The 30 best Off Broadway shows to see in Spring 2023

Fetus, don't fail me now! Philadelphia's Lightning Rod Special presents an encore run of its trenchant musical satire about abortion, co-created by Alice Yorke and Scott R. Sheppard (who also appear in it) with composer Alex Bechtel and director Eva Steinmetz. This feverish explosion of the abortion debate replaces rigid political views with a visceral exploration of the emotions that fuel both sides.

Wakka Wakka, the company behind 2017's madly audacious Made in China strings out another darkly comical puppet epic by writer-directors Gwendolyn Warnock and Kirjan Waage. This time, the subject is the persistence of hope in a postapocalyptic 26th-century wasteland where a chance encounter between an orphan and a jellyfish girl could make all the difference in the world. 

The antinaturalist deadpan auteur Richard Maxwell (The Evening) has spent more than two decades stripping away even the most basic theatrical comforts with his experimental-theater troupe, New York City Players. Their latest work—commissioned by NYU Skirball before the pandemic, and now presented as part of the Under the Radar Festival—uses a North Carolina restaurant as the starting point for an examination of food and human evolution. The cast includes NYCP regulars Jim Fletcher and Tory Vazquez. 

Everyman leading man Norbert Leo Butz stars as a New Yorker trying to hold on to the West Village he has known in this original musical by Simon Stephens (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) and American Music Club's Mark Eitzel. Neil Pepe directs the world premiere for his Atlantic Theater Company, and longtime Ailey dancer Hope Boykin choreographs; the supporting cast includes George Abud, Jordan Lage, Ben Rosenfield and Mary Beth Peil.

Two revered stage actors, Bill Irwin and John Douglas Thompson, play a domineering blind man and his long-suffering servant in Samuel Beckett's bleakly funny 1957 masterwork, a metatheatrical exploration of existential dread. The Irish Rep's own Ciarán O’Reilly directs the production, whose cast also includes Joseph Grifasi and Patrice Johnson Chevannes as the elderly garbage dwellers. 

Brooke Bloom and Lynn Collins star in a dark comedy by writer-director Erica Schmidt (Cyrano) about tensions between a working mother and the seemingly perfect—at least at first—new nanny she hires to look after her young kids. Audible Theater's world-premiere production will be recorded for subsequent audio release, as is the company's wont.

Ten years after her last major NYC appearance in Dead Accounts, Katie Holmes retruns to the stage in the local premiere Anna Ziegler's puzzle play, which explores love and happiness through the stories of two Jewish couples: Orthodox newlyweds in an arranged marriage, and a secular couple in which the husband, a famous novelist, engages in a flirtatious extramarital correspondence. Barry Edelstein directs for the Roundabout; Sarah Cooper, Lucy Freyer, Dave Klasko and Eddie Kaye Thomas complete the cast.

It's been a busy year or so for the top-tier American playwright Samuel D. Hunter, whose sensitive work focuses on crises of faith and self-knowledge in rural Idaho. His latest play, A Case for the Existence of God, won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, and the film version of his 2012 drama The Whale has made a big splash. Now the Signature revives his 2010 comedy about ruptures and raptures among coworkers at a Hobby Lobby store.  Oliver Butler directs this latest Hunter gathering. 

The Boys badass Aya Cash stars as a woman on a rocky road trip with her father, played by stage vet Frank Wood (Side Man), in the world premiere—after a three-year Covid delay!—of a bittersweet play by young writer Emily Feldman. Constance Shulman, Brian D. Coats and Maureen Sebastian complete the cast of this MTC production, directed by the ever perceptive Daniel Aukin (4000 Miles).

The ultra-provocative Thomas Bradshaw's previous two plays with the New Group, the outrageously outré Burning and Intimacy, hardly make him an obvious match for the genteel late-Imperial-Russian world of Anton Chekhov. So it will be interesting to see how Bradshaw cooks up The Seagull in his modern adaptation of the 1895 tragicomedy, reset at a theater-people retreat in the Hudson Valley. New Group chief Scott Elliott directs the premiere, and indie icon Parker Posey leads an ensemble that also includes David Cale, Hari Nef, Daniel Oreskes and Bill Sage.

Screen and stage big shots Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan play a bitterly divided married couple in the first major NYC revival of Lorraine Hansberry's other play: the playwright's 1964 follow-up to her barrier-smashing classic A Raisin in the Sun. The characters are mostly white bohemians in Greenwich Village, and the subject matter includes politics, art and the limits of tolerance. The sharp-minded Anne Kauffman directs a cast that also includes Gus Birney, Julian De Niro, Glenn Fitzgerald, Andy Grotelueschen, Miriam Silverman and Raphael Nash Thompson.

