Compiled by Bill Marx

Our critics salute the year’s outstanding productions.

Robert Israel

American dramatist John Guare made this trenchant comparison: “Novelists are only a couple hundred years old. Playwrights are a couple thousands of years old.” Throughout the millennia, playwrights have scribbled away and shared their vision in the face of plagues, pandemics, wars, censorship, imprisonment, and economic downturns. Yet, as the late playwright/Czech President Václav Havel noted, “Vision is not enough, it must be combined with venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps, we must step up the stairs.”

We are living in dangerous times. We have a deranged felon as president-elect who has promised to carry out mass immigration deportations, who denies climate change, and who, in fiery, bellicose speeches, threatens to unleash nuclear weapons. Now, more than ever, we need playwrights to supply visionary dramatic voices that will help us maintain our perspective — and keep our sanity. It’s up to audiences to encourage the playwrights and companies to push inspiring scripts up the stairs.

Of course, that doesn’t mean we’ll get what we wish for. As we bound into 2025, will Boston audiences see productions that speak truth to power? Will artistic directors take risks and reach out to audiences with new and insightful plays? Will we get daring scripts or entertainments tasked to play it safe?

So here’s my New Year’s wish: Challenge audiences and they will respond with applause and financial support. They will go the extra mile to help spread the word, too, the kind of response that publicists live for. (At the moment publicists — “influencers” — are too busy squawking hype into social media megaphones.) Nix on the carny-barking. Trust audiences to make informed decisions.

Enter the critics: The late Huntington Theatre Company director Nicky Martin once told me, “Theater critics today don’t love the theater. They don’t have a sense of history about the theater.” It was a harsh assessment. But Nicky had endured the wrath of New York critics with axes to grind, and he was left battered, bruised, and embittered. He told me that a New York Times critic once sliced and diced a show he directed, disparaging an actor Nicky revered (Nathan Lane), comparing Lane’s performance to the work of another actor the critic had not seen perform. Nicky took his loathing for that critic to his grave. I’m reminded of the loutish Dan in Patrick Marber’s play Closer, who says, “I’m a sort of journalist. I write obituaries.” A review should never be a death notice. A critic should be about discrimination: supply good and bad points, provide examples, and uphold journalistic ethics. The other side of the coin, happy talk, is also anathema to serious criticism. Reviewers who offer blanket praise do nothing but sugarcoat. Achieving evaluative balance is the key.

After decades as a critic, I long for theatrical experiences that bring disparate elements — acting, script, directing, set design, sound/lighting — together. This is the best kind of alchemy, one that transforms and transports me and my fellow theatergoers to another place, another time. It’s hard work. But when it happens, it can seem magical. And we, in the audience, are the admiring beneficiaries. So, a message to theater troupes, directors, and publicists for 2025: invite us to take the journey together, and let’s walk up the stairs.

Here’s my “best list” for 2024:

• Best Production: A Case for the Existence of God, by Samuel D. Hunter. SpeakEasy Stage, Boston. It took 10 years for a new Hunter play to be produced in Boston after SpeakEasy presented his drama The Whale. Was it worth the wait? Absolutely. Particularly because A Case… was given such an insightful and feisty production. Must we wait another decade to see another play by this playwright? Let that not be so. Hunter has a new play premiering in New York – Grangeville — set to be staged in February 2025. Will a local troupe bring it to Boston when it completes its NYC run? It stars Academy Award winner Brendan Fraser, who appeared in the film version of The Whale. Any takers? And, while we’re at it: how about staging another play by the gifted Branden Jacobs-Jenkins? In 2025, it’ll be 10 years since he’s been produced locally.
• Best Performer: Karen MacDonald, Pru Payne, SpeakEasy Stage, Boston. The script demanded that the actress take on the role of a self-centered, loquacious scribe who struggles with dementia and who reveals her frailties to us as her life is whittled away before our eyes. MacDonald delivered a bravura performance.

Most Promising: Sojourners, by Mfoniso Udofia, directed by Dawn M. Simmons, at Huntington Theatre Company, in collaboration with Front Porch Arts Collective, Boston. This production (Arts Fuse review) is the first in a projected nine-play cycle by a gifted playwright (who owes the ambition of its vision to the late August Wilson, who completed a 10-play cycle). The effort demonstrates one way in which a community-wide commitment can sustain live theater and engage audiences now and in the years beyond. The first play offered insight into the backstories of the characters. Will upcoming productions address contemporary issues such as Trump’s threats to deport millions of illegal immigrants?

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David Greenham

I had the pleasure of reviewing 17 productions for the Arts Fuse in 2024, and yes, they are self-selected for the most part. But I’m happy to report that I found a notable uptick in the number of productions mounted in the region (along with three in the UK and Ireland) that were rooted in themes and issues that are relevant to us today.

