1.   Amid a deluge of performances, critics and professionals sample new works and try to catch a sense of the prevailing winds in American theater.

2.   American theater.

3.   American theater is defined as European American theater.

4.   American theaters have become ponderous places of late.

5.   And among American theater composers, no one ever celebrated the good life as zestfully while dispensing as much insider knowledge as Cole Porter.

6.   An unlikely romantic comedy by the avant-garde Belgian director Chantal Akerman, this film had not found anyone willing to release it in American theaters.

7.   As a playwright, Tennessee Williams combined language with a dramatic sense as no one in the American theater had ever done before.

8.   As American theater worries about its mostly white, older, middle and upper-class audience, the Stratford shows what the alternative could be.

9.   As the director, the star and the keeper of the Ludlam flame, Quinton continues to be one of the most singular talents in the contemporary American theater.

10.   At its best, however, the singing is superb and the cantata conveys the thrilling exuberance of American theater.