Although the renowned 20th-century poet W. H. Auden dismissed The Taming of the Shrew as “the only play of Shakespeare’s that is a complete failure,” Laura Lapidus proves there is still plenty of life in the old comedy with To Have and To Hold, her contemporary reimagining that explores sisterhood, romantic love and the difficult business of coming into one’s own. Smartly directed by Zoë Adams and featuring a top-notch ensemble, this 85-minute romp through modern romance is both deliciously entertaining and unexpectedly poignant.

Laura Strausfeld, adaptor and director of The Real Ivanov: A Comedy About Despair, describes her production as a “faithful adaptation of [Anton] Chekhov’s Ivanov.” In 100 minutes without an intermission, an 11-member cast touches the principal plot points of the Russian master’s first full-length drama; but little remains of the dramatic craftsmanship that gives each scene of a genuine Chekhov play the aura of lived experience. The script of the so-called Real Ivanov summons to mind Reader’s Digest Condensed Books: more has been discarded than left intact. 

Terence Anthony’s The House of the Negro Insane, set in 1935 inside Central State Hospital, a psychiatric institution built to confine “insane and idiotic negroes,” is a searing drama about confinement, despair, and the possibility of freedom. Structured in seven scenes, the play has a surreal texture that director Daniel Carlton brings to vivid life—a world in which even those resigned to death may dare to imagine freedom beyond the walls.

TThe Bathroom Attendant, by Tom Kelly, centers on Johnny (Dan Patrick Brady), an affable ex-prizefighter who is down on his luck in Las Vegas. Living in a rundown housing block on the outskirts of the city, Johnny currently works as a restroom attendant at the city’s Mob Museum, but he believes his fortune is just one winning hand away—if only he can scrape together enough cash to play.

In Sophie McIntosh’s new play benevolent, four young women in 1917 New York endure life inside the Inwood Benevolent Home, an ostensibly charitable reformatory for “fallen girls.” More specifically, the work is set in the basement laundry room, where the women wash soiled sheets, toiling over basins with washboards and helpings of borax. McIntosh uses this setting to explore issues of class, gender, and desire, all rooted in the relationships among the four residents.

La Femme Theatre Productions, dedicated to “exploring the female experience through classic and contemporary plays,” is presenting the first New York revival of Wendy Wasserstein’s An American Daughter. This largely forgotten play premiered on Broadway in 1997 with a first-rate cast, including the late Lynne Thigpen, who won a Tony Award for her superb performance as the protagonist’s best friend Judith. It closed after a paltry 89 performances. The revival, directed by Sarna Lapine, utilizes post-Broadway revisions by Wasserstein, who died in 2006 at age 55. The script-tinkering hasn’t fixed the problems of the original, and it undermines what Wasserstein accomplished in this not-so-bad high comedy, which, in the late 1990s, was timely and diverting (though it fell far short of the political heft she had intended).

Even a powerful story can become more compelling when told through the traditions of its culture. Such is the case with Samantha Blain’s new play Isla, which embraces puppetry, music and magical realism to tell, in 75 minutes, a story of how Blain’s family fled Cuba. The world premiere production is a bilingual shadow play with beautiful, lilting songs, accompanied by guitarist Claron Hayden. All the artistic elements come together in a wonderful, multifaceted production.

“A sad tale’s best for winter,” says Mamillius, the young son of Leontes and Hermione, king and queen of Sicilia, in Shakespeare’s late play The Winter’s Tale (ca. 1610). Mamillius may be right, but a sad tale can also work on a sweltering night in Central Park, as Daniel Sullivan’s no-frills, emotionally intense staging demonstrates.

In John Donnelly’s The Pass, directed by Max Hunter, two rising British soccer stars confront the volatile intersection of masculinity, desire, and celebrity when a hotel-room encounter threatens to upend their carefully constructed futures. Spanning 12 years and three hotel rooms, this provocative drama tackles the high stakes of being young, ambitious, and closeted in a world where the pressure to perform extends far beyond the playing field.

