Ten Amazing Productions in 2025

"John Proctor is the Villain"
by Kimberly Belflower
stage door with Sadie Sink
at the Booth Theatre

The American theater is dying. Long live the American theater! So far, so good, we have made it through another calendar year without a single Cleveland theater going under, due not only to the great work we produce, but the strength of our audiences. It is glorious to see.

I had the opportunity to catch many great shows this year, not as many as I hoped, but I was immensely satisfied. Here's a list of shows I really enjoyed, presented in chronological order.

Experts in a Dying Field (Test Flight)

Every single time I see a production in the James Levin Theatre at CPT, I recall that it must be the physical space in which I have ever seen the most live performances. Since 1992, and that was some time ago, when I attended The Chapel of Perpetual Desire presents a Liturgical Circus of Religious Fervour and Live Sex on Stage! I have either witnessed, participated in or produced something in that room several times every single year.

"King James" by Ravij Joseph
Cleveland Play House
Photo: Roger Mastroianni

And many times it has been something like this, a new work with an experimental edge, in this case a series of interpersonal vignettes written and performed by Jonathon Morgan, executed by an ensemble of cheery performers. I like spending time in the same room with people like that.

King James (Cleveland Play House)

Speaking as someone who has written his share of plays that take place in Cleveland, I was very excited to see this two-hander by Heights High graduate Rajiv Joseph. Every story has to take place somewhere, why not here? Why not at the same bar on Coventry where my wife and I spent so many of our twenty-something nights? That it succeeds on its own merits as a tale of friendship and basketball is why it’s justifiably being produced everywhere, but I’m very glad to have seen it with a Cleveland audience.

"The Wolves" by Sarah DeLappe
Dobama Theatre
Photo: Steve Wagner

The Wolves (Dobama Theatre)

My wife and I have raised two high-functioning people into young adulthood, folks whose adolescence was marked by the trauma of encroaching authoritarianism and global pandemic. DeLappe’s play about a girls high school soccer team so carefully tracks what I have seen in my own kids and their contemporaries, what they have been pressed to accomplish and what they have to put up with, should be necessary viewing for anyone who underestimates this generation.

John Proctor is the Villain (Booth Theatre)

I’ve already said many things about this play. This stage direction from the play script says it better:

they scream so loud and for so long
it’s a lifetime of screams
it’s awesome

"Twelfth Night"
Cleveland Shakespeare Festival

Twelfth Night (Cleveland Shakespeare Festival)

Twelfth Night is my wife’s favorite Shakespeare, and it’s certainly one of my top five. It’s a remarkably flexible text, and in production a skilled director can emphasize many different characters, and choose a variety of justifiable moods. The final image of the production at Great Lakes Theater this spring was of the twins, Viola and Sebastian, giddily engaging in cryptophasia. We saw a production in Montreal ten years ago that closed on three characters who were left without a partner – Feste, Sir Andrew and Antonio. Lisa Ortenzi’s production for Cleve Shakes was ideal for free, outdoor theater. It was funny, silly, bright, and very fast.

The Right Room (BorderLight Theater Festival)

We did it, thanks to the folks at BorderLight we produced a play that takes place in a hotel room in an actual hotel room. I got to watch the final dress rehearsal in the Presidential Suite of the Crowne Plaza Hotel – which was also the only rehearsal in the actual performance space – but I did not have the opportunity to experience it with the audience, there was no room. But I could hear it, and that was a lot.

"Sincerely, (the diary play)"
by Bryanna Lee
The Vagrancy

Sincerely, (the diary play) (The Vagrancy)

The day after The Right Room, I managed to see six shows at BorderLight, including this memoir play by Bryanna Lee. And when I say memoir play, I meant that literally -- the entire script is masterfully shaped from found documents (journals, video recordings, medical records, text messages) into a self-elegiac narrative about adolescent hope and betrayal.

Sunday in the Park with George (Great Lakes Theater)

Sondheim doesn’t make it easy. There is a reason this one isn’t done often. It’s challenging in so many ways. I was so excited to have the opportunity not only to see it performed live (for the first time) but also to share it with my entire family. The wall of beautiful voices at the conclusion of each act brought me to tears.

