★★★★☆ Lila Neugebauer directs a one-woman show on the hottest of the hot-button issues of the moment
Macbeth: Have You Heard the One About the Scottish Play?
★★☆☆☆ Sam Gold’s star-studded production of Shakespeare’s witchiest play is beset by toil and trouble
The Skin of Our Teeth: It’s So Extra
★★★★☆ Thornton Wilder’s epic receives a suitably over-the-top production at Lincoln Center Theater
Hangmen: Martin McDonagh’s Slick Comedy Finally Arrives on Broadway
★★★★☆ A new staging of the dark comedy from a playwright once dubbed theater’s Quentin Tarantino goes for laughs over gore
The Minutes: So Much Promise, So Little Payoff
★★☆☆☆ Tracy Letts’ new play is part satire, part black comedy, and all head-scratcher
Cyrano de Bergerac: James McAvoy As a Swoon-Worthy Swashbuckling Poet
★★★★★ The Jamie Lloyd Company reinvents Rostand’s nosey Frenchman for the 21st century
Birthday Candles: A Quirky Time-Hopping Rom-Com
★★★☆☆ Debra Messing ages 90 years—playing a daughter, mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother—in a 90-minute play
The Chinese Lady: For Your Education, Entertainment, and Discomfort
★★★★☆ Playwright Lloyd Suh draws on real-life 19th-century events with 21st-century ramifications in this Ma-Yi Theater, Barrington Stage, and Public Theater production
On Sugarland: An Ambitious, Epic Wartime Drama
★★★★☆ Aleshea Harris explores the aftermath of war and the shades of grief in a shattering new play
The Merchant of Venice: A Too-Timely Production of Shakespeare’s Problem Play
★★★★☆ ✩ John Douglas Thompson brings a steadfast gaze and spine of steel to the much-maligned Shylock