The 30 best Off Broadway shows to see in Spring 2025

The versatile playwright Bess Wohl (Small Mouth Sounds) looks at Ohio women's dreams of liberation in two time periods—1970 and fifty years later—in a world premiere directed for the Roundabout by Whitney White (Jaja's African Hair Braiding). The highly promising cast comprises Betsy Aidem, Susannah Flood, Kristolyn Lloyd, Adina Verson, Irene Sofia Lucio, Audrey Corsa, Kayla Davion and Charlie Thurston.

Signature Theatre resident playwright Samuel D. Hunter (The Whale) has been justly celebrated for a suite of sensitive works that focus on crises of self-knowledge and connection in rural Idaho. This time, Paul Sparks and Brian J. Smith play half-brothers—one of whom has moved to the Netherlands—who communicate long-distance to address their mother's failing health. Jack Serio directs the world premiere.

Christian Slater and Calista Flockhart play the parents in the latest revival of Sam Shepard's 1978 dysfunctional-family play, a dark satire of the American Dream set on a crumbling California farm. Scott Elliott directs the production for his New Group, with a supporting cast that comprises Cooper Hoffman, David Anzuelo, Kyle Beltran, Jeb Kreager and Stella Marcus.

In this two-person thriller by Rajiv Joseph (Guards at the Taj), a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal at the turn of the 21st century veers by accident into a secret world of State Department intrigue. Abubakr Ali, Mia Barron costar in the show's world premiere at Manhattan Theatre Club, which commissioned it; May Adrales directs.

A frozen marionette of the blinded Oedipus, wandering in disgrace with his daughter Antigone, gradually melts into nothingness in this evocative string-puppet work, created by Élise Vigneron and Hélène Barreau for France's Théâtre de l’Entrouvert. Inspired by Henry Bauchau's novel Oedipus on the Road, the piece has been adapted for an American production—performed by Mark Blashford and Ashwaty Chennat—that premiered at the 2023 Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival and is making its New York debut under the aegis of HERE's Dream Music Puppetry Program. 

The expert Jack O'Brien directs the latest revival of Henrik Ibsen's once-scandalous 1882 play about the roots of deadly social disease, a classic indictment of bourgeois hypocrisy. Stage A-listers Lily Rabe, Billy Crudup and Hamish Linklater star opposite second-generation acting stars Levon Hawke and Ella Beatty in this Lincoln Center Theater production, which marks the New York debut of a new translation by Ireland's Mark O’Rowe. 

Jerry Lieblich (Mahinerator) writes confounding, inventive works that interrogate the relationships between language, knowledge and power. This latest piece, presented by Lieblich's company Third Ear Theater, is set in a world of politics, science and war. The seasoned experimentalist Paul Lazar (of Big Dance Theatre) directs a cast of downtown all-stars: Jess Barbagallo, Jennifer Ikeda, Naren Weiss, Chloe Claudel, Nature Theater of Oklahoma's Anne Gridley and Mac Wellman muse Steve Mellor.

Back in 2018, the oral historian and producer Jennifer Ashley Tepper—a gale force of musical-theater fandom—created a series of concerts at 54 Below devoted to airing unheard songs from the trunk of Jonathan Larson, who died suddenly on the eve of his breakthrough with Rent. Now that project has been expanded into an Off Broadway revue with a very talented cast: Adam Chanler-Berat, Taylor Iman Jones, Lauren Marcus, Andy Mientus and Jason Tam. John Simpkins directs; the orchestrations are by Charlie Rosen, co-arranged with Natalie Tenenbaum. 

The Irish writer-director Enda Walsh (Ballyturk,Medicine) likes to cram big themes into small spaces; his characters often live in hermetic, sometimes imaginary worlds that strain to keep the outside at a distance. In his latest theatrical experiment—presented at his usual New York City outpost, St. Ann's Warehouse—he joins forces with composer Anna Mullarkey to create an impressionistic multimedia song cycle about about the past and present lives of an isolated woman in the Irish countryside. The piece is performed by Kate Gilmore, who starred in its premiere production at Dublin's Abbey Theatre last year.

A young wrestler begins physical and spiritual training at a Tokyo sumo facility in this weighty new drama by Lisa Sanaye Dring, whose New York premiere is directed by Ralph B. Peña for Ma-Yi Theater Company and the Public Theater. The cast includes Scott Keiji Takeda, Red Concepción, Michael Hisamoto, Ahmad Kamal, Earl T. Kim and David Shih.

Five college girls face a big test of their friendship when they stay up together to polish off their final coursework in Natalie Margolin's new play, directed by Jaki Bradley. Expect, if not outright slumber-party games, at least some Adderall-driven version of Truth or Dare. Tony nominees Julia Lester (Into the Woods) and Kathryn Gallagher (Jagged Little Pill) share the stage with Kristine Froseth, Havana Rose Liu and Alyah Chanelle Scott in the world premiere.