Cat on script.
November 9, 2025

Ten November (reading)

I was introduced to this script by Steven Dietz over twenty years ago, and kept ruminating on a possible production. Living on the Great Lakes, the Edmund Fitzgerald has a kind of personal significance and I have wanted to tap into that. The fiftieth anniversary of the disaster seemed like the last opportunity to acknowledge this. We have a charming little house, full of clutter and love, and don’t have people over often enough, and so created a haunting evening with a cross-section of friends to tell the story.

I Wear My Dead Sister's Clothes (Cleveland Public Theatre)

We end where we begin, in the Levin Theatre. Amy Schwabauer (with director Ray Caspio) has brought this monodrama about grief and things through an extensive development process and I finally took the opportunity to see it at a Monday night showing. I love Monday night theater. We're thinking of developing a new theatrical memoir and just as I was questioning the importance of death narratives, I saw this and feel entirely justified (again). So you all have that to look forward to.

Here Are The High School Plays! (Revisited)

To paraphrase what a traffic court judge once said to me, this blog has hair on it. Which is to say, it’s been around a while. When I began this blog on January 1, 2010, our kids were six and four. Now the younger one is entering his junior year at the University of Cincinnati, the elder just graduated with honors from my alma mater, Ohio University.

Seven years ago, I wrote a post about the kinds of plays being produced in American high schools. The elder (Zelda, I will name them, they are an adult now) a freshman in high school, was in their first evening of one-acts, which included Don Zolidis’s omnipresent 10 Ways to Survive the Zombie Apocalypse. Later that year, Zelda would play Poppy in a very good production of Noises Off.

One of my biggest regrets, if not theirs, was that they were cast as Celia in As You Like It their junior year, a production cancelled due to COVID-19. I hope to someday see them do Shakespeare.

Most plays chosen by high school drama departments, be they contemporary, classic or sometime in between, aren’t about high school students. I have been led to believe teens don’t want to play teens, they want to be something other than who they are. It is also true that many shows that have featured teenage characters feature poorly drawn teenage characters (I’m looking at you, Bye Bye Birdie.)

Recently, however, there have been several musicals that have broken through, due in part to their freshness and accuracy in addressing the concerns and interests of modern young people; musicals like The Prom, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee and Ride the Cyclone. And in just the past few months, I have had the chance to take Zelda to see two recent plays that are very present and particular to the current moment.

The first was last spring’s Dobama Theatre production of Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves, an 80 minute play about a competitive high school travel girl soccer team (I think I got those adjectives in the right order). I read it in 2020 and I loved it – as a soccer dad, I felt it rang with truth – and I thought, oh man! Zelda needs to read this! Then I thought again. They were in the thick of it, and this story might come as an unwelcome intrusion.

"The Wolves" by Sarah DeLappe
Directed by Nell Bang-Jensen
Philadelphia Theatre Co. (2020)

I did watch a production of The Wolves produced for Zoom in late 2020 by the Philadelphia Theater Company, which was surprisingly effective given the limitations of the technology. When Dobama announced their production, I thought, perfect! I can now take them to see that. It had been over four years since the quarantine-era match that took Heights out of the playoffs, and the flagrant foul that took our child, the keeper, out of the game.

So we attended the performance together. I was sure Z would be particularly drawn to the character of 00, the goalie for the Wolves, and in this production played by Jasmine Renee, who is also directing The Right Room for BorderLight this summer. Z said they loved the show, and also that they never need to see it again. I don’t know it, but I get it.

More recently, we saw John Proctor is the Villain on Broadway. The moment they went on sale we got tickets – I just had to take the family to see this show. And then I got very concerned. I loved the script, I also loved the Performing Arts Academy production two years ago, But … Broadway? Would it work? Would it be successful? Would the market bear a play about the very real concerns of people who were not yet adults?

The marketing campaign was interesting. I kept getting texts that were written (I guess) like an actual teenager was sending them. I forwarded one to the rest of the family and Zelda thought I’d been hacked.

