The 25 Best American Plays Since ‘Angels in America’ – The New York Times

  1. Topdog/Underdog 2001
  2. An Octoroon 2014
  3. The Flick 2013
  4. Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play 2013
  5. Clybourne Park 2010
  6. Ruined 2008
  7. How I Learned to Drive 1997
  8. Seven Guitars 1996
  9. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 1994
  10. The Designated Mourner 2000
  11. The Humans 2015
  12. This Is Our Youth 1996
  13. Three Tall Women 1994
  14. Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train 2000
  15. Eurydice 2006
  16. House/Lights 1999
  17. The Laramie Project 2000
  18. Yellow Face 2007
  19. August: Osage County 2007
  20. The Vagina Monologues 1996
  21. Underground Railroad Game 2016
  22. The Wolves 2016
  23. The Realistic Joneses 2012
  24. The Apple Family Plays 2010-13
  25. The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity 2010

That was 1993. Exactly 25 years later, the first Broadway revival of “Angels in America” started us thinking about what has happened to American plays in the meantime. Have they been as great? Is their greatness different from what it was? Is “greatness” even a meaningful category anymore?

Perhaps not on Broadway. Of the plays we’ve singled out as the best 25 of the last 25 years — dated by their first reviews in The New York Times — only nine have ever appeared on Broadway, and none originated there. No matter their size, most began on, and many never left, the smaller stages of Off and Off Off Broadway, or were developed at regional theaters.

If they have reached fewer people as a consequence, they have told more stories: the kind often ignored during the decades when theater was still a dominant but homogeneous cultural force.

The Great Work Continues: The 25 Best American Plays Since ‘Angels in America’
JUNE 1, 2018