This ensemble play by Abe Koogler (Fulfillment Center), about nature lovers in the Pacific Northwest investigating the disappearance of an orca pod, was a highlight of the 2023 Summerworks festival. Now Clubbed Thumb brings it back for a longer encore run at the Public, directed once again by Arin Arbus (Waiting for Godot). Returning original cast members—including Crystal Finn, Jan Leslie Harding, Armando Riesco and stage treasure Maryann Plunkett (The Notebook)—are joined by newbies Miriam Silverman, Mia Katigbak, Arnie Burton, Ryan King and Carmen Zilles.

Joshua Harmon (Prayer for the French Republic) reteams with his Significant Other director, Trip Cullman, for a new dark comedy in which original Into the Woods star Joanna Gleason plays a dying woman who asks her young playwright grandson—played by Andrew Barth Feldman, an estwhile Evan Hansen—to write a vicious dramatic exposé of their family. The estimable Jeanine Serralles (Catch as Catch Can) is also in the cast of the play's world premiere at Manhattan Theatre Club. 

Soho Rep, having recently been squeezed from its longtime home on Walker Street, begins a several-year residence at Playwrights Horizons with the U.S. premiere of Nia Akilah Robinson's debut play: an ambitious exploration of the treatment of black bodies in America that moves between 1830s Philadelphia—when grave robbery for medical research was not uncommon—and a modern summer camp on the same location. The implacable Crystal Lucas-Perry (Ain't No Mo') and current Juilliard student Clarissa Vickerie play the central mother-daughter pairs in both parts of the play, joined by Miles G. Jackson and the mononymic Holiday as men they encounter. Off Broadway newcomer Evren Odcikin directs. 

The Irish stage and screen actor and international lust object Paul Mescal, who beefed up to star in Gladiator 2, now plays the most famous sexy brute in dramatic history: Stanley Kowalski, the role that made Marlon Brando a star in Tennessee Williams's steamy 1947 masterwork. Patsy Ferran co-stars as the cracked belle Blanche DuBois; Anjana Vasan is Stanley's wife, Stella, and Dwane Walcott is his poker pal Mitch. This revival, which premiered at London's Almeida Theatre in 2022, is directed by Rebecca Frecknell, who also guided the misguided Broadway revival of Cabaret, so be prepared for some wildly stylized choices. Tickets through BAM have already sold out, so if you want to get your hot hands on a ticket, you'll have to depend on the kindness of scalpers.

When the matchless French actress Isabelle Huppert (Elle) does theater, she likes to do it weird. She has worked twice before with the leading lion of the avant-garde theater establishment, director Robert Wilson (Einstein on the Beach): in Orlando (1993) and Quartet (2006). Their third collaboration is a 90-minute monologue about the divisive 16th-century royal Mary Stuart (a.k.a. Mary, Queen of Scots) by the American novelist Darryl Pinckney, set to a classical score by Ludovico Einaudi. The production, which premiered in France in 2019 and was seen at London's Barbican Center last year, is performed in French with English titles. Be prepared for strikingly stylized work.

LaChanze, who shone in the overdue 2021 Broadway premiere of Alice Childress's Trouble in Mind, makes her directorial debut at CSC with another work by the pioneering playwright: a 1969 drama, set against the backdrop of the 1964 Harlem riot, that she originally wrote for the Boston public-television series On Being Black. Grantham Coleman plays a painter working on a triptych about Black womanhood, and Olivia Washington—the daughter of Denzel and sister of John David—plays a downtrodden woman he thinks would be a good model for the unflattering final panel.

The excellent Andrew Scott, who has played the wicked Moriarty on Sherlock and the titular sociopath on Ripley but will always be Fleabag's Hot Priest in our hearts, assumes every role in this solo version of Anton Chekhov's 1897 masterwork Uncle Vanya, a bitterly comic meditation on the wages of self-sacrifice. The piece—which Scott co-created with adaptor Simon Stephens, director Sam Yates and designer Rosanna Vize—was received ecstatically in London in 2023. Now it comes to the West Village's venerable Lucille Lortel Theatre for an eight-week run. 

Two bold Québécois theater makers, director Alix Dufresne and playwright Étienne Lepage, slip a little Freud into PAC's spring season with a darkly playful metatheatrical comedy in which four imbecilic people wander onto an empty stage and mayhem ensues. This absurdist philosophical look at accident and urges was created in French; in its New York incarnation, half of the performances are in English and half are bilingual with English surtitles.

