In the late 1970s, when playwright Sam Shepard decided to move on from his short experimental works staged at La Mama in the East Village, the Royal Court in London, and the Magic Theatre in San Francisco, he turned to the American theater’s standby—a dysfunctional family. The result was the three-act Curse of the Starving Class. The disintegrating family would be the focus of True West and Buried Child, perhaps his two most famous works, but the seeds are already sprouting wildly in Curse.

The Mint Theater Company is doing what it does best: acquainting audiences with a long-ago play, and author, most people have probably never heard of. Here the author is Harold Brighouse, and the play, Garside’s Career. Billed by the Mint as “bright, witty political satire,” it traverses more genres than that, also taking in domestic drama and commentary on relations between the sexes, and serves as parable about misplaced ambition. The production is mostly excellent. The bright and the witty are relative.

One month after Suffs, a celebration of first-wave feminism, closed on Broadway, playwright Bess Wohl shines a spotlight on the second wave in Liberation. Wohl offers vividly sketched characters, a well-honed mix of comedy and drama, and a complex yet heartening portrayal of sisterhood, but falters a bit incorporating her family history into the plotline and attempting to reconcile the 1970s women movement’s racial blind spots.

At the start of Still, two people—long ago, a couple; now, well over 60—are getting reacquainted in a swank hotel bar with a cocktail and a conundrum. Helen (Melissa Gilbert) comments that “the cells in your body” are “renewing themselves all the time,” and “after seven years you’re a completely different person,” at least “on a cellular level.” Mark (Mark Moses) recalls a “brain teaser” about a ship: “it’s made of wood, and every time part of it breaks they replace it with a part made of metal. And eventually every single part has been replaced. Is it still the same ship?”

The actor Dakin Matthews won a special Drama Desk award in 2003 when he adapted both parts of Shakespeare’s King Henry IV into a single, albeit lengthy, version produced at Lincoln Center. His edit allowed regional theaters to present the histories of Henry IV; his son Prince Hal; and the roguish Falstaff in one production, lessening the expense of mounting two separate ones. The adaptation removes lesser characters, such as Mouldy and Rumour in part 2, and trims extended metaphors and a lot of obscure Elizabethan humor. But the famous scenes and lines remain—“I am not only witty in myself, but the cause of wit in other men,” “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” “We have heard the chimes at midnight.”

Night Sings Its Songs is a rare opportunity to see a play by Jon Fosse, the Norwegian winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature. Fosse’s 1997 play is centered on a married couple, named only Young Man and Young Woman. From the outset it’s clear they are having marital difficulties. Young Man (Kyle Cameron) is unhappy and apathetic, while Young Woman is dissatisfied in her marriage and feeling stuck. They have a baby who periodically cries.

With My Man Kono, now premiering at Pan Asian Repertory, playwright Philip W. Chung has an interesting story to tell. He tells it dutifully, thoroughly, and for the most part clearly. But not excitingly. Chung has done his research. His title character, Toraichi Kono (Brian Lee Huynh), was a Japanese immigrant who made it to the United States in the early 20th century and rose to a position of relative wealth and importance, then saw his fortunes dramatically reverse.

Stories on stage and screen that engage with, critique, or warn about artificial intelligence (AI) are as much in vogue as AI itself. McNeal, about art and AI, recently concluded its Broadway run; We Are Your Robots and Prometheus Firebringer at Theater for a New Audience addressed collective veneration of the technology Off-Broadway; and Companion, a twisted and funny exploration of human and nonhuman desire, opened this month in movie theaters. Now, Jordan Harrison’s The Antiquities, an episodic look at our current technological moment—or precipice—through the artificial eyes of the future, enters the AI discourse at Playwrights Horizons (co-produced with the Vineyard Theatre and the Goodman Theatre).

Beckett Briefs, the rubric for three short plays by Samuel Beckett at the Irish Repertory Theatre, provides a rare look at works by the dramatist whose Waiting for Godot has overshadowed all theater since the mid-20th-century. The progression of plays devised by director Ciarán Hinds moves from the slightest, Not I, featuring only a mouth speaking, to Play, in which only three heads appear, to the longest, and most fruitfully theatrical, Krapp’s Last Tape, featuring Oscar winner F. Murray Abraham, head to toe. All three works are suffused with regrets about or outrage at the setbacks, blunders, jealousy, and dishonesty in the characters’ lives.

