The Best Theatre of 2025

In September, the playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney returned to his career-making breakthrough from 2007, a mythopoeic tale about Oshoosi Size (Alani iLongwe), a gifted singer who has returned home from prison, on probation, and his brother, Ogun Size (André Holland), a rule-follower who can not let Oshoosi feel free. Moving around and between the Sizes is the mysterious Elegba (Malcolm Mays), whose influence over Oshoosi seems both dangerous and loving; in the play’s trickster paradigm, these are the same thing. McCraney co-directed this production with Bijan Sheibani, and while McCraney’s writing has always been musical, this beautifully calibrated iteration—performed in the round, with a live drummer playing accompaniment—achieved a surprising symphonic grandeur.

“Ragtime”

Vivian Beaumont

Terrence McNally, Stephen Flaherty, and Lynn Ahrens’s 1996 musicalization of E. L. Doctorow’s superb 1975 novel returned first via the Encores series, in a stripped-down 2024 production by Lear deBessonet; it then followed her to Lincoln Center, where she recently became the new artistic director. Even among an impressive company of Broadway giants, Joshua Henry stands out, with a performance that seems to give voice to generations of rage, not to mention the terror of our own moment. Henry plays the pianist Coalhouse Walker, Jr., a Black man insulted and tormented to the point of violence, who tries to shout down an entire country. “Make them hear you! Make them hear you!” he sings, and his immense, generation-defining baritone shakes the pillars of the house.

“The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella”

Powerhouse Arts

Carolina Bianchi’s difficult, profoundly disturbing piece, created with the Cara de Cavalo collective from Brazil (co-presented in New York by Powerhouse: International and the Crossing the Line Festival), begins as an impassioned lecture on theatre, suffering, and performance art. Her tribute to Pippa Bacca, a real artist who was killed while hitchhiking as part of a performance piece, eventually becomes an experiment that Bianchi conducts on herself, in which she drinks a sedative onstage and “participates” in the rest of the show unconsciously, as a limp body manipulated by the company. Even after she falls asleep, we still seem to hear Bianchi, whose words appear projected on a screen, recounting story after story of sexual assault and murder. Onstage, she curls up, suggesting by her appalling vulnerability how easily these stories of femicidal violence could be our own.

“The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire”