The word belong becomes an obsession for stoker Yank (Jon Beavers) in Eugene O’Neill’s 1922 play The Hairy Ape. Yank has spent his life shoveling coal on a transatlantic liner, and he is the tallest and seemingly strongest of the men doing that work in Ciarán O’Reilly’s engrossing production at the Irish Rep. Yank sees himself as the solid foundation of the entire society, but when a socialite visits the stokehold, it launches him on a downward spiral. He becomes obsessed with the idea that she could look at him only as a “hairy ape.”

Sara Fellini’s Ectoplasm is clearly engineered for a run in October, the month when the supernatural holds sway. Following the success of Paranormal Activity on Broadway, Ectoplasm might be expected to lean into horror and jump scares, but Fellini, who also directed, structures it more like a murder mystery. Though the material is overly familiar, Ectoplasm is buoyed by good acting, interesting details, and a few surprises.

For the first two scenes of Max Wolf Friedlich’s The Holes, the intrigue builds carefully, as a bartender named Joey Alexander (Bubba Weiler) hangs around his cozy but empty establishment on a snowy night. He soon has a visitor, a man (Grantham Coleman) calling himself “Paul,” who hands him an envelope full of cash and an ID that identifies him otherwise: as someone named Wesley. The cash gains Wesley entrée into the back room of the dive bar—in spite of arriving long after his assigned time. “Next time don’t be late,” says Weiler’s stern Joey, adding, “12:24 is not the same as 11:30.” What is behind that door constitutes a mystery that drives the narrative of The Holes. Friedlich calls his play a “fairy tale,” but the gay-inflected twaddle that follows is a far cry from Hans Christian Andersen.

Marin Ireland’s Pre-Existing Condition is about the emotional aftermath of domestic violence. It is a quiet, unflashy play—75 minutes, sensitively directed by Maria Dizzia, with subtle performances from an ensemble of four—but no less devastating for its restraint. Lupita Nyong’o is outstanding as the protagonist, A: with fury, self-doubt, shame, and agony roiling beneath the surface, she strains at every moment to stay composed. The audience follows her through support groups, therapy, unhelpful family and friends, and the tentative possibility of letting herself trust again.

In Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love (1997), intellectual brilliance and unspoken longing collide as poet and classical scholar A. E. Housman confronts the love he has carried silently through a lifetime. In this rare revival, Zachary Elkind’s direction and David Greenspan’s mesmerizing performance transform Housman’s final journey into a poignant meditation on love, memory, and the price of keeping desire hidden.

French poet and avant-garde artist Jean Cocteau wrote his 1929 novella Les Enfants Terribles (The Terrible Children) in just 17 days while recovering from an opium addiction at a clinic. In Michael Gardner’s ambitious new stage adaptation, which he also directs, Cocteau’s dark, hypnotic fable explores the dangerous power of imagination, suggesting how unbridled fantasy and obsessive isolation can transform an internal refuge into a destructive prison.

In Stephen Sheffer’s new play Lean-To, strangers camp out in the titular structure during a hike. While the setting is rendered beautifully, the drama flops due to a script full of extended silences, platitudinous conversation, and ill-conceived character behavior.

In The Body of Mary: A Play in Three Acts (of God), Katie Cappiello reimagines the Virgin Mary’s origin story to examine the struggle over women’s bodies, reproduction, and who controls the narrative. Written and directed by Cappiello, this comedy brings together three women named Mary whose lives, separated by centuries, illuminate the forces of patriarchal control, violence, and repression.

Marfa, Texas, the shooting locale for the George Stevens epic film Giant 70 years ago, is known as a dot of cultural sophistication, big on minimalist art, amid hundreds of miles of Texas brush and desert. It’s also renowned for the Marfa Lights, a nocturnal phenomenon of distant brightness that can appear orange, yellow, blue, red. It’s not known as a hangout for anxious thirtysomethings yapping about politics, gender, and muddled friendships, but that’s the upshot of Very Blue Light, Daphne Silbiger’s new drama at The Tank. That it plays as well as it does is a tribute to Silbiger’s clever invocation of familiar themes, and a beguiling cast of four up-and-coming actors.

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.