Long story short, the production is not only successful but very successful, and nominated for seven Tony Awards. Having seen Oh, Mary! last fall, this is only the second time I have had the chance to see two Tony nominated shows before the awards drop – the first was two years ago when we saw Merrily We Roll Along and Purlie Victorious on the same weekend in late 2023.

The evening we attended John Proctor was a Tuesday night, and the place was packed. So many young people! So many young women! Attending a play! And they were rewarded, too, as the entire company who played the teenage characters signed everyone’s program at the stage door.

This is a fascinating time in American theater, where challenging new ideas are making their way onto professional stages across the nation. That the voices of young people are represented with honesty and accuracy, and in a way they have not been before. Will plays like The Wolves or John Proctor is the Villain supplant chestnuts like Twelve Angry Men or The Crucible on our high school stages? And would it be such a terrible thing if they did?

See also: 

Here Are The High School Plays! (2018)

Play a Day: John Proctor is the Villain

Ten Amazing Productions in 2023

Jordon & Orson at "Hadestown"

When did we start posting photos of our programs? I remember all those in early 2016 who went to see Hamilton with the original cast, showing off selfies in the Richard Rogers Theatre, feeling at once joy for whoever was there and also that inevitable pang of jealousy.

Totes FOMO, yo.

Of course, I have also posted a picture of my Hamilton program on Instagram, but also, when I remember to, pictures of the program from whatever show I am seeing, wherever I’m seeing it. It’s a promotion, not a flex (I promise) reminding anyone out there who cares to know that theater is happening, and to encourage others to choose it.

This year I had the opportunity to see a lot of shows, and I want to make more of a habit of this. Since the kids have moved on to college I have taken more opportunities to just go see shows as a regular thing.

Here are ten I caught this year which were amazing (presented in chronological order).

"Scenes From a Night's Dream"
Photo: Rob Wachala

Scenes From a Night’s Dream (convergence-continuum) Yes, I’ll start with one of mine. This was my Master's Thesis, an exploration of the darker corners of my own psyche and I couldn’t have been more pleased with the acting company who realized not only the loopiness of the dream but the dreadful tension of reality.

Hadestown (Palace Theatre) The boy and I saw this show on Broadway, and we were both excited to get to share the touring production with our partners, here in Cleveland. I’m not really a huge musical fan, but I like what I like, and I really think this is the best original musical of the past ten years.

Fun Home (Cain Park) This show is meant to be intimate, which is why it was weird to see the Broadway tour perform Alison Bechdel’s memoir play from the balcony in the Palace seven years ago. The Alma was not only a more suitable venue, but we were seated front row center on opening night. Joanna Cullinan directed this piece with all the sensitivity and humor it deserves.

"Step Nine"
Photo: Steve Wagner

Step Nine (give me your keys) This is another one of mine, a twenty-minute two-hander about toxic masculinity in the theater community. Presented for free in a small room at Parnell’s downtown as part of the BorderLight Fringe Festival, I have been led to understand that a few men about whom I know absolutely nothing were angered that I would write a play about intimate details from their personal lives.

The Last Five Years (Near West Theatre) The main problem with any production of this two-person musical by Jason Robert Brown is that anyone playing Jamie will try to make him sympathetic, but he’s not. Neither is JRB for having written a somewhat cringy roman à clef about his first marriage. The folks at Near West saved the play from itself by queer casting Sarah Blubaugh in the role, who was able to cut to the heart of the role in the way no man could, and by God, she even crafted a mythic spectacle from the much-derided “Schmuel Song.”

"The Last Five Years"
Photo: Amber Patrick

Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 (Great Lakes Theater) People who love this musical really love this musical, but that’s not a lot of people. I came to it entirely fresh and was entirely overwhelmed. This was the best show I have ever seen at Great Lakes Theater. Alex Syiek as Pierre brought me to tears, twice.

Bulletproof Backpack (Tri-C West) Eric Coble wrote a very good script about America’s gun pandemic, and director James Alexander Rankin staged a fast-paced production packed with urgency. And that’s the best kind of art they is.

