A theatrical double threat, Lavey steered her trailblazing company through another hot season, highlighted by a sizzling revival of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, starring Amy Morton and Tracy Letts (No. 50), which transferred to Broadway. Between charting the company’s artistic course and welcoming many of its 200,000 theatregoers, she found time to act, too. Last April, she appeared in The March, Frank Galati’s ambitious adaptation of the prizewinning E. L. Doctorow novel.

Photograph: ANNA KNOTT