The Best Theater of 2025 Came From Extraordinary Playwriting Rather Than Hollywood Stars

In 2025, the play was thing. As expensive musical productions struggled, new and revived dramas drew fans and critical praise, if not always massive sales, on and off-Broadway. The heroes weren’t stars like Denzel Washington and George Clooney—who broke box office records with meh performances in, respectively, “Othello” and an adaptation of the film “Good Night, and Good Luck”—but the playwrights themselves.Jordan Harrison and Samuel D. Hunter, extraordinary writers whose probing, moving works had been praised for years, introduced plays off-Broadway in February, then enjoyed triumphant (if criminally belated) Broadway debuts in the fall. There were also new or substantially revised works by Pulitzer Prize winner Martyna Majok and finalist Rajiv Joseph, along with classics by bards ranging from Shakespeare to Alice Childress.Our critic recounts these and other highlights of the past twelve months, roughly in order of their arrival.“The Antiquities” With his latest outing—titled, in full, “A Tour of the Permanent Collection in the Museum of Late Human Antiquities”—Mr. Harrison and directors David Cromer and Caitlin Sullivan reminded us that our obsession with advancing technology is nothing new, and envisioned, with characteristic empathy and ingenuity, its terrifying potential for the future.“Henry IV” Director and actor Dakin Matthews brought his lively fusion of Shakespeare’s two plays following the king, first presented at Lincoln Center Theater more than 20 years ago, to a cozier space provided by Brooklyn’s Theatre for a New Audience, enabling his superb new cast—including Jay O. Sanders, a predictably outstanding Falstaff—to get closer to and occasionally mingle with audience members.“Grangeville” Mr. Hunter set this account of two estranged half-brothers both in his native Idaho, where most of his plays unfold, and in the Netherlands, but retained the sometimes harrowing intimacy and abiding but unsentimental compassion that generally distinguishes his work—beautifully served by Jack Serio’s appropriately minimalist staging.“Purpose” After making a searing Broadway debut with 2023’s “Appropriate,” Branden Jacobs-Jenkins secured his place as his generation’s most astute and scathingly funny chronicler of family dysfunction with this account of a prominent civil rights leader and his very different sons. Phylicia Rashad helmed a dynamite company in her own first undertaking as a Broadway director.“Wine in the Wilderness” Another duly acclaimed actress turned director, LaChanze—also a hugely successful producer in recent years—recruited another wonderful ensemble to revive Wildress’s gem, a “Pygmalion”-like tale set in 1960s Harlem, for Classic Stage Company. The heroine was played by oneOlivia Washington, who outshone her movie-star dad’s performance uptown.“The Swamp Dwellers” Wole Soyinka’s one-act piece, written in the late 1950s, when the Nobel Prize-winning playwright and poet was still a student, is set in a village in the Nigerian Delta. But its themes—of love and betrayal, faith and family, tradition and corruption—are timeless and universal, and directing the play for Theatre for a New Audience, Awoye Timpo underlined the lyricism, humor, and wisdom of Mr. Soyinka’s writing.“Floyd Collins” More than 30 years after its world premiere, Jason Robert Brown’s supple and affecting musical—drawn from the real-life horror story of an explorer who wound up trapped in a Kentucky cave—got the epic, stirring Broadway production it deserved. And in the title role, Jeremy Jordan, who had charmed audiences in lighter fare for years, proved himself a leading man with real dramatic chops.“Angry Alan” Rather than deliver yet another petty, whiny tirade about toxic masculinity, Penelope Skinner attacked and explored modern misogyny in a witty, disturbing, and nuanced account of one fellow’s descent into the “manosphere,” online platforms stemming from noxious reactions to second-wave feminism but newly empowered in our post-#MeToo era. John Krasinski, best known for playing a nice guy on TV’s “The Office,” charted Alan’s fall to hilarious and ultimately devastating effect.“Caroline” Preston Max Allen’s riveting new play ostensibly focused on challenges faced by a transgender child and her mom, but its deeply humane vision and canny twists could blur the lines between what we consider traditional and radical. Mr. Cromer directed the marvelous cast—including a preternaturally gifted River Lipe-Smith, only 11 at the time—with his usual sensitivity and insight.Jon Michael Hill as Naz, Kara Young as Aziza, and Harry Lennix as Solomon in ‘Purpose.’ Marc J. Franklin“Queens” “Liberation,” Bess Wohl’s tribute to ‘70s feminists, may have gotten more attention, especially after transferring to Broadway, but Ms. Majok’s haunting account of female immigrants living in a hidden basement apartment—substantially revised since its premiere in 2018—covered more ground and featured more finely drawn, compelling characters. And Trip Cullman elicited knockout performances from celebrated troupers such as Marin Ireland and Julia Lester. “Kyoto” Political docudrama doesn’t get much juicier than Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson’s crackling re-enactment of negotiations leading to the Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 treaty aimed at reducing the global emission of greenhouse gases. (Who’d have thought?) Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin’s London-based production proceeded at a dizzying, dazzling pace, propelled by a top-notch cast led by American actor Stephen Kunken as a lawyer and lobbyist scheming to sink the process.“Little Bear Ridge Road” Like “Grangeville,” Mr. Hunter’s first Broadway outing followed relatives with a strained relationship—in this case, an aunt and nephew—brought together by family hardship. But “Little Bear” was even more biting in its humor and more luminous in its emotional and spiritual grace, and Joe Mantello culled exceptional performances from his actors, including a typically razor-sharp Laurie Metcalf and a dry, stunning Micah Stock.“The Baker’s Wife” Director Gordon Greenberg recruited some of the finest stage actors and singers in the business for this toasty-warm, glistening revival of Stephen Schwartz and Joseph Stein’s cult favorite. Ariana DeBose, the Oscar-winning leading lady, brought a revelatory gentleness and warmth to the heroine, a young French woman torn between the older husband who adores her and a lusty roué, and she and her castmates did full justice to Mr. Schwartz’s enduringly sumptuous score.“Archduke” Mr. Joseph re-imagined key events precipitating World War I for this bleakly hilarious, unexpectedly touching absurdist thriller, which provided star turns for a pair of theater favorites, Patrick Page and Kristine Nielsen. Under Darko Tresjnjak’s robust direction, three relatively inexperienced players — Jake Berne, Adrien Rolet, and Jason Sanchez — proved equally impressive.“Oedipus” Playwright and director Robert Icke recast Sophocles’s tragic hero as a contemporary politician in this breathtaking adaptation, which arrived from the U.K. with its original leading players on board: a blazingly charismatic Mark Strong and, in her Broadway debut, the great Lesley Manville, who won an Olivier Award for her witty, heartbreaking Jocasta.“Marjorie Prime” Mr. Harris’s prescient, Pulitzer-nominated study of an elderly widow’s relationship with an A.I.-generated facsimile of her late husband, first produced in 2014, finally made it to Broadway, opening earlier this month. Its starry, flawless cast includes Cynthia Nixon and Danny Burstein, but the standout is, in the title role, the miraculous, 96-year-old June Squibb; I can’t wait to see what she does next.

The Best Theater of 2025 Came From Extraordinary Playwriting Rather Than Hollywood Stars

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