I’m so thrilled that 2011 can be marked as the year that two very promising American playwrights crossed over into visibly being really great writers. David Lindsay-Abaire did it on Broadway in the spring with Good People, and Jon Robin Baitz did it Off-Broadway with Other Desert Cities. I rarely miss anything on Broadway, so I knew about Lindsay-Abaire’s triumph first-hand. I heard Baitz’s triumph trumpeted frequently by people whose taste I trusted, so I was very much looking forward to the inevitable Broadway transfer of Other Desert Cities. I was not disappointed.

In Other Desert Cities, writer Brooke Wyeth (Rachel Griffiths) reunites with her parents (Stockard Channing and Stacy Keach), former members of Ronnie and Nancy Reagan’s inner circle, her brother (Thomas Sadoski) and her aunt (Judith Light), in Palm Springs, to celebrate Christmas 2004. Six years after writing a hit novel, Brooke announces that she is about to publish a memoir focusing on an explosive chapter in the family’s history, throwing the holiday reunion into turmoil, as the Wyeth family struggles to come to terms with their past.

This is first-rate, intelligent family drama, as powerful in its own way as Tracy Letts’s breakthrough August: Osage County – and more tightly written. Political hot-button issues of all sorts are raised, their personal dimensions smartly explored – the comparisons and contrasts between the personal and the political are thoroughly worked over – and no easy answers are offered (though Baitz resolves the family stories in ways that feel earned, honest, and satisfying).

Rachel Griffiths is terrific as Brooke, and Stockard Channing is frighteningly accurate as she charts the shifting perspectives of Brooke’s mother Polly, a Texas Republican who also happens to be a Jewish ex-screenwriter, full of all kinds of surprises. The most compellingly writen character of all, though, is Polly’s fuck-up liberal sister Silda, which Judith Light plays to perfection. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the first serious contender for 2012’s Best Play Tony.

For tickets, click here.

While visiting mainland China some years back, playwright David Henry Hwang was invited to see a new arts center in a large provincial city. He was very impressed with the state-of-the-art facility; he was also thoroughly taken aback by the embarassing mistranslations between English and Chinese that populated the signs at this otherwise immaculately turned out center.

In Chinglish, Hwang explores the deeper problems that these mistranslations point towards, while also exploiting the hilarious misunderstandings they engender for maximum comic effect. American businessman Daniel Cavanaugh (Gary Wilmes) – owner of a sign-making business – knowing nothing about either the culture of China or its language, seeks a relationship with government officials, hoping to expand his market. Along the way, he becomes involved in an intrigue with the guarded, mysterious Xi Yan (Jennifer Lim).

Lim and Wilmes play out the complicated relationship between Daniel and Xi with great attention to detail, not letting a stitch drop when it comes to the social and moral implications of what goes on between them. Leigh Silverman’s taut direction helps a lot, too, filling out the third dimension in Hwang’s occasionally over-schematic script.

Chinglish is also an impressively designed show: Anita Yavich’s costumes make droll points about the fetishization of Chinese culture by Westerners and vice versa. David Korins’ double-turntable set is a marvel, especially when moving in sync with sound designer Darron L. West’s pungent musical selections.

The surtitle projections by Jeff Sugg and Shawn Duan – an essential part of a show where a large percentage of dialogue is in Chinese – are mercifully clear, but the need to focus on them for long periods of time can be a bit headache inducing. Chinglish is intelligent and insightful, but wears its smarts lightly. All in all, a brisk, engaging comedy with some serious issues on its mind.

For tickets, click here.

How do you adapt one of the cornerstones of kinky culture, without creating pornography? Playwright David Ives has come up with a very creative solution for this smart, sexy show, by showing us an extended, out-of-control audition in which a director and an actress act out the major scenes in Venus in Fur, a watershed 1870 novel by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch – a book so sexually ahead of its time that the word “masochism” was derived from the author’s name.

Vanda (star-in-the-making Nina Arianda) is a young actress determined to land the lead in a new play based on Venus in Fur. Or at least that’s what she claims to be, though hints are dropped pretty quickly that she may be up to more. The adorable Hugh Dancy, wearing a very tight gray t-shirt, plays Thomas, the play’s adapter/director. While Ives’s main thematic prey is the psycho-sexual depths explored in the novel, he also takes ample delight in pointing out the sadomasochistic truth about show business, and auditions in particular.

The play is especially delicious as a tour de force for two actors. As wonderful as Arianda was in Born Yesterday, she is positively dazzling here. And Dancy is a terrific foil – it’s very hot indeed to see this hunk’s skin get flushed in some of the show’s more intense moments.

The show’s handful of failings include being too long (even at an hour and 45 minutes, there still is much that could be cut) and the occasional lapse into lazy pretension. That said, Ives has done a marvelous job of making sure that the play isn’t just red meat for actors, but a roller coaster of a good time for the audience. Venus in Fur is a hot plate of kinky fun.

For tickets, click here.