Tommy Dorfman (Romeo + Juliet) plays the trans scion of a Hassidic rabbinical dynasty in Emil Weinstein's stage adaptation of Abby Chava Stein's 2019 memoir. Tyne Rafaeli (Selling Kabul) directs the Off Broadway premiere for New York Theatre Workshop, which is presented offsite at Abrons Arts Center.

Warehouse workers reenact legends of their high-school heydays, which loosely correspond to myths from The Iliad, in an original synthwave musical written and composed by Loading Dock Theater's Leegrid Stevens, with an ear to evoking 1980s nostalgia via vintage instruments and tape loops. The gender-fluid cast of 16, directed by Eric Paul Vitale, includes Daphne Always, Deshja Driggs, Arya Grace Gaston, Max Raymond, Jen Rondeau and Loading Dock co-founder Erin B. Treadway (Spaceman). 

Nina Hoss, who gave a riveting performance in 2018's Returning to Reims, is now returning to St. Ann's Warehouse to star in writer-director Benedict Andrews's new adaptation of Anton Chekhov's 1903 tragicomedy about a family on the edge of ruin in a country on the brink of revolution. Hoss plays the profligate Ranevskaya, an aristocrat stymied by nostalgia, and Adeel Akhtar is the rich but lower-class merchant with designs on her family estate. The production arrives at St. Ann's on the heels of a highly acclaimed U.K. run at the Donmar Warehouse (no relation).

Three Black artists from different disciplines, cultures and generations compete for attention and opportunity at an international conference for artists of the African diaspora. WP Theater partners with Colt Coeur to present the world premiere of Francisca Da Silveira's drama; Ato Essandoh, Nedra Marie Taylor and Nimene Sierra Wureh play the clashing trio. 

Awoye Timpo, who directed Theatre for a New Audience's beautiful 2019 revival of Alice Childress's Wedding Band, returns to TFANA with another overlooked work of Black drama: The first major play by Nigeria's Wole Soyinka, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. This 1958 one-act tells the story of a young man from the flooded Niger delta who is mistreated by his rapacious twin brother and disappointed by the overfed Yoruba priest of the Serpent of the Swamp. 

Caryl Churchill (Cloud Nine) is among the finest, strangest and most wonderful playwrights in the English language, so it's always a treat to get something new from her. This time it's a quartet of mostly short experimental works that debuted to acclaim at London's Royal Court Theatre in 2019 and 2021: Glass, about a girl made of, you guessed it, glass; Kill, a monologue for the bloodstained Gods of Olympus; What If If Only, in which a grieving man receives a strange visitation; and the longest piece, Imp, in which an elderly woman threatens to unleash a magical spirit in a bottle. Churchill's frequent collaborator James Macdonald (Escaped Alone) directs.

Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's scabrous musical, a cynical Weimar update of John Gay's 1728 satire The Beggar's Opera, returns in a new production by Germany's Berliner Ensemble, which mounted the original version in 1928. The show still centers on the charismatic killer and lothario Macheath—known as Mackie Messer ("Mack the Knife")—but Barrie Kosky's staging, on a geometrical set by Rebecca Ringst, is far from traditional the production makes numerous trims and changes to the notoriously unwieldy script by Brecht and his finally credited collaborator, Elisabeth Hauptmann. Performances are in the original German, with English titles.

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. Ten years later, the funny and talented writer-performer offers a sequel of sorts to that show, perhaps addressing how he has changed in the intervening decade, during which he has raised his profile significantly as an actor (including in a recurring role on The Politician) and won an Obie for Best New American Play for his 2023 show Dark Disabled Stories. Danny Sharron directs this Playwrights Horizons offering. 

Whitney White has become one of the industry's leading directors, earning a Tony noms for last season's Jaja's African Hair Braiding and helming Liberation at the Roundabout this spring. In April, however, she takes center stage as the writer and performer of this musical dive into the dark soul (and R&B and gospel and pop and rock) of Lady Macbeth, as seen therough a lens of Black womanhood. The play is directed by Tyler Dobrowsky and Taibi Magar, the married artistic directors of Philadelphia Theatre Company, where the musical was seen in 2023; Raja Feather Kelly is the choreographer, and Charlie Thurston (who is in the cast of Liberation) reprises his role as Macbeth. 

Writers Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley and director Rory Pelsue are the Fake Friends gang behind 2020's uproarious Circle Jerk, a Charles Ludlam–style satirical farce about technology and white supremacy that was a surprise finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Expect wild things from their follow-up at the New Group: an original musical that envisions a trio of Gen Zers on a quest to track down a missing pop star from the 2000s. The cast of the world premiere includes Sara Gettelfinger, Natalie Walker, Patrick Nathan Falk, Keri René Fuller, Luke Islam and the distinctive Milly Shapiro, who shared an honorary 2013 Tony Award for Matilda and famously lost her head in Hereditary.