Sean Boyce Johnson plays a soldier on a long and winding journey home in this reboot of Homer's Odysseus story, moved to modern-day Harlem by the up-and-coming playwright Marcus Gardley (The House That Will Not Stand). Stevie Walker-Webb (Ain’t No Mo’) directs the local premiere at CSC; James T. Alfred, Tẹmídayọ Amay, Jimonn Cole, Harriett D. Foy, Marcus Gladney Jr., Adrienne C. Moore, Lance Coadie Williams and D. Woods round out the cast.

Two South Asian women meet in Ohio in 1982, two decades after striking a fateful deal half a world away, in this debut play by Deepa Purohit—who has long been involved on the play-development side of things, including as the cofounder of Rising Circle Theater Collective. Awoye Timpo directs the show's world premiere on the Atlantic's main stage, with Nilanjana Bose and Gulshan Mia in the central roles.

Streamlined to a single song-and-dance-filled act, Classical Theatre of Harlem's raucous mounting of Shakespeare's comedy features wonderfully broad performances that embrace the play’s humor and elucidate its poetry. Kara Young (Clyde’s) is the show's heart and soul as Viola, supported by a cast that includes Christina Sajous, William DeMeritt, Allen Gilmore, and Carson Elrod. Director Carl Cofield weavs an Afrofuturist aesthetic throughout the storytelling and design, and the result is an unabashed crowd-pleaser.

Few theater companies have as impressive a record of championing emerging talent as Page 73. Its new offering, coproduced with Playwrights Horizons, is a magical-realist tale by Agnes Borinsky in which Crystal Dickinson and Jess Barbagallo play siblings whose feet become rooted in the ground of a public park. Director Tina Satter (Is This A Room) presides over a cast of 12 that includes Max Gordon Moore, Danusia Trevino, Ray Anthony Thomas, Marcia DeBonis and Becky Yamamoto.  

Soho Rep joins forces with the National Asian American Theatre Co. to present the premiere of writer-director Shayok Misha Chowdhury's family drama, which explores queer desire across generations, cultures and languages. Performed in a mix of English and Bangla, the play follows a grad student (Abrar Haque) and his boyfriend (Jakeem Dante Powell) on a trip to Kolkata, where an old camera exposes past secrets. 

A young Navy man on a journey up the West Coast imagines the inner lives of strangers on his train in a new play by the sharp-minded and humane Keith Bunin (The Credeaux Canvas). Tyne Rafaeli directs the New York premiere at Lincoln Center; Mia Barron, Camila Canó-Flaviá and Rhys Coiro, who were in the play's debut production at La Jolla in 2019, are joined for this leg of the journey by Will Harrison, Jon Norman Schneider and Michelle Wilson.

The season of Suzan-Lori Parks, which has already included a Broadway revival of Topdog/Underdog and a run of Plays for the Plague Year, continues with another Parks project: a golden-anniversary adaptation of Perry Henzell's breakthrough Jamaican film The Harder They Come, perhaps best known today for its classic soundtrack of songs by the movie's star, Jimmy Cliff. Tony Taccone and Sergio Trujillo direct the world premiere at the Public. Natey Jones scales the Cliff role, and the supporting cast includes Jeannette Bayardelle, Jacob Ming-Trent and Meecah.

Director Eric Tucker and his taut company Bedlam depart from their usual classical-theater path to take a whack at the legend of Lizzie Borden, who was acquitted of axe-murdering her parents in 1892 but has been condemned in rhyme ever since. Zuzanna Szadkowski (Gossip Girl) and Deborah Knox's irreverent dark comedy weaves in pop-culture threads from A Doll's House to the Manson murders and beyond. Joining Szadkowski and Knox in the cast are Susannah Millonzi, Jamie Smithson and the reliably discomfiting Tony Torn.

Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson’s nearly three-hour immersive play is based on their stint as volunteers with refugees in Calais, France, who were hoping to cross the Channel into England. It’s not artful as a piece of drama; rather, it’s a deliberate cacophony of voices. The play wants you to feel, for a moment, what it’s like to live each moment at a crisis point. It's impressive and at times virtuosic. After a hit run before the pandemic, the production returns to St. Ann's for another go.

Tempers, anxieties and hormones flare at a self-defense class for college students in Liliana Padilla’s look at desire, violence and, perhaps, the desire for violence. Rachel Chavkin (Hadestown) and Steph Paul codirect the New York Theatre Workshop production.

