his dad, Liberian dictator Charles Taylor. And when Chuckie Taylor Jr.'s four-year reign of terror in his father's homeland ended in 2003, he tried to hide from justice in the United States, as so many other foreign war criminals had done before him.

Thanks to a Miami jury and an untested federal law, he failed. In January, Taylor became the first person convicted under a 1994 law prohibiting Americans from torturing abroad. He earned 97 years in prison for his crimes — and his conviction brought hope that someday warlords might stop looking to plush Miami waterfront homes as a safe haven to hide from their sins.

Joseph Adler is a big personality with a big voice, big hair, and a big heart. So Adding Machine must have been quite a trick for him. The musical, composed in 2008 by Joshua Schmidt and written by Schmidt and Jason Loewith, is a modernist horror story based on Elmer Rice's nearly forgotten 1927 play The Adding Machine. Its story follows the spiritual decay of a man who loses his job to a machine, just when he is on the verge of turning into a machine himself. The show is meant to summon the feel of an early 20th-century industrial utopia gone awry — a world of smokestacks and conveyor belts, of perfectly conditioned workers diligently plunking away for their pay and rations of leisure time. The individual is invisible in such a world, and for one and a half hours at Adler's GableStage, the personalities of all involved in Adding Machine's production were notable only by their absence. Adler and his cast hardened their hearts, stepped away from the footlights, and let us see the only personality that mattered in this context: the blind and hungry void of industry gone mad.

The same basic story of seven or so strangers picked to live in a house has been told now on MTV's Real World for 21 seasons and counting, but the format is getting a bit old. It's become a "watch hot kids get drunk and hook up show," which is only exciting to impressionable young teens who can't wait to get drunk and hook up on their own some day. So this year, MTV decided to switch things up for the Brooklyn season. Yeah, there were some drunk hookups, but more importantly there was the first transgendered housemate, an Iraq war vet, and JD Ordonez, a gay kid from Miami with an abusive father who put himself through school to become a dolphin trainer. Of course, JD's 15 minutes started ticking a little earlier than his housemates, as even before it was known he'd been cast in the show, gossip blogs were talking about a rumored relationship the kid had. We're not in the business of blind items here, but let's call the rumored ex Blanderson Pooper.

Costume quality, more than any other aspect of theater, is determined by money. If you've got a lot of it, you can dress your actors as cats, French aristocracy, Queen Elizabeth, or anything else. If you don't have any, you dress them in corduroy and denim. So let's take a moment to praise a decision that had almost nothing to do with money, though it was made in service of a production with plenty of money to throw around. To wit: to dress Shane R. Tanner in tights that were ever so slightly too small in Actors' Playhouse's wonderful 1776. The tights were a very light gray — under the lights, they became the color of an aviation cocktail — and if they didn't show absolutely everything as Tanner tromped angrily around the stage singing "Molasses to Rum," they showed enough. The man has beautiful thighs. His quads could crack a Brazil nut, and do unspeakably wonderful things to any softer-fleshed critter. His calves are constructed of the same curves and angles God first employed to create the hindquarters of a horse — sensuous, meaty, almost edible. You want to touch them. Or bite them. At the very least, you want to see them again.

Here's a fun game: Call Dr. Paul George, knowledge shah at the Historical Museum of Southern Florida, and mention any prominent local name, current or ancient, to him. Norman Braman. Julia Tuttle. Chief Neamathla. Al Capone. After George has finished explaining the intricacies of their personal stories and their relevance to the region, throw some historical developments at him. The Dade Massacre. The Cuban Missile Crisis. Interama. January 2, 1984, at the Orange Bowl. Commence jaw-dropping as he brings yesterday's Miami to highly detailed life with Rain Man-esque accuracy. But if you keep calling him, he's probably going to get annoyed — he ain't Miss Cleo. So sign up for one of Dr. George's countless tours, designed more for locals than tourists. Via walking, Metromover, boat, or bicycle, they cost from $20 to $44 and cover everything from local black history to famous criminals to the secrets of Miami City Cemetery. If you treasure Marley & Me as a South Florida period piece, it's time for a checkup with the doctor.

You've had meals that cost more than the average Naked Stage set, yet this little theater somehow crams more mojo, authenticity, and oozy-walled atmosphere into its sets than any ten super-expensive shows at (name of shitty theater on Miracle Mile deleted by editor). Maybe it's because the room is shaped like a very long shoebox, with a stage that stretches back and back and back. Or maybe it's because the theater's founders — Katherine Amadeo, Antonio Amadeo, and John Manzelli — have mad flair. Whatever — all of their shows bring you somewhere else. But 4.48 Psychosis, by the suicidal (and now, sadly, suicided) Sarah Kane, sucked you into an alternate dimension. Gravity was suspended, with bloodstained furniture floating around like it was on some gothic space station. Hidden fans whipped back the actors' hair for no reason at all. At one point, a dirty sink glowed with an unholy blue light. A wall seemed to melt away and was replaced with an industrial shower, which looked like a place you might go to get deloused or Zykloned. All of this was done with the assistance of theatrical polymath Paul Tei, who, together with the Amadeos and Manzelli, ensured we left the theater with the uneasy feeling that the whole damn universe was booby-trapped and that absolutely anything could happen.

OK, so Betrayed wasn't completely new when it opened at Joe Adler's GableStage. But it still had that new-play smell. George Packer is probably the best writer The New Yorker has had in a decade or more, and his 2007 article about the Iraqi translators who teamed up with American forces after the 2003 invasion ("Betrayed: The Iraqis Who Trusted America Most") was one of the most powerful pieces of journalism written lately. Packer is no 9-to-5er, and he felt its power too: The plight of the secular, liberty-loving, life-risking Democraphiles he'd met in Iraq haunted his dreams, and this play was the result. It gave the reactionary liberals who proliferated in George W. Bush's second term — the ones with the curiously partitioned minds, who deplored totalitarianism in theory but thought it tolerable in practice, at least when its only enemy was a corrupt Republican administration — one hell of a jolt and reminded our glibbest hawks what the real fight was about and what it was worth. A play can hope to do no more.