Henrik Ibsen’s play The Wild Duck received a confused reaction from most critics after it was published in 1884. Almost alone, George Bernard Shaw acclaimed it, and while its reputation has gradually grown, it isn’t performed nearly so much as A Doll’s House or Hedda Gabler or Ghosts: the last New York City production in English was in 1987. For a play that the stern critic John Simon called “one of the finest tragicomedies in all dramatic literature,” the neglect is shocking, so Theatre for a New Audience deserves kudos for resurrecting it. The result, however, is often disappointing.
Romina Paula’s The Whole of Time chronicles the seismic impact of a seemingly casual visitor on an Argentine family. Written in 2009 and translated for the English-speaking stage by Jean Graham-Jones, the play was first presented in New York in 2024 at Torn Page, a nonprofit theater company in Chelsea. It was nominated for a Drama Desk Award that season. The Torn Page staging, directed by Tony Torn, has now been reassembled at The Brick in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, as a co-production of The Brick and A/Park Productions.
In Omar Bakry’s In the Shadow of Her Father, directed by Vincent Scott, Ava Wolski (Inji El Gammal), in her forties, lives a quiet life in rural Ohio with her adoptive father, Walter (Roger Hendricks Simon), in his seventies. Walter is a man haunted by alcoholism and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But when a stranger appears at Ava’s door, he ignites buried secrets and desires. Tackling alcoholism, PTSD, and the immigrant experience, Bakry’s drama is both a meditation on survival and a tender love story.
Playwright Rishi Varma was motivated to write Sulfur Bottom by his concern for environmental justice, defined by the show’s partner organization WE ACT as “ensuring that people of color and/or low-income residents participate meaningfully in the creation of sound and fair environmental health and protection policies and practices.”
Elizabeth McGovern is spending the dog days of 2025 Off-Broadway in Ava: The Secret Conversations. Known in recent years as the beloved chatelaine of Downton Abbey, McGovern has written herself a role that’s the antithesis of Lady Cora Crawley. Her new play depicts the twilight of Ava Gardner, screen goddess from backwoods North Carolina who married both Mickey Rooney (the “biggest star in the world” when she met him) and mob-adjacent crooner Frank Sinatra.
Anyone searching for a rabbit-out-of-hat show in which a master magician saws a femme fatale in half or makes her disappear should look elsewhere than Jamie Allan’s Amaze. Allan’s show has some dazzling glitter and glitz, but underneath it all there is a moving story that director Jonathan Goodwin has deftly and incrementally integrated with Allan’s sleight-of-hand illusions and interactions with his audience.
Well, I’ll Let You Go is written by actor Bubba Weiler, who’s a little over 30, and directed by Jack Serio, still under 30 and seemingly ubiquitous in New York theater. It’s set in a mid-size, midwestern town that has lost its skill-based, manufacturing economy. Weiler’s characters are adjusting, in sundry ways, to coarsening influences, including the regional fulfillment facility of a gargantuan online retailer, which is the town’s sole surefire source of regular employment. Weiler and Serio bring a balance of intellect and feeling to their work, and the result is a fresh, engrossing chronicle of ordinary citizens contending with change for the worse.
If only the romance of Gilda Radner and Gene Wilder were as straightforward as two comic icons collaborating on a professional project and eventually falling in love. For Wilder and Radner, it wasn’t nearly that simple. Cary Gitter’s Gene and Gilda provides the backstory of how these talented individuals managed a complex personal magnetism, bolstering each other’s confidence and respective on-screen personas, that morphed into a deep love.
The Irish Rep is currently staging its fourth production since 2013 of Conor McPherson’s 1997 play The Weir, with several of the cast reprising roles. And yet there is nothing stale about this staging—instead, the play is brought to exhilarating life by a marvelous ensemble, under Ciarán O’Reilly’s assured direction. The Weir is essentially a collection of four ghost stories, which arise naturally out of the banter in a rural Irish pub, that ultimately reveal more about the loneliness of the people telling them than anything supernatural.
A multitude of transgressions come to light in Terry Curtis Fox’s Transgression. This melodrama about New York artists consists of 19 scenes toggling back and forth between 2010 and 1970. At irregular intervals, the playwright detonates ugly, morally irksome surprises. The result is a two-hour, slow-motion collision between louche mores in the Warhol era and the subsequent new-millennial sensitivity that augured the eruption of #MeToo.