Although the all-Asian, all-female production of Shakespeare’s late romance Cymbeline by the National American Asian Theatre Company (NAATCO) doesn’t succeed on all dramatic fronts, it’s brimming with vitality. It draws on fairy-tale elements, including a wicked queen, an unscrupulous villain, a wronged hero, and an extended scene of revelations that give it the aura of a fairy tale. Cymbeline perhaps can best be summed up as a myth of national origin that reveals how the British and Roman heritages came together under its ancient, peace-loving title character.  

It was the summer of 1947, and Tennessee Williams needed a man—a leading man, that is, for his newest work, a feral little melodrama called A Streetcar Named Desire. Veteran film star John Garfield was the top contender for the part, but as posited in Kowalski, Gregg Ostrin’s seductive, and occasionally true new play, a 23-year-old Marlon Brando won the role of Stanley over the course of a single, drink-filled evening at Williams’s bungalow in Provincetown, Mass.

Blind Runner, written and directed by Amir Reza Koohestani, features only two actors. Set in Iran, the play is about a husband (Mohammed Reza Hosseinzadeh) and wife (Ainaz Azarhoush) who now only meet during prison visiting hours. Neither has an actual name. Wife is serving a sentence for something she posted on social media. Although it’s not specific, there is a suggestion she showed support for women who protested the 2022 killing of Mahsa Amini by the Guidance Patrol, a type of morality police. The post alters the lives of the couple.

This production has transferred to the Women’s Project Theater (2162 Broadway at 76th) and will run through Jan. 19. For tickets and more information, visit mrssternwanders.com.

Jenny Lyn Bader’s Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library is an intellectually stimulating and profoundly moving historical drama currently running at 59E59 Theaters. Directed by Ari Laura Kreith, and inspired by real events, the play is a compelling portrait of a young Gestapo officer who arrests a graduate student suspected of illegal research.

For a while in Ken Urban’s play A Guide for the Homesick, the author’s subject seems predictable. Set in Amsterdam, near Schiphol airport, the two-hander opens with a tall, strapping black man named Teddy (McKinley Belcher III) inviting a younger, white backpacker into his room. They’ve just met at a hotel bar, where the backpacker, Jeremy (Uly Schlesinger), has missed his flight. Teddy offers his guest a beer and a floor to sleep on, but the situation vibrates with sexual tension.

Kallan Dana’s new play Racecar Racecar Racecar is an original tale of a daughter-dad adventure in which character is tested, quite literally, if preposterously, during a cross-country road trip. Directed by Sarah Blush, and making its world premiere at A.R.T/New York Theatres, this surreal one-act play packs an emotional punch.

It’s impossible to discuss Pen Pals, Michael Griffo’s new two-hander at the Theatre at St. Clement’s, without first bringing up A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters. A Pulitzer Prize finalist, Love Letters consisted of nothing more than two actors reading letters to each other, recounting an epistolary romance spanning almost a half-century. It was so popular because, first of all, it was easy to produce: small set, small cast, and celebrity actors who could jet into town, get onstage, and read the text without having to memorize anything.

What does it take to turn an extraordinary Shakespearean tragedy into an extraordinary production? The first step is vision. King Lear, with Kenneth Branagh in the title role, reflects the artistic vision and collaborative muscle of a directing triumvirate—Branagh, Lucy Skillbeck, and Rob Ashford. They have reduced the Bard’s three-hour-plus saga to two hours with no intermission and cast current and former Royal Academy of Dramatic Art students to bring new energy to a complex story. This series of theatrical risks yields cohesive and riveting theater.

Michelle Kholos Brooks writes powerful dramas about salient issues. Together with director Sarah Norris, she has created a viscerally, emotionally gripping tableau of remembrance. With maximum impact, Kholos Brooks’s Room 1214 hits gun violence out of the ballpark.

