Performing Arts Organization

Readers’ choice: Texas Ballet Theater

Staff choice: Amphibian Productions

What do Fort Worth’s theatergoers do when they’re looking for something that isn’t the umpteenth performance of Oklahoma! or Annie? If they’re savvy, they seek out the plays presented by this sophisticated troupe out of TCU, which puts on thought-provoking avant-garde drama without Hip Pocket’s comfy insular vibe.

Theater Troupe

Readers’ choice: Four-Day Weekend

Staff Choice: Amphibian Productions

Male Actor

Readers’ choice: Michael Johnson, Box Theatre

Staff choice: (tie) Michael Muller, Evan Mueller, Jonathan Fielding, Below the Belt, Amphibian Productions

We could’ve picked any one of this trio of actors who terrifically evoked the wounded masculine ego, but together in this play, Muller, Mueller, and Fielding represented a kind of tag team of heterosexual male dysfunction masquerading as camaraderie within the claustrophobic hothouse of office politics. It didn’t seem proper to single out any of their performances, since each seemed to offer different tragic stages of the same “team player”: Fielding as the baby-faced new arrival all too eager to stand there and repeatedly take the blows; Mueller as the cynical pugilist who secretly dreams of reconnecting with the world outside his workplace; and Muller as the veteran factory man who long ago lost hope of any human connection beyond a cynical, burlesque version of water cooler friendships with his underlings. Their ensemble work was hilarious, disturbing, and oddly sobering in this age in which Americans are working a lot more for a much smaller return.