At the heart of Heather Christian’s Oratorio for Living Things, 2022’s most penetrating new work, there’s a breathless choral recitation of the ways we might spend our lives: “Seventeen days blowing out candles…Three hours accidentally taking pictures of the inside of your pocket…Four minutes hearing your favorite song for the first time.” My rough calculations, Heather Christian-style, suggest that I’ve sat for over eight days in the theater in 2022. When you add up all your hours, her text seems to inquire: Was it worth it?
These dozen works of theater—from new, challenging plays, to revitalizing revivals of classic musicals, to redemptive restagings of underappreciated gems—should provide the answer. In a year where the theater industry powered forward, despite ongoing Covid-caused cancellations, delays, and diminished audiences, an inspiring cavalcade of new playwrights, enlightening directors, and electrifying performers burst onto the scene.
Ain’t No Mo’, Belasco Theatre
Jordan E. Cooper’s stunning Ain’t No Mo’ imagines a moment in which all Black Americans receive an email from the government inviting them to take a one-way flight to Africa. In 90 minutes of sketches, an array of citizens—a woman waiting for days at an abortion clinic, a wealthy family in their gold-laden dining room, a gaggle of reality TV stars—all weigh their options. Ain’t No Mo’ is discomfiting and disturbing, but it’s also often riotously funny and wickedly smart. Best of all are the six actors who reappear over and over again in such varied appearances, accents, and attitudes that it seems like a cast of dozens. But a special shout-out is due to Crystal Lucas-Perry in back-to-back riveting scenes as a whirligig figure called Black, escaped from a wealthy Black family’s basement to remind them, before they turn down their tickets, of the sociocultural ties they’ve turned their backs on, and as a quietly mournful inmate about to be released at last into a world that has sapped her joy from her.
English, Atlantic Theater Company
Set in a TOEFL prep class in Iran, English charts the studies of four adults striving to master a new language. Playwright Sanaz Toossi is always patient with her characters, allowing their motivations and insecurities to unspool slowly across the course of a play. Though the audience may be invited in to eavesdrop on illustrative scenes, the dramatist’s touch is light, and, especially under Knud Adams’s naturalistic direction, there’s the strong sense of a lived-in world that the characters inhabit even when we’re not looking. (Toossi’s Wish You Were Here at Playwrights Horizons was similarly moving, if not quite as meticulously sculpted in its spring debut.) Toossi’s thoughtful use of language challenged English-speaking audience’s assumptions about what language learners are capable of expressing. English’s warm, wonderful performances, especially Marjan Neshat’s stern, sad teacher, were indelible.
Golden Shield, Manhattan Theatre Club
Anchuli Felicia King’s Golden Shield pulls off an unlikely collection of ambitious aims all at once that many playwrights fail to achieve one at a time. Inspired by a real international court case of Chinese dissidents filing a class action lawsuit against a giant American technology company, Golden Shield is at once a sweeping intercontinental David-and-Goliath epic, a satirical study of the art of translation, and a tender treatment of a broken family. A rapid-fire staging from May Adrales and an enlivening scenic design from dots, an innovative collective who also energized Classic Stage Company’s haunting Snow in Midsummer this year, made the multi-lingual Golden Shield a breathtaking journey.
Into the Woods, St. James Theatre
Everything about this revival of Into the Woods is handled with a light, inviting touch. Director Lear DeBessonet excavates every moment in the woods for depths of interpersonal honesty that hover, often unseen, behind Stephen Sondheim’s cerebral words and complex harmonies. Every dissonance and layered rhyme ripples forth not from storybook characters or psychological experiments, but from genuine human beings learning how to cope. This production’s success is due, too, to a giddily revolving door of Broadway talent who have powered the run through its multiple extensions. One particularly glorious trio to highlight from the bunch: Sara Bareilles, the acclaimed singer-songwriter, radiating humor and humanity throughout her performance as the Baker’s Wife; Hamilton’s Phillipa Soo, similarly balancing delicious physical comedy and sweet sincerity as Cinderella; and Kennedy Kanagawa, making even the cow feel fully human as he breathes emotional credibility into a slinky-like Milky White.
Islander, Playhouse 46 at St. Luke’s
Unsung hero of 2022 Off Broadway theater? That may be Jennifer Pluff, the founding executive director of Playhouse 46 at St. Luke’s, who shepherded in a new era of theater in the round with the import of the Scottish two-hander, a cappella musical Islander. The terrific duo of Bethany Tennick and Kristy Findlay perform Finn Anderson’s ingenious music as they record themselves into live looping technology. There’s as much magic in watching the pair build this on-stage sound world, an exhilarating multiplication of what should be possible for two voices to create, as there is in the lovely, mythic story of a lonely girl trapped on an island and her new mysterious friend who washes ashore along with a whale with a song of its own.
