Best Play

The Bacchae is an ancient Greek tragedy by Euripides, produced posthumously around 405 BCE. Dionysus returns to Thebes to establish his worship and punish King Pentheus, who denies the god's divinity and attempts to suppress his followers. The conflict culminates in Pentheus being killed by frenzied...

The Oresteia is a trilogy of Greek tragedies by Aeschylus, first performed in Athens in 458 BCE. Comprising Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides, it follows murder and revenge within the House of Atreus after the Trojan War. The cycle moves from hereditary blood vengeance to the public...

Antigone is an ancient Greek tragedy by Sophocles, first performed in Athens around 441 BCE. After a civil war in Thebes, Antigone defies King Creon's order by performing burial rites for her brother Polynices, whom Creon has declared a traitor. Their confrontation leads to multiple deaths and explo...

Angels in America: Millennium Approaches is the first part of Tony Kushner's two-part theatrical work Angels in America, subtitled A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Set primarily in New York during the 1980s, it interweaves the lives of gay men, Mormons, and political figures amid the AIDS crisis a...

Arcadia is a 1993 play by Tom Stoppard set in an English country house, where scenes alternate between events in 1809 and investigations by present-day scholars. Its paired timelines gradually reveal connections involving a gifted student, her tutor, the estate's landscape, and a disputed episode in...

Hedda Gabler is a play by Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen, published in 1890 and first performed in 1891. It portrays Hedda Tesman, recently married and deeply dissatisfied with the restricted life available to her, as she manipulates her husband, former admirer, and the vulnerable scholar Eilert L...

A Doll's House is an 1879 play by Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen centered on Nora and Torvald Helmer's marriage. A secret loan Nora obtained to protect her husband's health exposes the imbalance beneath their apparently comfortable household and forces her to reassess her role as wife and mother....

The Seagull is a play by Anton Chekhov about writers, actors, artistic ambition, and unreturned love on a Russian country estate. Its 1896 premiere in St. Petersburg was poorly received, but the Moscow Art Theatre's 1898 production established the work as an important example of ensemble performance...

Uncle Vanya is a play by Anton Chekhov, developed from his earlier work The Wood Demon and published in its definitive form near the end of the 1890s. On a provincial Russian estate, Vanya and Sonya confront the sacrifices they have made to support the retired professor Serebryakov, whose visit disr...

Three Sisters is a play by Anton Chekhov, first performed by the Moscow Art Theatre in 1901. It follows Olga, Masha, Irina, and their brother Andrei as they endure provincial life while repeatedly imagining a return to Moscow and a more meaningful future. Rather than relying on a single dominant plo...

The Cherry Orchard is Anton Chekhov's final play, first performed by the Moscow Art Theatre in January 1904. It follows landowner Lyubov Ranevskaya and her family as debt forces the sale of their estate, which includes a celebrated cherry orchard, to the businessman Lopakhin. Chekhov described the w...

Twelfth Night is a comedy by William Shakespeare, generally dated to around 1601 or 1602 and set in the fictional land of Illyria. After a shipwreck separates Viola from her twin brother Sebastian, she disguises herself as a young man and enters the service of Duke Orsino, producing a chain of mista...

Sunday in the Park with George is a musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by James Lapine. Its first act imagines Georges Seurat creating A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, while the second follows a fictional descendant confronting artistic and personal pres...

Angels in America: Perestroika is the second part of Tony Kushner's two-part drama Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Set amid the AIDS crisis and conservative politics of 1980s America, it continues the intertwined stories introduced in Millennium Approaches and moves them toward...

The Misanthrope is a five-act verse comedy by Molière, first performed in Paris in 1666. Its central character, Alceste, condemns flattery, dishonesty, and social convention but loves Célimène, whose wit and participation in fashionable society contradict his principles. Through their conflict and t...

The Trojan Women is a tragedy by Euripides first performed in Athens in 415 BC. Set after the fall of Troy, it follows Hecuba, Cassandra, Andromache, and other captive women as Greek victors determine their enslavement and the destruction of the surviving royal family. Rather than dramatizing combat...

The Wild Duck is an 1884 play by Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen. It follows Gregers Werle, an idealist who enters the household of photographer Hjalmar Ekdal and insists that the family confront concealed facts about its past. His pursuit of complete honesty destabilizes the household and has trag...

Follies is a musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by James Goldman, first produced on Broadway in 1971. Former performers from the fictional Weismann Follies reunite in a theater scheduled for demolition, accompanied onstage by younger versions of themselves. Centering on the...

The House of Bernarda Alba is a Spanish-language play completed in 1936 by Federico García Lorca, shortly before his death. Set in rural Spain, it follows the widowed Bernarda Alba as she imposes eight years of mourning and strict confinement on her five adult daughters. The all-female household bec...

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is a play by Tom Stoppard first staged at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1966. It retells events from Shakespeare's Hamlet through two minor courtiers who struggle to understand the plot carrying them toward their deaths. The work moves between scenes derived...

The Iceman Cometh is a play by Eugene O'Neill, first produced in 1946 and set in 1912 inside Harry Hope's run-down New York saloon. Its residents sustain themselves with "pipe dreams" about reforming their lives until traveling salesman Theodore Hickey arrives and urges them to abandon those illusio...

A Little Night Music is a 1973 stage musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by Hugh Wheeler. Inspired by Ingmar Bergman's film Smiles of a Summer Night, it follows intertwined romantic relationships among several couples in turn-of-the-century Sweden. Much of its score uses tri...

The Threepenny Opera is a 1928 musical play by dramatist Bertolt Brecht and composer Kurt Weill, with assistance from translator Elisabeth Hauptmann. Adapted from John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, it relocates a criminal underworld story to Victorian London and uses songs and satire to examine capitali...

Translations is a 1980 play by Irish dramatist Brian Friel, set in 1833 in the fictional County Donegal community of Baile Beag. It centers on a British military survey that records Irish place names in English for new maps, connecting language and naming with colonial authority, identity, and cultu...

A View from the Bridge is a drama by Arthur Miller, first staged in 1955 and subsequently revised into a two-act version. Set among Italian-American longshoremen in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, it follows Eddie Carbone, whose possessive attachment to his niece Catherine drives him to betra...

Hadestown is a sung-through musical by Anaïs Mitchell that retells the Greek myths of Orpheus and Eurydice and of Hades and Persephone. Its score draws on folk, jazz, blues, and related American musical traditions, while its underworld is portrayed as an industrial society governed by labor and scar...

Top Girls is a 1982 play by British dramatist Caryl Churchill that examines women, work, class, family responsibility, and the costs attached to individual advancement. It opens with a fantastical dinner hosted by Marlene, where women drawn from history, literature, art, and legend recount their exp...

The Marriage of Figaro is a five-act comedy by the French playwright Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, first performed publicly in Paris in 1784. Set during a single eventful day, it follows the servant Figaro and Suzanne as they resist Count Almaviva's attempts to interfere with their marriage...

Blood Wedding is a tragedy by Spanish poet and dramatist Federico Garcia Lorca, written in 1932 and first staged in 1933. Drawing on a real crime reported in rural Spain, it follows a bride who abandons her wedding celebration with Leonardo, a former lover whose family is locked in a deadly feud wit...