First Night's Top Ten of 2010: Nashville's Best Actresses in a Play

Mining the depths and heights of their own life experiences to bring to life onstage a plethora of challening and compelling characters, dramatic actresses in Nashville were at the pinnacle of their talents in 2010. Thoroughly captivating their audiences night after night, they put their tremendous talents on display with no-holds-barred performances that have raised the bar for actresses who follow in their wake in the coming seasons. And these ten women gave what we considered to be the most noteworthy performances of the 2010 season...

• Heather Alexander, The Grapes of Wrath, Circle Players. Featuring a stunning and exhilarating lead performance by Heather Alexander in the pivotal role of Ma Joad, director Clay Hillwig scores an artistic success with his production of Frank Galati's The Grapes of Wrath - based upon John Steinbeck's epic novel - to open Circle Players' 2010-11 season at The Keeton Theatre. Audience members whose exposure to The Grapes of Wrath comes primarily from the classic Academy Award-winning film version that starred Henry Fonda and Jane Darwell will find that the focus of the play has shifted somewhat from Tom Joad's idealistic tale (although certainly that remains a vital part of the story) to the family matriarch, played in such an eloquently understated fashion by Alexander.

• Britt Byrd, Twilight of the Gods, Blackbird Theatre Company. Blackbird, the newest member of Nashville's burgeoning community of theater companies, makes an auspicious debut with the premiere of Wes Driver and Greg Greene's smartly written new script - Twilight of the Gods - at David Lipscomb University's Shamblin Theatre. Featuring a truly outstanding ensemble performance from the 13-member cast (with particularly impressive turns by Britt Byrd and Patrick Kramer), Twilight of the Gods might best be described as a murder mystery cum drawing room comedy cum intellectual discussion. Patrick Kramer virtually steals the show with his wonderfully over-the-top portrayal of H.G. Wells, whose histrionics are delightfully and almost epically comical. Conversely, although somehow just as entertaining and certainly just as memorable, is the performance of Britt Byrd as Sarah, the young woman believed to be the reincarnated Jack the Ripper. Byrd effectively underplays her scenes with a gracefully tortured performance that makes her scenes late in the second act particularly moving.

• Kim Bretton, Vincent in Brixton, Actors Bridge Ensemble. Set in the London suburb of Brixton, the play focuses on young 22-year-old Vincent Van Gogh's brief stay in Britain working for a Dutch-based art firm, learning the art of sales while sublimating his own artistic tendencies and his unbridled - and unedited - views of life and love. Brought by serendipity to the home of Ursula Loyer, inquiring about the possibility of renting a room there, the rather abrupt young Dutchman finally meets his match in the older and wiser woman, leading to a stunning denouement of ultimately devastating effects. The sexual tension between Vincent and Mrs. Loyer is fairly palpable, thanks to the exquisite pairing of Brent Maddox and Kim Bretton as Wright's leading characters. Bretton's revelatory reading of Mrs. Loyer is something every younger actress in Nashville should study and appreciate - and commit to memory. Bretton artfully and creatively becomes her character, showing the range of her craft while demonstrating Mrs. Loyer's own stunning emotional arc. As Bretton gracefully acts her way through the script (although calling this acting seems inconsequential so completely does she embody Mrs. Loyer), she transforms herself and her audience, in a performance that should be savored and applauded.

• Trish Crist, Seasons Greetings to Our Friends and Family, Rhubarb Theater Company. Thanks to a joint production of Nashville's Rhubarb Theater and Pendulum 3, David Sedaris' twinbill for Christmas - The Santaland Diaries and Season's Greetings to Our Friends and Family - gave audiences just the right twist to the holiday season, delivering laughs and evoking deeper thought, thanks to the superb performances of Bob Roberts, as Sedaris' onstage doppelganger, and Trish Crist as the Christmas letter-writing doyenne of the fictional Dunbar family. The Dunbar living room is tastefully decorated for the holidays and Crist, as the family's psychopathic matriarch, makes good use of the playing space to deliver her tale of Christmastime turmoil and familial upheaval in an understated, but completely believable, manner. Crist's performance is perfectly modulated and she does, in fact, sound exactly as you would expect Jocelyn Dunbar to sound. Her delivery is unfettered by dramatic nuance, making the Dunbars' lifestory all the more disturbing.