The Music Man, Winter Garden Theatre
There’s plenty to pick at in this production, but when a town’s worth of kids line up behind Harold (Hugh Jackman), that unflappable Pied Piper, and starts marching, The Music Man insists on being irresistible. This musical has long had the misfortune of being both overexposed and underappreciated, a mainstay of school and amateur productions that doesn’t consistently let audiences in on the sophistication and emotional honesty of Meredith Willson’s score and storytelling. But there’s nothing simplistic about it, and this slightly zany production, deeply felt and deeply funny, and grounded in Sutton Foster’s sensitive, stirring Marian Paroo, sells the show’s intelligent warmth with a persuasiveness to rival Harold Hill himself.
Oratorio for Living Things, Ars Nova
There’s everything else this season, and then there’s Oratorio for Living Things, a sort of sung-through liturgical service exploring, through text that’s opaque and mysterious but never pretentious, what it means to be human. Staged magnificently in the round by Lee Sunday Evans, a dozen performers encircle and weave through the audience, often making gently piercing eye contact with us as they sing Heather Christian’s synergy of classical, soul, blues, and jazz styles. Since the ensemble often sings individual, overlapping vocal lines, every audience member hears unique material, glimpses into fragments of different lives. Above all, Oratorio for Living Things, culminating in a final community-affirming gesture, offers an often-overwhelming, unshakable reminder of the expansiveness of our mutual humanity. “13 seconds of true bliss” is all Christian calculates for us in a lifetime, and it’s hard to imagine I didn’t use up one or two of mine listening to her incandescent score.
A Raisin in the Sun, The Public Theater
Robert O’Hara’s sometimes harrowing, sometimes hilarious revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun illuminated all the aching depths of a play that’s too often read too close to the surface. This has been a year of O’Hara reimagining works with which we’re well-acquainted—a cut-down, Covid-era Long Day’s Journey Into Night for the Minetta Lane Theater and a Richard III starring Danai Gurira at Shakespeare in the Park—but it’s his A Raisin in the Sun that felt definitive. I remember writing an essay in middle school about the symbolism of Lena Younger’s houseplant, and Tonya Pinkins’s powerful Lena force audiences to free the play from the classroom curricula that have crusted around it, and confront its pain and vitality head-on.
Skeleton Crew, Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
Dominique Morisseau’s exquisite slow-burn of a breakroom thriller about a quartet of employees at a soon-to-shutter automotive plant in Detroit exploded on to the stage early this year. Phylicia Rashad led the excellent cast with a feisty, fiery performance as Faye, a veteran worker struggling to make ends meet. Rashad was well-matched in the always-superb Brandon J. Dirden as Reggie, her conflicted supervisor and longtime friend. Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s masterful pacing built to a first-act closer as quietly tense and suspenseful as anything onstage this year. Morisseau renders her characters with memorable precision and compelling respect.
A Strange Loop, Lyceum Theatre
Michael R. Jackson’s Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning A Strange Loop burrows deep into the unpredictable mind of Usher (Jacquel Spivey), a Black, queer usher at The Lion King who’s writing a musical about a Black, queer usher at The Lion King who’s writing a musical about…well, you get the idea. The musical immerses its audience into the infinitely vivid and complex existence of a narrator and protagonist who both creates and is the show itself. A Strange Loop deploys unfamiliar storytelling tools, like the ensemble of six Thoughts who summon Usher’s inner demons and neuroses, to amplify unfamiliar on-stage voices: To be heard, a Black, queer character like Usher needs to shatter the confidence of audiences that they know the rules of this musical theater game. But the more evident the show’s unstable structure, the more riveting it becomes, and, in bringing Usher’s vivid and complex inner life all the way to Broadway with such gripping vibrancy, Jackson nudges the musical theater form in a startling, new direction.
Wedding Band, Theatre for a New Audience
If Robert O’Hara’s production of A Raisin in the Sun sharpened audiences’ comprehension of Lorraine Hansberry’s intentions, Awoye Timpo’s gorgeous staging of Wedding Band reignited the legacy of Alice Childress, one of Hansberry’s under-celebrated contemporaries and collaborators. Just as Childress’s Trouble in Mind, which finally made it to Broadway 50 late in 2021, offers a searing commentary that could have been written today on racial (mis)representation and the silencing of Black voices in the theater industry, Wedding Band (written in 1966) is a gutting study of a 1918 interracial—and illegal—relationship in South Carolina. Through Julia and Herman, played pulsatingly by Brittany Bradford and Thomas Sadoski, Childress explores what it means to share a deep love with someone whose experiences in the world you can never fully understand, and she does so with as much fierceness as Jeremy O. Harris would dig into those same questions in Slave Play more than 50 years later.
what the end will be…, Laura Pels Theater
Three generations of a family of Black queer men come to better understand each other in this gently wrenching play by Mansa Ra. By collapsing what might well be three separate stories—a dying grandfather at last living his truth, a remarried father confronting his sense of his own masculinity, and a teenage son coming of age—under one unlikely roof, Ra creates a space that can contain a nuanced gradient of experiences where queerness is always accepted but not always understood in all its variations. And when what the end will be…, directed by Margot Bordelon, takes a swift turn towards the tragic, Ra’s world expands further through a series of heartbreaking conversations about growing old and letting go.
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