With recovery no longer so secret, a new wave of plays dealing with its realities has started to emerge. Some of the playwrights have drawn from their own lives.
Whether it’s finishing what Jane Austen started, imagining the private conversations of first ladies or inserting the personal, on London stages female playwrights are mixing things up.
A musical adaptation of the popular fantasy novel comes to Broadway and goes to Hades.
In a work opening with a goat tethered to a cinder block, the closest we get to Tchaikovsky’s ballet is four dancers representing swans.
Tim Sanford, the longtime artistic director at the prestigious Off Broadway theater, will turn over the reins to his deputy, Adam Greenfield.
The first three are to be released Friday by Ghostlight Records and the Civilians theater company.
The legendary stage actress’s character was shaped as much by the roles she lost as those she won. These are some of the ones that got away.
The 1993 comedy has a Broadway-friendly family plot, but filling one of Robin Williams’s most memorable roles could be risky.
Trip Cullman’s unmoored production of this atypical comedy from Tennessee Williams presents sexual attraction as a raging force of nature.
A complex look at democracy from an Asian perspective turns “The King and I” inside out.
The actor, best known for “Company” and “Law & Order,” cooks, chops and sautés onstage as a finicky chef in Theresa Rebeck’s play.
In Sean Daniels’s grim autobiographical comedy, a charming stage director tries, and tries again, to sober up.
TheaterWorksUSA has brought a best-selling children’s book series to the stage in a bubbly, puppet-filled musical.
Intimate but distant by design, Andy Bragen’s play takes us on a journey many are likely to face with an aging parent.
Will Arbery has brought the world of ultraconservative Catholic intellectuals to the stage in “Heroes of the Fourth Turning.” He’s pleased that they appreciate being seen, not judged.
This head-tripping play from Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, inspired by Euripides’ “The Bacchae,” allows women past and present to find catharsis in one truly wild bash.
He received widespread attention for his dramatic protest against the Roman Catholic Church after it blocked the passage of a reproductive health bill.
She bantered with John Lennon in “A Hard Day’s Night” and won a Tony for playing four women in “Stop the World — I Want to Get Off.”
Tracy Letts, the author of “August: Osage County,” reinvents the midlife crisis play with a hilarity that scalds in this Steppenwolf production.
This inaugural offering from the Coop squeezes whimsy, character comedy and ecological allegory into one crowded play.
Catya McMullen’s work is a memory play, a friendship play, a delayed coming-of-age drama and briefly a romantic comedy.
Previews, openings and some last-chance picks.
Ms. Ruhl, who learned she had Bell’s palsy in 2010, will explore her struggle with the condition in a book.
The show, now called “MJ The Musical,” will begin previews July 6 at the Neil Simon Theater.
Fierstein is no stranger to portraying women onstage. This time, he’s skipping the drag to play the outspoken politician Bella Abzug. Why him? He’s got an answer.
Berlin’s theater season opens with directors taking audiences through the fog of war, down the gloomy tunnels of cyberspace and into a world without hope.
Ross Golan’s dark chamber musical, based on a concept album, stars the excellent Joshua Henry as an innocent man on the lam.
A circle of young black playwrights is doing some of the most vital work in American theater. And Perry is at its center.
Friends and family about to be left behind when a young man goes to college reckon with a world of narrow choices in Chad Beckim’s play.
This landmark work, “a whole new form of theater,” originated with a poet, Ntozake Shange, dancing.
Readers discuss the conflict between long-held expectations of audience behavior and changing times. Also: #MeToo in teaching; the failure of our prisons.
The composer broke out with his touching musical “Ordinary Days.” He’s back with his biggest show yet, the ’70s-set tale of a treacherous burger cook with more than a resemblance to Macbeth.
An astonishing new play by Will Arbery risks a rare stage subject: Christian conservatism.
Set in a bar on Christmas Eve, this revival at the Irish Repertory Theater plays alcoholism for drama without resorting to boozy histrionics.
At 75, the actor is trying his hand at musical theater in an Off Broadway show called “Only Human.” It kind of makes sense.
The creators of “The Lightning Thief” musical may have added songs to the Percy Jackson story, but they’re not about to make the movie’s mistakes.
Experiencing Jeremy O. Harris’s provocative Broadway debut feels fraught, but invigorating.
In this haunting memoir of his relationship with a homeless man, Mr. Oliver confirms his status as a poet laureate of New York’s dispossessed.
Jeremy O. Harris’s Off Broadway hit about race and sex in America shakes things up on Broadway.
A seized phone. A stopped concert. A text from Rihanna. All are new fuel for a heated debate about theater etiquette in the digital age.
Ms. Carroll was part of my extended family, that fabulous aunt who commanded attention by simply walking into the room.
Diahann Carroll won the Tony Award for best actress in a musical for her role in “No Strings,” playing an American fashion model living in Paris.