Editor Bill Marx and I, and many others, have been consistent in our pleas over several years for theaters to produce work that speaks directly to the issues on the minds of their communities. Maybe the shift is starting to happen.

For me, five productions stood out for their willingness to make audiences think while also providing mesmerizing performances, sparkling ensembles, engaging direction, and unified visions from technical artists.

The best of the year for me, was the fruit of a healthy collaboration between theater companies. Merrimack Repertory Theatre and Cincinnati Shakespeare Company joined forces to create a compelling production of David Catlin’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The cast — led by Jasimine Bouldin’s Mary Shelley and John Patrick Hayden’s Percy Bysshe Shelley/Dr. Victor Frankenstein — was excellent, and director Brian Isaac Phillips showed a deft hand in telling this complicated version of the novel, which interweaves the story’s characters with 19th-century writer/celebrities. In my review I wrote, “Is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein relevant? Given that the monster we have elected, America’s first President to be tried and convicted of crimes, is a creature who appears to be immune from the laws and the Constitution, it is fair to speculate that Victor may be speaking of us when he declares, ‘In our ignorance we unleash a trove of ills on the world.’”

A different kind of potential horror story, Francisco Mendoza’s Machine Learning, was mounted on stage by Central Square Theater, another wonderful partnership, this time between Central Square and Teatro Chelsea. A new kind of monster was spotlighted in this show: his name was Arnold (played by Gabriel Vega Weissman, who also directed the production). Arnold’s AI voice has been manufactured by tech aficionado Jorge (an engaging Armando Rivera), an ambitious student whose goal was to develop a caregiver for his cantankerous dying father, Gabriel (a nuanced Jorge Alberto Rubio). The evening was an unsteady dive into the future, though not entirely depressing. Given that real intelligence seems to be waning in our world, it makes sense that artificial intelligence needs to be brought in, if only as a reinforcement.

Central Square Theater also scored a hit with a strange love story between a brilliant and patient scientist, Dr. Irene Pepperberg (Stephanie Clayman), and her equally brilliant though brutally stubborn gray parrot, Alex (Jon Vellante). Based on a true story, Laura Maria Censabella’s play Beyond Words, was one of the season’s most unlikely successes. Jon Vellante gave a tour-de-force performance as the moody bird with a delightful sense of humor. And kudos to Central Square Theater and MIT’s Catalyst Collaborative for the Brit d’Arbeloff Women in Science program for their support of stories that meld science and art.

First time playwright Michael R. Jackson also went in an innovative direction with his feisty and bizarre A Strange Loop, a musical that mostly takes place in the protagonist’s head. SpeakEasy Stage and Front Porch Collective collaborated on the Boston premiere of this Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning musical. Kai Clifton delivered a masterful performance as Usher, a gay, recovering evangelical Christian, who works as an usher at a production of The Lion King. He’s haunted by an iCloud of Unproductive Thoughts played by Grant Evan, Davron S. Monroe, Jonathan Melo, De’Lon Grant, Aaron Michael Ray, and Zion Middleton. A smart team — director Maurice Emmanuel Parent, music director David Freeman Coleman, and choreographer Taavon Gamble — generated a fast-paced effusion of theatrical energy that was both hysterical and heartbreaking.

And finally, one of my most memorable nights at the theater is one that I understood the least. While on vacation in Dublin I ventured to the historic Olympia Theatre to catch Emmet Kirwan’s Dublin Oldschool which had been a huge hit a decade earlier at the Dublin Fringe Festival. Raw and rough around the edges, the play was an intense (and overwhelming) verbal waterfall, an explosion of contemporary (slang aplenty) language from wannabe DJ Jason (Kirwan), who runs into his long-hiding brother Daniel (Ian Lloyd Anderson).

Just two guys in contemporary clothes on an empty stage, some simple light, and a couple of microphones on stands. That was all that was needed to probe — via exhilarating gallows humor — the many permutations of urban despair: alcoholism, drug abuse, homelessness, the loss of opportunity, the extinction of hope. It was a raucous night as shouts of agreement amid gales of knowing laughter erupted from the sold-out crowd. This was theater as cri du coeur: it felt as if the production had leaped up from the ground so it could scream at the powers-that-be, the privileged-in-charge.

Given the results of our election, I won’t be surprised if some theater artists decide to claw their way to the microphone and bellow a word or two about where the country is headed. Now that would make for compelling theater!