Well, I’ll Let You Go, Bubba Weiler’s drama of grief and Midwestern angst, opened Off-Broadway a year ago this month, elevating the author from yeoman actor to New York’s most prominent emerging playwright. The Saviors, Weiler’s second play (now at the Atlantic’s Linda Gross Theater) substantiates his promise, extending and arguably deepening his collaboration with director Jack Serio.

“A combination of the Eiffel Tower and the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.” “Upside-down pineapple. Honeycomb spaceship/shawarma.” These descriptions of Vessel, the tourist attraction in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards, are the most memorable lines in Brendan George’s well-intentioned play The Vessel, which has a lot to say but doesn’t say most of it in a theatrically exciting manner.

Enter a complex query into an AI chatbot, and the computer program will ruminate. Employing a proprietary algorithm, actions will be taken, decisions will be explained, and the sometimes unexpected results will arrive in due course, with little regard as to whether a satisfying answer is justification for the steps taken to reach it. This process is the metaphorical framework for Andrew Stein’s new and disturbing think piece, Disruption. Set in a New York defined more by its data sets than its landmarks, three couples provide the input for a calculating friend who employs an omniscient technology to rewire all of their lives.

What if men suddenly disappeared from the planet? Melissa Maney’s darkly comic Hungry Women, directed by Daniella Caggiano, imaginatively explores that provocative question across two centuries, using absurdism, macabre humor, and a feminist lens to examine how women might reconstruct society—and what they might ultimately discover they are most hungry for.

For its third mainstage production under new owners A24, Cherry Lane Theatre brings in a London success—Benedict Lombe’s romantic two-hander Shifters, directed by Lynette Linton—with some boldface names on its U.S. producing team, including actors Idris Elba and Danai Gurira and rapper Little Simz.

After spending decades bringing history’s greatest composers to vivid theatrical life, Hershey Felder turns his storytelling gifts inward in Hershey Felder: The Piano and Me. The result is an intimate and deeply affecting autobiographical portrait that reveals how music shaped not only an extraordinary career but also an extraordinary life.

Eric Marlin’s What a World! What a World! explores gender identity, drag, and gay love in a dialogue-heavy production that opens on a bare stage reminiscent of a 1970s avant-garde drama. Queen-Tiye Akamefula and Annie Hoeg exchange overripe melodramatic dialogue while moving and posing in tandem, using gestures that recall the 19th-century Delsarte system—back of hand to forehead, arms outstretched—executed with the measured precision of tai chi. The result is alternately intriguing and irritating, but emotionally remote.

Family entertainment often settles for amusing the children while asking adults to patiently endure the ride. The Listies: Make Some Noise gleefully defies that formula, delivering an hour of quick-witted comic anarchy in which playwright-performers Richard Higgins and Matthew Kelly prove that silliness, when executed with razor-sharp timing and imagination, can delight audiences from preschoolers to grandparents.

The ideals and experiences that bond people together when they are young may be the very things that divide them when they mature. This we learn from the protagonists in Birthright, Jonathan Spector’s play that tracks the lives of six Jewish friends from 2006 through 2024. In each of the three nearly one-hour acts, perceptible changes occur in each character’s priorities and attitudes, at least in part because in their discussions, no topic is sacrosanct.    

Erica Murray’s The Loved Ones is a poignant meditation on grief and betrayal that offers a potentially melodramatic setup but largely avoids obvious broad strokes in favor of quieter pleasures—sharply observed dialogue, characters who defy the labels placed on them, and an exploration of the difficulties and power of empathy. An outstanding ensemble led by the great Maryann Plunkett depicts the international group of women—Irish, English, and American—brought together in rural West Clare, Ireland, through tragic circumstances that threaten to divide them yet end up eliciting a precarious and precious sense of solidarity.   

A tent creates a confined yet evocative space—the image might conjure up strong memories and associations, perhaps of childhood camping trips or adolescent backyard adventures or later-in-life attempts at experiencing the great outdoors. For Ari and Brit, the protagonists of Victoria Lynne Barclay’s new two-hander Camping, the tent is a world unto itself. From ages 15 to 40, the two women navigate life—including relationships with inadequate men—and feelings for each other that they can never quite come to terms with, through events that always return them to the same tent. That Barclay makes this contrivance feel largely natural is one of the strengths of this sensitively observed play.

