Onstage in 2025, the past caught up with us. The consequences of COVID-era economics — swelling costs, especially for musicals, and an accompanying need to provide enough zing to get large audiences into seats — made themselves known in the programming, in splashy star casting on Broadway and in the proliferation of more intentionally modestly budgeted work elsewhere. But there was also the sense, in the greatest work of this year, of artists turning back to what’s led us here, confronting and also embracing history at the moment of its impact with the present. In Liberation, Bess Wohl had the feminism of 1970 colliding with the feminism of our time; in Can I Be Frank?, Morgan Bassichis performed a séance with an ahead-of-the-curve comedian of the AIDS era; a revival of The Brothers Size communed across the decades with itself. Theater, alive in a flickering glorious moment of performance, kept leaning on its considerable talent for raising the dead, asking how they led us here, and how, with or against them, we might lead ourselves back out.
An unnamed apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn
I recognize that it’s inside baseball to recognize a production that played to only a half-dozen audience members a night inside an apartment in Greenpoint, but I hope it’s cause enough to bring Slanted Floors back to a larger audience, or at least for the team behind it to keep putting on plays like this one. In Billy McEntee’s drama, we saw two halves of a Brooklyn gay couple, played by Adam Chanler-Berat and Kyle Beltran, negotiate life as aspiring theater-adjacent creatives while working through the tensions of their own relationship and prepping dinner (a hearty soup, served to those of us watching). The piece had precision realism, helped along by Ryan Dobrin, but also, crucially, an open and wandering heart, handing Beltran a speech where he imagines a whole alternate-universe life upstate that I will not soon forget.
Second Stage
In equal part lacerating and hilarious, Talene Monahon’s drama splits its acts between a recreation of the 1925 legal battle that the Armenian refugee immigrant Tatos Cartozian fought to be recognized as a white man and thus become a naturalized American citizen and a surreal reality TV taping, 100 years later, of a show very much like Keeping Up With the Kardashians. Monahon’s script juggles the knives of satire and devastation, and Second Stage’s production had a director, in David Cromer, and a cast, including Andrea Martin, Will Brill, Tamara Sevunts, Raffi Barsoumian, and a heartbreaking Nael Nacer, that could keep up with the tricky emotional choreography of assimilation.
Theater 154
You have to give it up for theater that meets the moment with a howl of pain and fury. At a time when most New York theaters were disorientingly silent on the subject of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the playwright Torrey Townsend took himself and the institutions around him to task with a very meta drama. To try to summarize it succinctly: Jewish Plot is about a reading of an imaginary 19th-century author’s play about antisemitism that a version of the playwright is trying (and failing) to update as a career boost, because he’s been told playing into his own Jewishness will help him succeed. All the while, he’s alienating his cast with increasingly arcane rewrites. Like those poor actor characters, Jewish Plot teetered under the pile of things it tried to accomplish at once, but when it connected it really connected, delivering an indelible final monologue that transfigured the theater into a wasteland.
Atlantic Theater Company
What would New York theater do without David Greenspan? He’s always working, and his impish delight in acting makes him a reliable high point in pretty much every production he’s in — right now, that would be Prince Faggot, where he dons a wig as a palace aide. In the spring, the playwright Mona Pirnot handed him a tribute on a silver platter where, in imitation of Greenspan’s own solo performances, he played every member of a clique of 30-something playwright friends gathered for a reading at an apartment. Pirnot’s play contained plenty of despair and self-laceration at the economic realities of playwriting, contraposed with sheer delight in what Greenspan can pull off onstage. It’s insane to pursue a stage career, but look at what magic it can contain.
