The 20 best Broadway shows and Off-Broadway theater of 2015

A ghostless ghost story, Annie Baker's long, meticulous play was rich in suggestive pauses and a kitschy-gothic atmosphere. In a rural bed-and-breakfast, a troubled young couple is watched by the ambiguously sweet proprietor (the marvelous Georgia Engel). Sam Gold staged the action so precisely, those lost souls haunted our dreams.—DC

Anyone who has endured a tech rehearsal knows how painstakingly dull it can be. But genius playwright Anne Washburn used this limbo-like onstage-backstage world as a locus of humor, complexity and even menace. Immersing you in illusion—and illusion-breaking—the densely layered Les Waters–directed production made for a deconstructed love letter to playmakers.—DC

The radiant Lupito Nyong’o and her castmates were riveting as sex-slave "wives" of a Liberian rebel leader in Danai Gurira’s urgent drama. Gurira rendered these women's plight in sometimes harrowing detail, but with merciful humor and a focus on the personal. To this bracing tale of war and endurance, applause seemed an insufficient response.—AF

Broadway’s funniest and splashiest musical comedy in at least 400 years offers anything-for-a-laugh gags wrapped in a solid structure, with a dash of sweet emotional ballast. Brian d'Arcy James is splendid as a frustrated Elizabethan playwright trying to construct the world's first musical.—DC

The quietly magnetic Carey Mulligan, as a schoolteacher, and the off-angular Bill Nighy, as a rich entrepreneur, were the Broadway year’s most compellingly mismatched couple in this razor-sharp revival of David Hare’s 1995 drama. Sifting through the ruins of their past romance, they unearthed a clash of values that resonated as powerfully now as ever.—AF

Eugene O'Neill's 1946 masterwork about varieties of delusion in a New York saloon is nearly five hours long, a test for even the hardiest theatergoer. But Robert Falls's gorgeously acted revival made it worth the hangover. Anchored by a splendid Nathan Lane and the volcanic Brian Dennehy, this Goodman Theatre production got you drunk on O’Neill’s punchy, jagged lyricism before slapping you sober.—DC

Bartlett Sher's revival of the 1951 Rodgers & Hammerstein classic is a grand and glorious thing: smart, moving and visually ravishing. Tony winner Kelli O'Hara is simply perfect as a single mother teaching the children of the King of Siam. Nothing is lost in translation; this King and I speaks a universal language of love.—DC

Ten years after its Broadway premiere, The Color Purple returns in an intensely focused revival, directed by John Doyle, that brings out its deeper hues. Cynthia Erivo triumphs in the central role of Miss Celie, who rises through unspeakable adversity to find joy in a world that has given her little reason to believe she has a right to it.—AF

The playful verbiage and satirical cartoonishness of Jenny Schwartz’s play, about a teenage girl whose Internet-addled mom decides to move them to Iowa, were captured splendidly in Ken Rus Schmoll’s staging, and the cast of eight sustained a remarkable tone of committed absurdism. Smartly weird songs, by Schwartz and Todd Almond, were among the show’s many elements of surprise.—AF

Writer-director Richard Maxwell’s tale of a cage fighter, his manager and a prostitute seeking redemption at a dive bar started out like a throwback to his earlier, more accessible comedies about society’s losers. But by the end it turned more abstract and terrifying than anything else he’s done. The deadpan auteur can still shock and surprise.—DC

Print-media worker bees were a miserable hive of self-involvement in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s cunningly structured satire, which swerved violently from knowing workplace comedy into a wider lane of social comment. The play had powerful things to say about how we tune in and tune out; after its shocks, the human touches lingered.—AF

A cunning and cipher-like Ben Miles played Tudor fixer Thomas Cromwell in this two-play version of the novels by Hilary Mantel. Mike Poulton's action-packed script created a totally engrossing pageant of gossip, backstabbing and amoral double-dealing in the dangerous court of King Henry VIII. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s versatile 23-member ensemble made history in every sense.—DC

Four trashy white siblings staged an intervention on behalf of their even more damaged sister; in the second scene they were all played by black actors. That was just one of many snappy switcheroos in Robert O’Hara’s brash, taboo-flouting roast of race and representation, acted with verve by a cast of 10. For better or worse, the satire was relentless.—AF

In his latest antivanity project, actor-writer Jesse Eisenberg played a deplorable trust-fund slacker whose jerkiness verged on psychosis. The cast of Scott Elliott’s razor-sharp New Group production was stellar (including Erin Darke and The Big Bang Theory's Kunal Nayyar), and Eisenberg’s intensely awkward performance was repellent and riveting.—AF