• Nan Gurley, Doubt, David Lipscomb University Theater. Nan Gurley intelligently underplays playwright John Patrick Shanley's devout Sister Aloysius, skirting stereotype while creating her own personal take on the character, created on Broadway by Tennessee native Cherry Jones in her Tony Award-winning turn. The role seems tailor-made for the versatile Gurley, whose underlying grace and humanity saves Sister Aloysius from becoming a terrorizing harridan. While Gurley, at first, seems somewhat tentative and reserved, she quickly regains her surefooted way of bringing her character to life.

• Melissa Bedinger Hade, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, ACT 1. Director Michael Roark's effective staging of the piece - and the spectacularly theatrical, yet somehow low-key and effectively underplayed, performances of Melissa Bedinger Hade and Ed Amatrudo - adds to the visceral reactions experienced by the audience in this almost epic dismantling of an American marriage, circa 1960-something. The tremendously adept Hade and Amatrudo, whose onstage chemistry is palpable, create characters whose interactions are all the more unsettling and disquieting. Hade's Martha is as good as it gets in local theatre - oh, screw the "local," she is nothing short of amazing and her performance in this production could hold its own in comparison to anything we've seen. Hade's earth-motheriness, cloaked in her boundless heart and emotional delivery, remains somehow understated (embuing Martha with warmth - who knew?) despite the character's outrageously over-the-top carriage and demeanor. Hade is well-cast, proving herself capable of anything playwright Albee throws her way.

• Amanda Lamb, Fat Pig, GroundWorks Theatre. Amanda Lamb gives such a stunningly real performance as the heroine in Neil LaBute's Fat Pig - in a well-paced and sensitively directed production from Paul J. Cook for GroundWorks Theatre - that it's hard not to confuse the actress and her character or to know where one ends and the other begins. Helen is clearly attractive, intelligent, funny and brimming with bravado and self-confidence and it's quite easy to assume that Amanda Lamb possesses all those same attributes. Certainly, she is a versatile actress (previously, we'd only seen her as the good Baptist woman who is the matriarch of the gospel singing group in A Sanders Family Christmas at Chaffin's Backstage at the Barn over the holiday season), but who knew how revelatory this performance would be? In fact, Lamb's virtuoso portrayal of Helen May well be the most courageous turn by an actress on a local stage this season. At the very least, it's something audiences will talk about for months to come. She's really that good - and hers is a performance that should not be missed; yet, so are the performances of the other three players in Labute's play about contemporary manners and morals.

• Mary McCallum, Fly, Girl!, SistaStyle Productions. Actress-playwright-producer Mary McCallum gives an extraordinarily strong and vibrant performance as aviatrix Bessie Coleman in her self-written new historical drama, Fly, Girl! With an outstanding supporting ensemble, all of whom are completely committed to both their roles and this important production, it is a sharply written and movingly acted new work - definitely one that deserves a broader audience beyond the confines of the Nashville stage. McCallum completely engages her audience with her warmth and enthusiasm, and her completely confident portrayal of Bessie is heartfelt and admirable, embued with respect and a very genuine sense of Coleman's place in American history.

• Corrie Miller. Unravelling the Ribbon, Tennessee Women's Theater Project. The luminously gifTed Miller plays Rose, a 30-something hairdresser and mother of two, who finds a lump in her breast in the play's early moments. Rose's circuitous journey through diagnosis, treatment and recovery is dealt with rather matter-of-factly, yet somehow her trek seems all the more powerful as a result. Perhaps it is Miller's heartfelt rendering of her character that makes it more compelling for the audience member recalling his fallen friend, or perhaps it is the no-nonsense manner in which the playwrights tell Rose's story - whatever it is, it is movingly, heart-wrenchingly genuine and only the coldest, most unfeeling person in that darkened theatre won't feel a lump in his throat or be forced to stifle a near-sob.

• Jess Miller, Six Degrees of Separation, Street Theatre Company. Miller's Ouisa provides much of the heart and soul of John Guare's contemporary play that coolly and methodically considers society's preoccupation with celebrity and the doors that even the suggestion of celebrity can open among the upper class. Miller's superb depiction of the sophisticated Ouisa Kittredge is at first off-putting with a well-drawn characterization that is cold and distant, yet as Ouisa becomes more and more enraptured by the young man whose very presence in her New York City apartment has caused her to question her own life and its accompanying well-heeled lifestyle, Miller's performance becomes more nuanced and certainly more effective. In the end, you are captivated by her exquisitely crafted portrayal.

Pictured: Mary McCallum