In the revival of Crystal Skillman’s Open, now playing under the deft direction of Jessi D. Hill, Megan Hill delivers a mesmerizing solo performance as the Magician—a woman who attempts to conjure the truth of a personal tragedy through the language of illusion. What unfolds is not merely a magic show, but a deeply felt meditation on love, loss, and the fragile hope that words—and maybe even spells—can undo the past.
It’s impossible to ignore chemistry, whether it’s as basic and essential as two molecules of hydrogen and one of oxygen, or as toxic and unwelcome as a string of PFAs. In Charles Randolph-Wright’s Duke & Roya, the chemistry goes beyond the molecular level, as Jay Ellis and Stephanie Nur demonstrate in the title roles. It’s a powerful component for this play, which by turns is romantic and political and covers a lot of ground without quite bursting at the seams.
Jethro Compton’s stage adaptation of the classic short story The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance delivers a taut and compelling drama that both honors and subverts the conventions of the Western. Directed with precision and emotional clarity by Thomas R. Gordon, this new production retains the story’s essential moral conflict—between truth and legend, justice and lawlessness—but deepens its resonance by introducing a new character and themes that can speak powerfully to a modern audience.
In Emmanuelle Mattana’s Trophy Boys, four debaters huddle in an empty schoolroom (nifty scenic design by Matt Saunders), strategizing for the final match of an interscholastic tournament. They’re seniors at Imperium, an elite boys’ prep school; the imminent debate is against a team from a similarly tony girls’ school. This is the swan song of the boys’ high-school extracurricular lives. They’re undefeated and, being fiercely ambitious, terrified of losing this last debate, especially to a female team.
In A Letter to Lyndon B. Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First, playwright-directors Natasha Roland and Xhloe Rice blur the line between 1960s Boy Scout rituals and the drafting of U.S. soldiers to Vietnam. What emerges is an absurdist meditation on masculinity, obedience, and the perilous passage to manhood.
Jordan Tannahill’s drama Prince Faggot, a love story about a gay heir to the British throne and his boyfriend, is admirably multifaceted: part fantasia, part social and political commentary, part agitprop. At heart, though, Prince Faggot is a bittersweet romance about a royal and a commoner, a sort of Roman Holiday for the 21st century—if Audrey Hepburn’s princess had become a devotee of drug-assisted intercourse and Japanese rope bondage.
At the Barricades, a play drawn from original sources by James Clements and Sam Hood Adrian, explores the price of freedom and the complexities of political idealism. The play highlights the fight of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a battalion of international volunteers numbering roughly 2,800 Americans who fought on the side of the Republicans (the democratically elected government) during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) against the Nationalists, the rising fascist dictatorship under Generalissimo Francisco Franco.
In political parlance, the term A Special Relationship refers to the longstanding alliance of America and its “closest ally” Britain (the phrase “America’s oldest ally” refers to France). Disparities in language are a prominent feature in Tim Marriott and Jeff Stolzer’s winsome comedy, which is playing as part of the Brits Off Broadway festival. The piece takes as a major theme George Bernard Shaw’s maxim (sometimes attributed to Winston Churchill or Oscar Wilde): “England and America are two countries divided by a common language.”
John Krasinski first made a splash on the TV series The Office (2005–13), and after that with the creepy horror film A Quiet Place (2018) and its goosebump-laden sequels. He has a long film resume as actor, writer and director, and lately he has boosted his credits as an action star in the Amazon Prime series Jack Ryan. Yet, although Krasinski appeared in the play Dry Powder with Hank Azaria and Claire Danes in 2017, film acting doesn’t necessarily point toward stage prowess. But the confidence with which Krasinski takes the stage in the first moments of Angry Alan gives one hope that he’s an exception, and it only increases as the actor’s masterly performance opens Studio Seaview (formerly 2nd Stage) with a bang.
In a whirlwind of wit and whimsy, Abigail Pickard Price’s (with Sarah Gobran and Matt Pinches) new stage adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice offers an unexpectedly funny take on the classic, featuring just three actors who embody 18 characters. Directed by Price, this madcap rendition breathes fresh life into Austen’s sharp social satire, as the performers navigate cultural pitfalls of Regency England.
