The New York Times: Best Theater of 2020
Clockwise from top center: Sara Krulwich/The New York Times; Machine Dazzle; Shane Harvey/The CW; Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
By Jesse Green, Laura Collins-Hughes, Scott Heller, Maya Phillips, Alexis Soloski and Elisabeth Vincentelli
Published Dec. 1, 2020
A Top 10 list in a Worst 10 year is a strange undertaking. But as I looked back at 2020, even considering the disaster that divided it into before and after, I found that theater was still doing what it does at its best: showing us how we live right now, and how we might live better.
That’s not always the case. Typical seasons offer a selection of titles planned years in advance and sorted by happenstance. But once the stages were locked down in March, throwing thousands out of work, 2020 turned into a year in which theater was of necessity purpose-built, in real time, from scratch. There was some irony in that; it was, after all, the vanishing of the dinosaurs — the corporate Broadway musicals, the 16-week movie-star vehicles — that allowed the smaller, better adapted new works to poke their heads out.
Those shows, however makeshift and mediated by a screen, matched the moment better than most seasons’ shows match theirs. If you follow the calendar (my list is basically chronological), you can see how the online productions I highlight, as well as a few that came before the shutdown, trace a compelling passage through the pandemic year. Together, they helped us move from premonitions through panic toward a new — and often exciting — abnormal.
‘Russian Troll Farm’
With no end to the pandemic in sight, theater-makers had to face the fact that repurposing existing stage works was not going to produce vibrant new ones for our changed world. Just in time, “Russian Troll Farm,” by Sarah Gancher, showed that digital-native productions could make the medium maximally expressive — in this case by exploring the world of online Russian election disrupters using an online aesthetic. It took two directors (Jared Mezzocchi and Elizabeth Williamson) and three companies (TheaterWorks Hartford, TheatreSquared in Arkansas and the Brooklyn-based Civilians) to pull it off, but it was a key step forward and a wicked-smart ride.