The theatre season of 2023 is, in some methods, a season of the previous. A few of this yr’s Broadway productions truly premièred downtown final yr, just like the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Fat Ham,” on the Public, which had a run this spring, on the American Airways Theatre, and the scrumptious “Merrily We Roll Along,” at New York Theatre Workshop, which is at present breaking home box-office data on the Hudson. Furthermore, we’re nonetheless (someway) seeing just a few reveals that had been delayed by the pandemic. They glide onto the stage, with glacial deliberation, the silt of three years in the past nonetheless caught of their ice.

Over all, darkish, meditative productions prevailed, typically with their units actually sunk in shadow. The reveals that drew us befell in primordial woods, or an ink-black night time, or London within the smog—we spent quite a lot of 2023 peering. Theatre clearly remembered that it’s good at offering introspection and long-duration thought. Most of the reveals subsequently additionally gave up the haste that characterizes a lot of recent playwriting. There are a number of items on this listing that unfolded unhurriedly, some in the midst of practically three hours. Maybe we’ve been educated by streaming to binge on narrative? Or maybe playwrights are attempting to information us again to a stiller, extra affected person mode of expertise.

As we thought of our favourite productions of 2023, we knew there have been a number of reveals on the close to horizon that we wouldn’t be capable to embrace. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Broadway début, a revival of his fanged household comedy “Appropriate,” opened to the press solely after we wrote this listing, as did Broadway’s “How to Dance in Ohio” and the musical adaptation of “Buena Vista Social Club,” on the Atlantic Theatre Firm. However one of the simplest ways to finish a yr is in wanting extra, so it feels solely proper that our “finish”-of-year listing—offered right here in chronological order—is essentially partial.

There have been plenty of unresolved threads on this manufacturing of a rambling, poetic, considerably mystical play by the late Denis Johnson, which opened final December, at Theatre for a New Viewers’s Polonsky Shakespeare Middle, after we put collectively the 2022 end-of-year listing. However I didn’t go to the theatre that night time in search of solutions—only a darkish room and a few voices price believing in for some time. What the play presents is just a few longueurs about life and, importantly, an all-night get together, rendered with blurry economic system and Dionysian delight. That’s typically greater than sufficient for a great time. As an off-kilter priest, the off-kilter Michael Shannon was pleasant to observe. Hari Nef was humorous and heartening and odd as a younger grownup with a wheelchair and a devilish humorousness. Extra pointless Christmas lights on phases, please. —Vinson Cunningham

This present, a type of cabaret, created by Lightning Rod Particular and staged at WP Theatre, tells a seemingly easy story: a lady walks right into a clinic, in search of an abortion. However right here in post-Roe America everyone knows that nothing might be much less easy in apply, or extra harrowing in politics. The present goes inward—actually—reasonably than panning out to survey the cultural subject. As a substitute of nosy politicians or activists on the streets, the dramatis personae are a bunch of singing, dancing, shtick-dispensing fetuses, implicitly doomed to get the “hook.” The manufacturing was bawdy, line-crossing, often transferring, at all times enjoyable. —V.C.

This masterwork by Samuel Beckett, displaying a number of of the Grasp’s grand themes and favored situations—two males alone, implicitly trapped, ready for a liberation whose context is unclear and whose actuality appears far off—was, above all else, a showcase for a few of the finest performing I noticed all yr. Invoice Irwin’s clown-based bodily precision met John Douglas Thompson’s Shakespearean brio in a method that clarified each originary kinds, giving them valences and deep reserves of metaphorical that means that I gained’t quickly or, actually, ever neglect. The viewers I sat in on the Irish Repertory Theatre was riveted, immersed below the spell of the performances and the various sparks of despair and temporary hope that they solid off. Right here, as elsewhere, Beckett makes use of repetition—on this case, inside the context of a master-servant relationship between a chair-bound tyrant and his more and more depressing manservant—as an ever-intensifying logic, revealing new depths as acquainted incidents revolve. —V.C.

We’re fortunate that Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s intricate bilingual drama is returning in 2024 for an encore run, at Theatre for a New Viewers—although I do know I’ll miss the proximity it had at its unique area, the tiny Soho Rep. The present, a literary marvel, advantages from closeness: in a small Kolkata dwelling, smoky sunshine drifts in via a excessive window, mud motes eddying within the advanced emotional currents amongst a Bengali Ph.D. pupil visiting from the U.S., his queer analysis topics, his American cinematographer boyfriend, and his welcoming Indian household. Hints of erotic secrets and techniques flicker within the textual content, and in our peripheral imaginative and prescient: Chowdhury’s brilliance lies in demonstrating how familiarity, even the type we get from spending practically three hours with these finely drawn characters, doesn’t insure intimacy. —Helen Shaw

Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” with its guy-centric retelling of the Salem witch trials, has clearly provoked a variety of playwrights into reëvaluating that fraught historical past—latest examples embrace Sarah Ruhl’s “Becky Nurse of Salem” and Kimberly Belflower’s “John Proctor Is the Villain.” I actually thought that we had dug up all there was to seek out in these Massachusetts woods. But Talene Monahon’s deft, depraved play, directed by Caitlin Sullivan for Bedlam, on the Connelly, and shrouded in New England gloom, managed its personal witchcraft: an exciting new perspective on the Salem women’ adolescent minds, revealing their craving for thriller, and the pernicious affect of the boys who want them. The best instance but of the latest mania for contemporary vernacular in old-timey settings, Monahon’s play was comedian line by line, however the cumulative impact was horror. The performers, too, had been stupendous—Brittany Ok. Allen, Sharlene Cruz, Tavi Gevinson, and Susannah Perkins all performed their baby characters as pricey little poppets with burning eyes. —H.S.