British auteur's Alexander Zeldin's devised drama, about cracks in the U.K.'s housing system, is set at a London shelter for the homeless during Christmas season. The shabby residence's squabbling inhabitants include a struggling family with children, two refugees, an alcoholic man and his incontinent mum. The play, which ran at the National Theatre in 2016, now makes its U.S. debut at the Armory; it is performed with the house lights up and some members of the audience seated right down near the actors. (Those are the premium seats; it costs a lot to be that close to poverty.)

Ryan J. Haddad burst onto the NYC performance scene in 2015 with Hi, Are You Single?, his one-man show about being a horny gay man with cerebral palsy, and followed it up with the showbiz-struck cabaret show Falling for Make Believe. The funny and talented writer-performer returns with a new autobiographical play about his experience—as someone who uses a walker—of the sometimes mean streets of New York. He is joined onstage by Dickie Hearts and Alejandra Ospina in a production directed by Jordan Fein and coproduced by the Public and the Bushwick Starr.

After acclaimed runs in the U.K., including the West End, Arinzé Kene brings his imaginative, semi-autobiographical monologue to New York for its U.S. premiere at the Shed. This exploration of inner-city London life, gentrification and the experience of Black creative artists includes spoken-work poetry, original music (by Kene, Adrian MacLeod and Shiloh Coke) and plenty of balloons. Omar Elerian directs.  

Talene Monahon (Jane Anger) imagines the inner demons of the girls whose testimony led to Salem Witch Trials (as depicted in Arthur Miller's The Crucible). Adult actors Tavi Gevinson, Brittany K. Allen, Sharlene Cruz and Susannah Perkins portray four of them; Caitlin Sullivan directs the first Bedlam production not helmed by company honcho Eric Tucker.

The singular Michael R. Jackson follows up on his Pulitzer Prize–winning intravaganza A Strange Loop with a musical fantasia rooted in soap opera, melodrama and Lifetime women-in-peril pictures. In this metatheatrical dark comedy, "Blackground" players in a soap town called Allwhite maneuver for better plotlines as a killer stalks the streets. Vineyard Theatre and Second Stage coproduce the much-anticipated premiere, which is directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz (The Skin of Our Teeth). Latoya Edwards is at the center of a talented cast that includes Alyse Alan Louis, Lauren Marcus and Molly Hager as the town's white heroines.

The English novelist and essayist Zadie Smith (White Teeth) makes her playwriting debut with a modern version of the lusty Wife of Bath section of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, with the much-married storyteller reimagined as a fiftysomething Jamaican-English woman taking command of the open mic at a pub in North West London. Clare Perkins has the central role in a production, directed by Indhu Rubasingham, that premiered at London's Kiln Theatre in 2021. 

On the heels of the Broadway revival of her 2001 Pulizer Prize winner Topdog/Underdog and the premiere of her musical The Harder They Come earlier this season, playwright Suzan-Lori Parks takes the stage herself to share the fruits of her pandemic writing project: an ambitious effort to write a new play every day, as well as original songs, to chronicle the experience of the shutdown. In this three-and-and-half-hour theatrical concert at Joe's Pub, directed by Niegel Smith, Parks is joined by Leland Fowler, Greg Keller, Orville Mendoza, Kenita Miller, Lauren Molina, Martín Solá and Pearl Sun (or at least, that was the cast of the show's Covid-shortened run last fall).

Set your boats against the current and prepare to be borne back into the Jazz Age as the U.K.'s Guild of Misrule brings its long-running immersive adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel to NYC. The show, directed by Alexander Wright, unfolds interactively in a ballroom space at the ritzy old Park Central Hotel that has been retro-renovated to evoke Jay Gatsby's West Egg mansion. Audience members are encouraged (but not obliged) to dress up in 1920s finery. Dance a charleston, raise a glass and watch the American dream collapse under its own bejeweled weight.

In a new play by Eboni Booth, The Good Place's adorkable William Jackson Harper plays an unemployed bookstore worker and April Matthis (Toni Stone) is a waitress who urges him to move in a new direction. Knud Adams—who directed Booth's memorable Off Broadway debut, Paris, in 2020—stages the world premiere for the Roundabout. 

It's been 20 years since Adam Guettel's grgeous score for The Light in the Piazza solidified his status as one of modern musical theater's most important composers. But we haven't gotten a full new show from him since—until now. This original musical, adapted from JP Miller's 1958 TV movie and 1962 film about a hard-drinking couple in the 1950s, reunites Guettel with two key Piazza collaborators: book writer Craig Lucas (Prelude to a Kiss) and leading lady Kelli O'Hara, who stars opposite fellow Broadway luminary Brian d'Arcy James. Michael Greif (Rent) directs the hotly antipated world premiere at the Atlantic.