In life, people are all haunted by one thing or another. For some, it might be love, loss, or anything in between. For the characters in Tim Mulligan’s latest play, Point Loma, what haunts them are literal ghosts. The play explores the supernatural with an immersive production by the Manhattan Repertory Theatre.
Kelundra Smith’s The Wash is an inspiring play about the originators of the Atlanta Washerwomen’s Strike of 1881, a little-known chapter in American labor history. Making its New York premiere, Smith’s drama captures the black strikers’ struggles during the Jim Crow era in the post–Civil War American South, including public indifference to the women’s working conditions and the demeaning, hateful attitude of their white customers toward them.
Lunar Eclipse, Donald Margulies’s 2023 play now receiving a Second Stage Theater production (at Signature Center), opens with one of the two characters, George, sobbing alone. George is a farmer in his 70s, sitting in darkness in a field in western Kentucky, where he is soon joined by his wife, Em, to watch a lunar eclipse. George and Em will not simply observe the overnight event: they will overcome George’s gruff exterior and look back over the course of their life together, facing difficult subjects, including the death of a child, and ultimately reaffirming their connection.
Encountering adaptations of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice seems as inevitable as Orpheus’s fateful turning around to look toward Eurydice on their journey out of Hades. Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice, from 2003, is receiving a revival to conclude her Signature Theatre residency. The production is directed by Les Waters, who also helmed the play at Yale in 2006 and at Second Stage in 2007. Ruhl’s mournful and whimsical take emphasizes Eurydice’s life and point of view, hence the title excising “Orpheus and,” even bestowing its heroine with some agency, especially during that oh-so-famous moment of Orpheus looking back.
The new musical Goddess signals from the get-go that it has Broadway ambitions. Vivid with saturated colors, eye-catching in Arnulfo Maldonado’s underground nightclub, and bursting with energetic dancing and singing, the Public Theater production is a grand assemblage of first-rate talent. And, as in the long-running Hadestown, another show with a subterranean setting, the characters are a mixture of supernatural entities and humans.
Bus Stop, the third of four Broadway successes that playwright William Inge scored between 1950 and 1959 (the second, Picnic, won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize), takes place in a small-town diner on a route between Kansas City and Topeka. Grace (Cindy Cheung), the proprietor, keeps the place open all night, when necessary, as a refuge for travelers marooned by inclement weather. During a blizzard, a Topeka-bound bus arrives around 1 a.m.; the driver, Carl (David Shih), informs his four passengers that they’re stranded until highway crews clear the road ahead.
Two-character plays are a tricky thing to pull off. When they are successful, they can be engaging entertainments. Sleuth boasted a great deal of mind games, along with costume changes. In the past season, The Roommate and Dakar 2000 traveled through scene and time changes, but with expectations often upended. Although Philip Stokes’s Shellshocked also relies on mind games, it feels hermetically sealed.
Cracked Open is about one family’s journey with mental illness after their 18-year-old daughter suffers a psychotic breakdown. Presented during Mental Health Awareness Month, this drama, written and directed by Gail Kriegel, explores the stigma of mental illness and the often bewildering path for a family to find an effective treatment for a loved one.
In a letter to Jay Laughlin, founder of the publishing house New Directions, in late 1945, Tennessee Williams wrote about his process: “All of my good things, the few of them, have emerged through this sort of tortured going over and over—Battle [of Angels], [The Glass] Menagerie, the few good stories. ... But always when I look back on the incredible messiness of original trials I am amazed that it comes out as clean as it does.” The bill of two one-acts under the umbrella title Outraged Hearts—early versions of The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, revived by the Fire Weeds theater company—confirms the messiness Williams alludes to. As ambitious as Fire Weeds’ project is, it yields little beyond the confirmation of Williams’s own words.
Just like that other Alexander currently celebrated on the New York stage, fashion designer Alexander McQueen rose from humble origins to make his mark in an elite milieu. Darrah Cloud’s new bio-play House of McQueen features Bridgerton heartthrob Luke Newton in the title role, with Broadway musical star Emily Skinner as McQueen’s mother, Joyce, and Catherine LeFrere as his friend and patron Isabella Blow—the two most important women in McQueen’s life.