Previews, openings and some last-chance picks.
George Bernard Shaw gets sensitively streamlined in a briskly entertaining production with winning performers at its center.
This exultant evening of improvised rap — created by Thomas Kail, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Anthony Veneziale — turns out to be a perfect fit for Broadway.
Gay dads and their “woke genius” daughter face the limitations of life in a patchy new play by Jeff Augustin.
A veteran of the newspaper that covered Vincent A. Cianci Jr.’s travails gets all the inside jokes in “The Prince of Providence,” the hit play about him. So, it seems, does everyone in the audience.
With a cast that includes amateur actors from Paris’s deprived suburbs, “The Just Assassins” gives ethnic minority actors a chance to shine onstage at one of the city’s most hallowed theaters.
You know him from “Spring Awakening,” “Hamilton” and “Mindhunter.” But he feels most like himself as the nebbishy hero of “Little Shop of Horrors,” and he’s returning Off Broadway to prove it.
Brian Cox plays Lyndon B. Johnson at the height of his powers, when history decided to bring him down.
Mr. Sunshine is one of the rare Westerners to become a master of the centuries-old Japanese comic storytelling form.
Ben Brantley and Jesse Green respond to readers curious about the Tony race, hungry for happy fare, and heading to London.
Kate Hamill and Andrus Nichols made their names in a theater company specializing in scaled-down classics. Now they’re forming their own troupe.
The downtown rock raconteuse Tammy Faye Starlite is celebrating the 40th anniversary of “Broken English” in this hybrid of a show.
A director and a composer play versions of themselves in a fascinating but frustrating reconsideration of a movie infamous for its use of blackface.
A new work from one of the indisputably great directors is partly a tribute to theater and partly a warning about theatricality.
Previews, openings and some last-chance picks.
An easily legible production of the ancient Greek tragedy borrows from the tradition of Noh theater at the Park Avenue Armory.
The rapper and actor missed having a “Hamilton” moment with his longtime collaborators. But after getting sober and forging his own path, he’s ready to spit the truth.
From a member of Parliament in “Hansard” to the users of a threatened community center in “Faith, Hope and Charity,” London theaters are exploring how power works.
A barbed comedy takes a grim turn when friends find themselves tested over how far they’ll go to defend their choices and protect their children.
As a work of high drama, Jesse Green writes, the Trump-Zelensky script lacks stagecraft and subtlety.
Mac Wellman’s ode to theater does away with character and basic grammar. Here, language baffles and delights.
The star and the playwright of “The Sound Inside” talk about confidence and fame, monsters and witches, and their dogs.
Alexis Scheer’s vibrant play about four teenage girls, a Ouija board and a narco-terrorist summons the truly scary spirits that keep us awake at night.
Florian Zeller’s tiresome new play features Jonathan Pryce and Eileen Atkins as a long-married couple, one of whom may be dead.
In Jack Thorne’s listless new play, a group of feckless friends gather to discuss Anne Tyler and share their self-consciousness.
In ‘runboyrun’ and ‘In Old Age,’ the latest installments of Mfoniso Udofia’s nine-play cycle, America is no place to hide from the past.
John Glover lifts Michael Tucker’s otherwise convoluted and crowded dramedy of baby boomers contemplating life on a commune.
This distillation of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel, by the director who deconstructed “Oklahoma!,” catalogs the clutter of the American mind.
In Elizabeth Streb and Anne Bogart’s “Falling & Loving,” dancers and actors share the stage with the Guck Machine, which emits a waterfall of food andother objects.
The epicenter of New York’s AIDS epidemic, St. Vincent’s (1849-2010) is the subject of a memorial service that’s also a play.
A scholar in England suspected annotations in a First Folio at the Free Library of Philadelphia were John Milton’s, so he connected the dots with someone who had studied the work for a decade.
Previews, openings and some last-chance picks.
The long-awaited spectacle that relaunched the Théâtre du Châtelet was cheerful, but disappointing.
Works by Lauren Gunderson, Lauren Yee and Larissa FastHorse see multiple productions, while “Bright Star” proves a popular musical.
As a boy, he met the famed institution’s founder, Lillian Wald, and became a benefactor. In midcareer, he traded Wall Street investing for writing short stories and plays.
Bob Stevens’s fond look at a life-changing night for the young Beatles should satisfy more than die-hard fans.
Her Madame X show reimagines pop spectacle for a theater stage, merging her newest music and calls for political awareness with striking intimacy.
His eyesight failing but schedule still packed, the 94-year-old stage director reflects on a globe-spanning career that includes a New York premiere this week.
By definition, live theater vanishes in the moment; Ms. Corwin pushed to have shows videotaped and deposited in a library collection, which she ran for decades.
Laurence Fishburne and Sam Rockwell will star as the junk store hustlers in the revival of the 1975 play.