Public Theater
It’s hard to think of a more indelible monologue this year than the one Deirdre O’Connell delivered while sitting in a cloud, rhapsodizing about the suffering humanity inflicts in her name. In the second of Caryl Churchill’s quartet of short plays, O’Connell rambled on as “The Gods,” reciting the chain of retribution that makes up Greek myth, including matricide, patricide, fratricide, and war. “We’re the reason it happens, we can enjoy a war,” she purrs. “We don’t exist.” Churchill’s abiding interest in the violence that sustains specifically Western civilization pervades the play — in other vignettes, a boy wooed a fragile girl made of glass, and O’Connell was a Londoner pensioner who kept an imp in bottle to wish ill on her enemies — and here, it crystallized into a bloodied spear point. The gods tell us to kill, and they love it, and they don’t exist, but we make them up because we love to kill.
Public Theater
The most moving act of kindness I’ve seen onstage this year occurred midway through the five-hour staging of Else Went’s Initiative. A California teenager named Riley (Greg Cuellar), trying his hand at devising a storyline in Dungeons & Dragons, has crafted a heroic fable for his former best friend Clara (Olivia Rose Barresi) to repair a relationship splintered by high-school circumstance. Under Emma Rose Went’s direction, as Clara discovers she does have the power to repair her fantasy universe, a glowing orb descends from the ceiling, engulfing the theater in warmth. Throughout Initiative, which lies somewhere between Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Our Town, you’ll see the extreme mundane of nerdy California 2000s teenage life — it gave me stress flashbacks to my own experiences — contrasted with the possibilities of imagination and storytelling, which offers an escape for these characters from “Coastal Podunk,” but also, crucially, a way to heal each other and the world.
The Shed
The image of the circle repeats across Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play. It’s present in the dust (or maybe sand, or cocaine) laid out on the stage, and you can sense something cyclical in the action of the drama — two brothers, one of them making his way back into life after a stint in prison, both reckoning with the patterns of their lives. The sense of repetition enhanced and deepened the play’s revival, co-directed by McCraney and Bijan Sheibani at the Shed, with McCraney’s longtime friend and collaborator André Holland as the elder brother, Ogun. Nearly 20 years on, these artists could return to the same material and still find deep mysteries within it.
Lucille Lortel
Andrew Scott’s co-stars in Vanya included a piano, a tennis ball, a rope swing, a tea towel, and a gold chain. Sure, Scott was the only human star in this Chekhov play adapted by Simon Stephens and directed by Sam Yates, but like any great actor, he made space for his scene partners, which in this case were the inanimate objects that helped indicate all the despairing characters on the play’s now-Irish estate. Through the prism of Scott, Vanya was as rich as ever — richer, in some ways, for how it lived both in Scott’s body and the objects around him, which kept even characters who weren’t in a scene at the front of your mind. I think, surprisingly often, of the piano that sat at the side of the stage, operating as a spectral presence of Vanya’s late sister.
SoHo Playhouse
The solo stage performance that’s also a stand-up show — a child of theater, comedy and, often, economically friendly production budgets — was everywhere this year, but no one brought more heft and invention to the form than Morgan Bassichis. In their shapeshifting and blistering work, Bassichis, directed by Sam Pinkleton, revived the “rants” of Frank Maya — a pioneering gay comedian of the late 1980s and early ’90s who died of AIDS just as he was breaking into the mainstream. Bassichis is fascinated by what was urgent to Maya in the midst of an epidemic, the way he called out Liberace and other closeted celebrities, and also his petty and personal commentary, like diatribes about men who don’t call back after a date. An inquiry into what comedy is and what power we want it to wield that was, thank God, also cuttingly hilarious.
Laura Pels Theatre/James Earl Jones Theatre
In the first few self-effacing minutes of Liberation, Bess Wohl, through her onstage avatar, a playwright played by Susannah Flood, tells the audience not to worry: The running time isn’t too long, and you’ll get your phones back soon. Don’t be fooled, because even though Liberation occupies a relatively modest physical space — it plays out in a gym basement in 1970s Ohio where a consciousness-raising women’s-liberation group is meeting — the play climbs toward a cosmic wallop. Wohl welds together her memories of her mother and her own interviews with second-wave feminists into a time-hopping, soul-searching portrait of their movement, its achievements and failures, and its legacy. Directed by Whitney White, with a honed-to-perfection ensemble, Liberation overwhelmed me twice, both on and Off Broadway.
