The Best Theater of 2017

Terry Teachout, The Wall Street Journal

Theater in America is as vital as it’s ever been—with one grim exception. I saw impressive new plays, imaginative revivals and virtuosic acting in 2017, not just in New York but throughout the country. The musical, though, is in dire creative straits: Not only did I cover no first-rate premieres in the year just past, but I reviewed fewer noteworthy revivals than ever before.

The best new plays, all of them mounted off Broadway or out of town, included Zoe Kazan’s “After the Blast” at New York’s Lincoln Center Theater, Tracy Letts’s “Linda Vista” at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company, John Patrick Shanley’s “The Portuguese Kid” at Manhattan Theatre Club and the long-overdue New York premiere of Brian Friel’s masterly “The Home Place” at New York’s Irish Repertory Theatre.

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