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Bill Marx

I will stick to what I said in a February commentary this year about the current creative inertia of Boston-area theaters, encouraged by the complicity of our mainstream media.  I completely agree with Bob Israel and David Greenham’s call for productions that address current realities. Hearing from independent voices is essential at a time authoritarian strongmen are afoot and members of the (former) opposition are beginning to fall in line. The problem is that, in the past, small theaters took on this kind of risky work but, post-Covid, these enterprising troupes have either vanished or are struggling. We desperately need companies staffed by fledgling artists eager to take chances. The large and medium-sized theaters are not interested in challenging audiences: they are pretty much playing it safe (politically and artistically), waddling along as they vacuum up available resources from people and organizations that are content with the status quo. The Broadway-or-bust ethos of Diane Paulus, the artistic director of the American Repertory Theater, predominates, which means commercial material is marketed as boundary-breaking. Unfortunately, it is a lesson in bait-and-switch other theaters are picking up on.

For me, the question for 2025 Boston-area theater is this: Must the stage only discreetly charm the bourgeoisie? The 2024 shows I want to recognize, produced by small theaters, thunder no.

Little Peasants, produced by the nonprofit Food Tank, ran for two nights at the Burren in Davis Square. Performed by actors on book, the workshop staging was set at a coffee shop in the heartland, part of a national chain (think Starbucks) whose workers are about to vote on whether to organize and become part of a union. A female corporate honcho who started out as a barista and a professional antiunion lawyer have flown in to stop the effort. Their cushy jobs are very much on the line. Meanwhile, a diverse assemblage of workers must face their fears as they calculate what they stand to gain or lose if they join a union. Dramatist Bernie Pollack did an effective job (albeit indulging in some caricature) of dramatizing various economic/ethical issues, ranging from low wages and disrespectful treatment to corporate spying and union problems with diversity. A drama about forming a union that addressed economic inequality and cast aspersions on the holy grail of entrepreneurship? A script that reflects today’s labor turmoil? As I write this, workers at Starbucks across the country (“some 5,000 workers at what organizers said was more than 300 stores in 45 states”) are on strike. You mean the bourgeoisie won’t get their lattes?

The political relevance of Swiss dramatist Max Frisch’s 1953 play The Arsonists is chillingly clear. Interweaving comedy and tragedy, the script dramatizes how the privileged repress troubling realities for the sake of maintaining their comfort: in this case, it is the predicament of an upper-middle-class man who knows/doesn’t know why he is surrounded by disasters — night after night, parts of his city are being set ablaze. Of course, he doesn’t think he needs to take action — it couldn’t happen to his home. I saw the Praxis Stage production early on and it was lumpy, though I assume a director with the savvy of Robert Scanlan probably ironed out the kinks by the end of the run. Still, despite the staging’s muddiness, its message, as articulated by Scanlan in his Arts Fuse interview, was crystal clear: “It’s not just some generic ‘evil’ the play protests, it is willful blindness to fascist and authoritarian agendas. Denial and hiding behind ‘bourgeois’ comfort is the theme. We don’t often use the word ‘bourgeois’ nowadays, but that is the dirty secret: members of the middle-class (and higher income) — no matter how outrageous the threats are — are convinced that they are not ‘really’ directed at ‘us’… provided we are white and well off … or comfortably ensconced in solid property holdings.” You mean theater can dare to examine our complicity with authoritarian movements?

I would also like to second Bob Israel’s call for producing more new work by gifted playwrights, though must they have previously had a New York premiere? There are so many worthy, talented dramatists whose work is not staged in the environs of Broadway. The magazine ran a piece about one of them, Dan O’Brien, whose play Newtown deals with the 2012 murders of 20 first-graders and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. It recently premiered at the Geva Theatre in Rochester, New York — it is a powerful psychological study of the nature of denial and forgiveness. Given its small cast and simple set, it is tailor-made for what English dramatist Howard Brenton (who, at the age of 82, will premiere a new play, Churchill in Moscow, at the Orange Tree Theatre this February) would call a “poor theater.” May more of them come along in 2025.

As for a refreshing vision of what a major regional theater can be when it accepts its responsibility to provoke rather than divert, turn to the marvelous book The Play’s the Thing: Fifty Years of Yale Repertory Theatre (1966-2016) by playwright, dramaturge, and novelist James Magruder (Yale University Press, 400 pages, $60). Fabulous photographs (the lineup includes James Earl Jones, Christopher Walken, Frances McDormand, and Dianne Wiest), informative interviews, and generous servings of theater lore chronicle the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of a heralded artistic institution. (There are a couple of pages on one of my favorite productions of Henrik Ibsen’s Little Eyolf — Travis Preston’s 1985 Yale Rep production featured a giant white rocking horse.)

Anyone who cares about adventurous theater should pick up this informative volume. Each of its four chapters is dedicated to one of Yale Rep’s artistic directors: Robert Brustein, Lloyd Richards, Stan Wojewodski Jr., and James Bundy. What’s more, the volume comes along at a crucial moment, a time when regional American stages can either choose to innovate as they face a world that is rapidly changing around them or cut and run into stale escapism. This book provides much-needed inspiration for choosing the more demanding, and rewarding, artistic path.