In The Blood Quilt by Katori Hall, four half-sisters gather a few weeks after their mother’s funeral for an annual rite of stitching a quilt. As they congregate in their childhood home, the quartet of archetypal characters rehash old conflicts with their different personalities and views of tradition.

When aging genius Orson Welles and actor Sir Laurence Olivier meet in Ireland after many years, each brings his own “baggage” and sparks fly. Add to them the characters of theater critic Kenneth Tynan; Vivien Leigh, Olivier’s almost ex-wife; Joan Plowright, Olivier’s new woman; and an audacious Irishman, and play production bedlam prevails. With Orson’s Shadow, playwright and director Austin Pendleton, together with his codirector David Schweizer, has created a masterpiece that qualifies as much as comedy as it does drama.

Artemisia Gentileschi, the real-life subject of Kate Hamill’s uneven new drama The Light and the Dark, survived rape and a harrowing experience at her assailant’s trial to become the most accomplished female painter of the Renaissance. While Hamill’s approach to telling Gentileschi’s life story is ill-conceived in places, the playwright understands its power as a triumph over patriarchy.

In 2021, Sam Kissajukian created 300 large-scale paintings over only five months. This astonishing creative output is even more mind-boggling because Kissajukian wasn’t a trained or practiced artist—he was a stand-up comedian who had become disillusioned with the profession and moved into isolation in a windowless concrete warehouse. And, it turned out, he was experiencing a prolonged manic episode as a result of undiagnosed bipolar disorder.

The Oxford English Dictionary lists eight different meanings of the word babe, and that’s not even counting the famous talking pig. Playwright Jessica Goldberg is specifically interested in two of them. In Babe, her 2022 short and sour drama, currently receiving a well-appointed staging by the New Group, Goldberg offers an example of how the term can simultaneously signal affection and condescension. Pitting a powerful, wrong-headed man against two smart women of different generations, the trio admire one another for their singular skills while ruing the destructive power plays that undo their workplace relationship.

Loneliness and pandemic: two words that soared in usage in 2020 and 2021, when the COVID lockdowns kept people apart from their friends, family and regular activities. That pandemic is not the one playwright Olivia Haller references in the title Loneliness Was a Pandemic. Her occasionally thoughtful but not fully engaging drama (in which the word pandemic is never said) is concerned with another topic that’s been top of mind over the past few years: artificial intelligence.

Given recent electoral events it doesn’t require a huge imaginative leap to envisage a dystopian United States in the “not-so-distant future.” That future is when Amy Berryman’s philosophical, sci-fi–infused play Walden, which premiered on London’s West End and now comes to Second Stage Theater, takes place, depicting a world wrecked by climate catastrophe, human folly, and rapaciousness.

It’s a fallacy that addiction can be cured by a stint in rehab. Anyone celebrating sobriety can affirm that the process of recovery takes decades—and is often lifelong. Nevertheless, a rehab experience can trigger a life-changing awakening. This unpredictable process is at the center of Spike Manton and Harry Teinowtiz’s Another Shot, a poignant exploration of Teinowitz’s alcoholism and treatment. Director Jackson Gay keeps the play teetering between denial and acceptance, and between comedy and tragedy.

The price of fame is at the heart of Kenneth Lonergan’s Hold On to Me Darling, a 2016 play that premiered at the Atlantic Theater Company, directed by Neil Pepe. In Pepe’s superbly cast revival, Adam Driver now plays the main character, Strings McCrane, a renowned but feckless country and western singer who enjoys casual romantic relationships but wants more.

Song and story teach us that what a child experiences on a trip to grandmother’s house can go one of two ways. There might be pumpkin pie after a voyage over the river and through the woods. Or, as with the central character in Robyne Parrish’s grim and haunting Tin Church, a nightmare awaits, big and bad as any wolf and capable of swallowing a body whole.

Around three-quarters of the way through Martha Pichey’s inchoate grief drama Ashes & Ink, Kathryn Erbe delivers a monologue that should open the play. It’s the only monologue in Ashes & Ink, and all the experiences that Erbe, as Molly, refers to in it predate the action in the play, so it would be more appropriate at the top of the show, to lay the scene. Coming so late, it just expresses thoughts and feelings the audience is already aware Molly has.