Emma Messenger dominates any stage whenever she's on — not with big bravura performances, but with a strong, warm groundedness and an always-present vibe of hidden depth. She brought these qualities to varied roles this year: a strangely secretive and defensive mother in Edge Theater's Exit Strategies; a brilliantly vicious and vulnerable Martha in the same company's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; and an oddly uncompassionate though politically committed doctor in The Normal Heart at Vintage Theatre.