A mysterious chapter in modern art history receives some theatrical exploration in the world premiere of Lauren Gunderson's Bauer at San Francisco Playhouse. If you've never heard of the abstract painter Rudolf Bauer, whom some considered a genius beyond contemporaries like Kandinsky and Klee, that may have something to do with the fact that the Guggenheim Museum in New York, which was built to display his work, kept them instead in the basement out of public view.

That's one of the issues addressed in Bauer, a three-person drama by Gunderson, San Francisco's most prolific and produced playwright.

To call Gidion's Knot, Johnna Adams' play now at the Aurora Theatre Company, a mystery is accurate but only to a point. Certainly there are things we don't know and need to find out, but there's a whole lot more to this complex, disturbing and even devastating drama.

Looking at Nina Ball's incredibly realistic fifth-grade classroom set – complete with tiled ceiling and fluorescent lights – it's easy to think, "A play about a parent-teacher conference in a bright, friendly classroom. How intense could this be?" Oh, it's intense all right.

If you’re looking for the year’s best, you can shorten your search by heading directly to Word for Word, that ever-amazing group that turns short works of fiction into some of the most captivating theater we see around here. This year, we were graced with two outstanding Word for Word productions. You Know When the Men Are Gone – Word for...

If you want, as Oscar Wilde did, to make cogent and funny points about men and women, husbands and wives and the notion of good people vs. bad people, what better way to do that than by putting Danny Scheie in a dress and letting him unleash his inner Dame Maggie Smith?

Scheie's performance as the Duchess of Berwick in the California Shakespeare Theater's production Lady Windermere's Fan, Wilde's first major theatrical it, is one of many pleasures in director Christopher Liam Moore's beguiling production.

Safe to say you're not going to see anything like Mark O'Rowe's Terminus, the aptly named conclusion to Magic Theatre's 46th season. If you saw O'Rowe's last show at the Magic, the extraordinary Howie the Rookie 13 years ago, you'll know to expect vivid, visceral language delivered in monologues. That seems to be O'Rowe's specialty, along with depicting the rougher edges of Dublin with a strange sort of compassion and a gift for elemental storytelling that grabs hold and won't let go.

While Howie operated in a familiar street thug/crime world setting, Terminus is something altogether different. Like one of his three characters in the play, O'Rowe pushes himself out on a precarious limb and leaps. There's a distinct criminal element here as well, along with descriptions of violence that are somehow more vivid and horrific than if we were actually seeing them, but there's also a supernatural, even spiritual, aspect to the play that is remarkably moving.

One of the things I love about Bay Area theater is that picking a Top 10 list is usually a breeze. My surefire test of a great show is one I can remember without having to look at anything to remind me about it. The entire list below was composed in about five minutes, then I had to go look through my reviews to make sure they were all really this year. They were, and it was a really good year.