Millie, the cheeky British teenage expatriate at the center of Youth in Flames, begins the play drifting contentedly through life. In playwright-performer Mimi Martin’s engaging and deeply affecting solo drama, directed by Jessica Wiley, that carefree detachment is challenged by the turmoil of the 2019 Hong Kong protests, leading to a journey of self-discovery and moral reckoning.

The pub in Irish dramas is a center not just of drinking, but also of telling tall tales. In J.M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, a new arrival, Christy Mahon, boasts of killing his father. In Conor McPherson’s The Weir, the regulars exchange ghost stories. But the atmosphere of Catch of the Day, by Megan Jenkins and the Red Fox Theatre company, is different. There’s music already happening on stage when one enters, and the gregarious cast may be engaging the audience in conversation or offering potato chips up and down the aisle or sniping at one another. The slapdash mix of music and comedy is more goulash than ghoulish, yet the lack of structure turns out to be one of the show’s charms.

At the newly revitalized Delacorte Theater, Saheem Ali’s stirring production of Romeo and Juliet reimagines Shakespeare’s Verona as a divided community along the U.S.-Mexico border, bringing fresh urgency to the tale of the star-crossed lovers. By allowing Romeo and Juliet to speak to one another in Spanish amid a world of conflict, Ali illuminates both the intimacy of their bond and the forces determined to keep them apart.

Angsty-girl plays have been flourishing on New York stages, and in several of these ensemble dramas, the characters use music to let out their frustrations—see, for example, the group dance breaks in John Proctor Is the Villain, All Nighter and the just-extendedDad Don’t Read This. For the title characters of Eisa Davis’ disarming ||:Girls:|| ||:Chance:|| ||:Music:||, though, music represents more than a release. It’s their way of communicating, of making sense of their world, of discovering just what they’re capable of and what (and who) they truly care about.

And Then the Rodeo Burned Down is New York City’s third exposure to the antic stagecraft of Xhloe and Natasha, who write, perform, co-direct, and design and recently snagged major prizes in three consecutive years at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. These Gen-Z collaborators (full names Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland) deploy their well-honed professional skills—acting, clowning, dance, acrobatics, and stand-up—with astonishing energy and rugged charm. As writers, their stock-in-trade is a skeptical reassessment of myths about American history. As performers, their mission is to challenge those entrenched falsehoods in a style that’s more imagistic than analytic and informed by Theater of the Absurd.

Abigail Pickard Price’s production of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield may not include all the great characters of the 800-plus pages of the novel, but her exciting adaptation (with Sarah Gobran and Matt Pinches) for the Guildford Shakespeare Company is not to be missed.

Eljon Wardally’s Blooming in Dry Season turns a family dispute over a daughter’s future into a moving examination of ambition, sacrifice, and the burdens parents pass to their children. Over the course of two acts, layers of conflict gradually emerge, deepening one’s understanding of the characters’ lives. Wardally skillfully builds suspense through subtle clues that reveal the emotional toll hidden beneath the characters’ seemingly happy lives, and director Jackie Alexander paces the production adroitly and guides the powerful performances of an excellent cast.

John J. Caswell, Jr.’s Jerome is a departure from the typical gay play that pops up in June, geared toward Pride month: its focus is older gay men. A chalkboard in front of the proscenium curtain charts the decline of Jerome, Ariz., a mining town, from 10,000 population (crossed out) to lesser numbers (also crossed out) to, finally, Ghost City. That’s a tipoff that this eerie, intriguing drama is going to be different.

Jean Genet’s The Maids remains one of the theater’s strangest and most unsettling explorations of class, identity, fantasy, and performance. In director Kip Williams’s “new version,” Genet’s world of ritualized role-playing is transplanted into the age of Instagram filters, live-streams, and social media influencer culture—a contemporary framework that proves surprisingly well-suited to Genet’s original obsessions.