It was a yr filled with starry Stephen Sondheim productions: his ultimate venture, the half-musical “Here We Are,” on the Shed; the Broadway switch of “Merrily We Roll Along,” made buoyant eventually by a solid of darlings; and his operatic masterpiece, the soot-dark monster “Sweeney Todd,” staged by Thomas Kail in what seemed like a gap blasted into the stage of the Lunt-Fontanne. After I noticed “Sweeney,” in March, I shook off its horror, unthreatened by both Josh Groban’s milquetoast creepster model of the demon barber or Annaleigh Ashford’s frolicking Mrs. Lovett. However time—and people different Sondheim productions—saved bringing it to thoughts. Musical energy on such a scale creates a way of pursuit; I typically felt the present haunting me via the months, its immense sound (these shrieking sopranos! these terrorizing piccolos!) stalking my reminiscence. —H.S.

This, the latest play by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, might be, so far, my favourite work of dramatic artwork about COVID-19. (The pickings are slim to this point, however nonetheless.) Directed within the ominous darkish by Eric Ting, for Signature Theatre, the present facilities on a gaggle of mates introduced again collectively by their high-school reunion. Their fates have diverged—one’s a blue-chip artist, one’s married to a cop she doesn’t love, one’s received a nasty case of diabetes and is progressively dropping her sight—however they nonetheless share the verbal and emotional rhythms that tempo the relationships between tight-knit and intense teams of younger mates. One other invisible presence, Loss of life, in all its terrible glory, inhabits every of their our bodies at intervals, making disclosures and promising, because the tense night time rolls ahead, to assert a tribute. —V.C.

One of the anticipated performs of the yr, Annie Baker’s meditation on ache, at Atlantic Theatre Firm, managed to surpass even my excessive hopes—partly by placing my sense of hope, and several other of my different senses, right into a type of hypnotic stasis. On this lengthy, seemingly immobile interlude, ladies at a clinic attempt to tackle their power circumstances by excessive fasting. They sit on lounge chairs, within the purple California solar, conducting a suspended existence that’s each shocked and sharpened by hunger; they make desultory, droll dialog, which accrues, stealthily, right into a unusually humorous play. Baker, whose maybe-avatar within the manufacturing was performed by Christina Kirk, appears to have discovered an excellent deal prior to now a number of years, via her personal struggling and in inspecting the struggling of others. That data is merciless and inconceivably previous: when one girl completes her time on the clinic, she drinks a inexperienced smoothie, and it’s as vivid because the apple in Eden. —H.S.

The extra I take into consideration this manufacturing of Ossie Davis’s raucous, politically perilous 1961 comedy, on Broadway on the Music Field Theatre, the extra I love the at all times busy director Kenny Leon’s deft, musical dealing with of his startlingly good ensemble. Leslie Odom, Jr., because the eponymous hero, a preacher in pursuit of social justice and the real-estate equal of his individuals’s proverbial forty acres and a mule—on this case, an area church of nice significance to the Black neighborhood of a sharecropping plantation—is, at turns, hilarious, expressionistic, and righteously transferring. If Leon’s manufacturing is remembered a long time down the road (and I feel it has an opportunity), it will likely be as a result of it led but extra viewers members into acquaintance with Kara Younger, a bracing performer who left her imprint, possibly ceaselessly, on Lutiebelle Gussie Mae Jenkins, a personality originated by the nice Ruby Dee. —V.C.

“Stereophonic”

The playwright David Adjmi is aware of his method round a pop-culture phenomenon—his different performs embrace “3C,” a burlesque of “Three’s Firm,” and a portrait of Marie Antoinette, our bouffant influencer queen. Now he’s turned his wry eye to “Rumours,” or at the least a near-image of the extended means of that famously troubled, famously spectacular album by Fleetwood Mac. The present, at Playwrights Horizons, had two channels: within the foreground, the management room, the place the producer and the recordist govern sound ranges; upstage, the glassed-in recording sales space itself, the place the musicians jam and combat. The director Daniel Aukin solid the stellar ensemble into a reputable band, so the snippets of songs we heard, by Will Butler, helped us perceive why they’re keen to endure a lot: the music makes the explanation, which in flip makes the play. (As an alt-art bonus, upstairs, in Playwrights’ small area, the large clown Alexandra Tatarsky, who makes use of they/them pronouns, was performing their excellent “Unhappy Boys in Harpy Land,” a one-person lampoon of unhappy German literary boys—Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, Günter Grass’s Oskar Matzerath—whereas, within the face of precise state violence, making heartbreaking enjoyable of their very own ineffectuality as an artist.) —H.S. ♦