As Broadway flickered, off-Broadway was defiantly lit

The American theater is still caught in the post-pandemic quandary of smaller audiences, higher costs and diminished funding. No sector seems to have an answer to this economic riddle.

Broadway has had an especially lean fall season. The highlight has been the revival of “Merrily We Roll Along,” which transferred from New York Theater Workshop with its amazing trio of Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez intact. There have been other successes, most notably an invigorating production of Ossie Davis’ 1961 satiric farce “Purlie Victorious.”

But the real action in New York has been off-Broadway, where Aubrey Plaza made her professional stage debut, Alicia Keys released a musical inspired by her life, Stephen Sondheim’s last work was sleekly unveiled and two of the most intriguing dramas of the year, Annie Baker’s “Infinite Life” and David Adjmi’s “Stereophonic,” were launched.

Christopher Abbott and Aubrey Plaza in “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea” at the Lucille Lortell Theatre.

(Emilio Madrid)

There were other less easily categorizable offerings, performance-lecture hybrids that expanded the range of producing possibilities. Annie Dorsen’s “Prometheus Firebringer” explored the implications of artificial intelligence on our culture, our planet and our understanding of what it means to be human. The Theatre for a New Audience presentation at Brooklyn’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center proved that established nonprofits can trust their audiences to appreciate intelligent programming that invents its own methodologies and plays by its own rules.

Patrick Page, who played King Lear earlier this year in a touted production at Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre Company, brought his Shakespeare expertise to the stage in “All the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain,” a survey of the Bard’s bad guys at DR2 Theatre that was as entertaining as it was enlightening.

Normally, Broadway dominates my dance card on short trips to New York. But this season, the lull has allowed me to get back in touch with my off-Broadway roots. Before I moved to Los Angeles, I was a theater critic and editor for the Village Voice, where my ambit was principally the downtown theater scene.

For a formative decade at the Voice, I was a judge for the Obie Awards, which honors the best of off- and off-off-Broadway, giving me a prime seat for the most adventurous work in town. I saw shows in basements on the Lower East Side, sat through un-air-conditioned fringe festivals in the dog days of summer, experienced the raciest of performance art at spitting distance from the stage and covered the storied off-Broadway institutions that served as sanctuaries for artists constitutionally incapable of selling out to the Broadway machine.

Broadway has changed since I left New York at the end of 2005. Plays and playwrights I would never have expected to make the leap uptown have found welcome. Writers such as Lucas Hnath (“A Doll’s House, Part 2,” “Hillary and Clinton”), Jeremy O. Harris (“Slave Play”) and even Adrienne Kennedy (“Ohio State Murders”), the avant-garde doyenne who made her Broadway debut at age 91, basked in the spotlight of a more inclusive and aesthetically daring commercial theater.

But progress is neither inevitable nor consistent. The theatrical climate has become as unpredictable as our ailing planet’s weather. The COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on the artistic gains that were made. No one knows where any of this is heading, but struggle seems to be the common theme of theaters everywhere.

The New York Times issued a disturbing report this month on the financial turmoil constricting off-Broadway. Some experts are ringing alarm bells; others are asking if this is a “right-sizing” of a field that has grown institutionally too cumbersome and costly.

However you characterize it, the turbulence is inescapable. Which is all the more reason to acknowledge the rich bounty of work in the variegated landscape of today’s off-Broadway. Ross Wetzsteon, who was the Village Voice’s storied theater editor and Obie chair for several decades until his death in 1998, reminds us in his introduction to “The Best of Off-Broadway: Eight Contemporary Obie-Winning Plays” that off-Broadway began “in opposition — to the commodity theater of Broadway, to its package products, to its role as part of the entertainment industry.”

This dividing line blurred as off-Broadway companies grew more ambitious, smaller commercial venues proliferated and nonprofits began to offer themselves up as Broadway tryout houses.

Off-off-Broadway, the natural stamping ground of alternative theater, arose in opposition to compromised opposition.

But since the 2000s, as economic inequality in the nation has gone from bad to worse, the theater world has become more profoundly unequal. No one these days seems to be thriving, but less commercially oriented companies have been left to fend for themselves in the urban wilderness.

To ignore the lure of Broadway in recent years is to relegate yourself to the invisible margins, where mainstream media outlets rarely venture and the alternative press barely exists to cover. The frontier that off-Broadway provided, in Wetzsteon’s words, to free artists “from commercial pressures and audience expectations” so that “theater as an art form” could be affirmed, has been shrinking rapidly. Meanwhile, off-off-Broadway has morphed from a thriving downtown scene to a diffuse archipelago of coterie islands.

Change is constant, and theater-makers are accustomed to having to frantically adapt. Purity is commendable but increasingly not survivable. Facing extinction, nonprofit companies can hardly afford to stand aloof from the power of money and the lure of media. But there are smarter ways to make Faustian bargains, and too often it has seemed as if artistic directors were willing to sell their souls to the most frivolous of devils.

A scene from the new Stephen Sondheim-David Ives musical “Here We Are” at the Shed.

(Emilio Madrid)

The slowdown on Broadway has presented opportunities elsewhere. “Here We Are,” the musical Sondheim was struggling to complete before his death in 2021 with playwright David Ives, had its premiere at the Shed, a deluxe venue that opened at the Hudson Yards in 2019. In an interview, cast member David Hyde Pierce told me that it was perhaps preferable to introduce this unorthodox musical in a more “neutral space,” free of the “ghosts” of a Broadway house and all the expectations they bring.

