Seat Filler: Best NYC Theater of 2010

8. Dusk Rings a Bell
Stephen Belber, who cocreated The Laramie Project, revisited gay hate crime in Atlantic Theater Company’s Dusk Rings a Bell. Private Practice’s Kate Walsh starred as Molly, a verbose CNN exec returning to her old family summer home on the Delaware shore. There she reconnects with Ray, a townie with whom she shared her first kiss, and learns, to her horror, that he spent 10 years in prison for his part in the murder of a gay vacationer. One of his pals threw the punches and hurled the gay insults, but Ray “didn’t do enough to stop it.” Paul Sparks was quietly heartbreaking as Ray, a simple, soft-spoken man riddled with guilt and haunted by a premonition of his own death at the hands of a group of kids calling him “faggot.”

7. The Divine Sister
Legendary drag auteur Charles Busch is back to his old habits at the SoHo Playhouse in this glorious spoof of wimple flicks like The Singing Nun, The Sound of Music, and even Doubt. Directed by out collaborator Carl Andress, Busch channels Rosalind Russell in The Trouble With Angels and His Girl Friday to play a former crime reporter turned Mother Superior of a struggling Pittsburgh convent. “My dear, we are living in a time of great social change,” she says after a sunny guitar strum. “We must do everything in our power to stop it.” Sex and the City’s Julie Halston and Falsettos’ Alison Fraser steal scenes as nuns with a brief but bawdy lesbian flirtation, and Jennifer Van Dyck dons boy drag as a nerdy gay student.