Actors with Hollywood cachet have been gravitating to cozier venues with more devoted theater audiences. Plaza, who would have been welcomed with open arms by Broadway producers after her breakout performance in HBO’s “The White Lotus,” chose to do a revival of John Patrick Shanley’s “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea” at the Lucille Lortel Theatre on Christopher Street in the West Village, a historic Broadway venue where a landmark production of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s “The Threepenny Opera” starring Lotte Lenya ran for years and Caryl Churchill’s “Cloud Nine” had its New York premiere.

Although limited in scope and straightforward in style, Shanley’s drama provides Plaza and co-star Christopher Abbott with a rigorous emotional workout. Tickets, when I tried to buy a pair for New York friends, were scarce and formidably expensive, but no one at the Lortel on the night I saw the play seemed to feel cheated by the actors, who held nothing back in the brutal wrestling match that followed their characters’ lunge at intimacy.

Plaza isn’t the only big-name star working off-Broadway. John Turturro has been starring in the New Group’s production of “Sabbath’s Theater,” which he adapted with Ariel Levy from Philip Roth’s savagely salacious novel. Having long admired both Roth and Turturro, I was disappointed that I couldn’t make it to the Pershing Square Signature Center during a busy trip last month. But I’m grateful that I’ll be able to catch a live-stream of Dianne Wiest in the Vineyard Theatre production of “Scene Partners” this weekend, another off-Broadway offering I regretted missing.

The League of Live Stream Theater, which made it possible for me to see Jocelyn Bioh’s “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding” last month, is live-streaming the final weekend of performances of John J. Caswell Jr.’s “Scene Partners” in a production by Tony winner Rachel Chavkin (“Hadestown”). And who can resist the opportunity of seeing Wiest in an off-Broadway premiere about a 75-year-old woman who moves to Los Angeles from Milwaukee to finally make good on her movie star dreams?

Musicals are murderously expensive to develop, making “incentive” money from those with deep Broadway pockets a necessary evil. Yet where would the musical be as an art form without off-Broadway? “Hamilton” and “Fun Home” were both launched by the Public Theater, and “The Band’s Visit” started at the Atlantic Theater Company. These shows raised the bar for musical drama and proved to Broadway that meretricious soullessness isn’t the only way.

Maleah Joi Moon, foreground, in the world premiere of “Hell’s Kitchen” at the Public Theater.

(Joan Marcus)

The Public has scored another massive hit with “Hell’s Kitchen,” which features the gems of Keys’ music catalog brilliantly reinterpreted and expanded and a book by Kristoffer Diaz that tells a loosely fictionalized version of Keys’ coming-of-age story. The show, which is musically one of the most euphoric experiences I’ve had in a theater in some time, is headed to Broadway in the spring after its sold-out run at the Public.

Joining “Hell’s Kitchen” on the Great White Way in the new year is another off-Broadway musical, “Days of Wine and Roses,” a work by Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas that I saw at the Atlantic Theater Company in June. The production, directed by Michael Greif (who also directed “Hell’s Kitchen”), stars Kelli O’Hara and Brian d’Arcy James in roles that are every bit as psychologically complex as the film and play that inspired them.

As Wetzsteon noted in his off-Broadway anthology ( which included David Mamet, Suzan-Lori Parks and Wallace Shawn, among other playwriting insurgents), these weren’t plays meant “to comfort our evenings or confirm our values but to discomfort, to challenge, to disturb, to dismay, plays intended to send us reeling out of the theater examining our consciences.”

These works placed aesthetic demands on us as well by moving beyond “the fourth-wall, well-made play in search of visionary expression” — in styles that were “oblique, imagistic, elliptical, non-linear, nonrealistic, calling on new modes of acting [and] demanding new concepts of design.”

Baker’s “Infinite Life,” which had its world premiere in a co-production with London’s National Theatre at the Atlantic Theater Company tautly directed by James Macdonald, offered another adventure in neo-Chekhovian playwriting from an artist who adapted her own version of “Uncle Vanya.”

Baker is continually seeking ways of holding an audience captive without resorting to the normal ruses of conventional plotting. Steeped in behavioral truth, “Infinite Life” found dramatic purpose in the thematic connections among a group of characters being treated at a fasting clinic for chronic pain.

Adjmi’s “Stereophonic,” which is having its world premiere at Playwrights Horizons in a stunning production directed by Daniel Aukin, tells the story of a 1970s band on the rise (not unlike Fleetwood Mac) that is cutting an all-important follow-up album whose difficult birth may destroy the group before it’s released. Set in a recording studio and unfolding in a hypnotic rhythm that is in no hurry to get to the climax, this more than three-hour drama (with songs by Will Butler, formerly of Arcade Fire) immerses an audience in the slow, tense, soul-flaying grind of the creative process.

Washington Post theater critic Peter Marks called it the best play of 2023, but “play” seems an inadequate description for the dramatic form that Adjmi is mapping out. “Stereophonic” proceeds like a fictionalized documentary, a behind-the-scenes view of what it costs to make lasting art. But this detailed study is itself a work of pure imagination, a choreographic poem in which the messy minutiae of collaboration is coordinated in theatrical space to lay bare the dirty human secrets of artistic creation.

One of the reasons off-Broadway continues to be so vital is that it requires us to retool our critical vocabularies and to rethink our certainties of how this art form should behave. Broadway will regain the upper hand soon enough, but let’s hope that off-Broadway will consolidate a proud sense of its own autonomy after a fall theater season redeemed by its independent spirit.