Merrily We Roll Along (Hudson Theatre) Ever since I heard of this musical’s troubled history, I’ve been fascinated by it. I read the Kaufman & Hart play it is based on, I have been inspired by the backward chronology, I’ve seen the documentary. Songs from this show are now classics. When I heard this production was headed to Broadway I told my wife, we’re going. And it's a hit! People are really starting to get into Stephen Sondheim.

"John Proctor is the Villain"
Photo: Daren Stahl

Purlie Victorious (Music Box Theatre) It is a beautiful thing to see a triple threat like Leslie Odom Jr. tackle a straight play where he still has the opportunity to bring the graceful might of his voice and agility to the work. It is a demoralizing thing that a play from sixty years ago that comments on the state of civil rights in America is just as relevant in the 21st century, but I guess that’s why we do theater, right?

John Proctor is the Villain (Academy for the Performing Arts) Having first read this piece by Kimberly Belflower during the lockdown, I was really looking forward to eventually seeing a production. A high school drama about agency and abuse, I’m very glad I had the chance to see the work executed so expertly by actual teen performers.

"Forget About Me (The Breakfast Club Play)" reading at Purple Rose Theatre Company

Next weekend, the Purple Rose Theatre Company in Chelsea, MI, will present a concert reading of my new script Forget About Me (The Breakfast Club Play) via Zoom on Saturday, July 16 at 10:30am. This reading will be directed by Rachel Keown, Purple Rose Artistic Associate, and feature Rhiannon Ragland & Skylar Causey.

This will be the first opportunity to share the work with a larger audience. The piece has only been read twice before, for a small, invite-only audience of friends and shortly after for our NEMOFA playwriting workshop in late 2020. These were also, of course, presented online.

The working title was John Bender Is the Villain, a play on the title of Kimberly Belflower’s John Proctor Is the Villain, a contemporary (and very popular) takedown of Arthur Miller’s sainted protagonist from The Crucible.

As with that play, two generations have very different opinions about the message sent by beloved classics. In the case of Forget About Me, a mother and teenage child discuss their recent trip to the local drive-in to see The Breakfast Club. They went to a drive-in because it is late 2020 and there’s a pandemic quarantine going on.

Brief Synopsis: A Gen X Mom and her high-achieving, high school senior spend a night together at home. Cake is baked, drugs are consumed, and lines are crossed, while they debate teen movies, whether or not John Bender is the villain, and wait for that thick envelope.

So, my play is like No Exit only there are a lot more laughs, pop culture references, and they get cake.

The pandemic has been hard on everyone, the quarantine was something different. Did that actually happen? I was lucky, my work continued, I even started grad school which was easier because I did not need to travel an hour (both ways) to get to my classes. But I watched as my high school age children struggled to maintain a sense of self as events were first canceled then never scheduled.

Our eldest lost their senior year, no plays, no concerts, no special celebrations of achievement. All that time and effort, building reputation and honing their skills, to at last work alone in their room on college application projects and materials that might or might not carry them away from us and onto an uncertain future.

Then there is us, the Generation they called X,  raised in the shadow of the Boomers, our own childhoods making us very different parents with very different children. It’s funny, it’s as though the Strauss-Howe Theory of American Generations has failed its first test. The Millennials are as “Recessive” as we are, it’s Gen Z who are the new “Dominant” generation.

Or maybe that just seems to be the case in my house.

Purple Rose Theatre Company presented a concert reading of "Forget About Me (The Breakfast Club Play)" directed by Rachel Keown on Saturday, July 16, 2022 at 10:30 AM.

Seat of the Pants productions presents a staged reading of "Forget About Me (The Breakfast Club Play)" directed by Katherine Nash on Saturday, June 13, 2026 at 1:30 p.m. at Clague Playhouse in Westlake, and at 7:30 p.m. at Christ Presbyterian Church in Canton.

Play a Day: John Proctor is the Villain

Kimberly Belflower

To round out the week, I am enjoying a script that I have been looking forward to for months, yet purposefully avoided.

For Friday, I read John Proctor is the Villain by Kimberly Belflower and listed at New Play Exchange.

Last weekend my new play The Witches was to have received a workshop production at Cleveland Public Theatre. As I was trying to create a modern take on the historic events of the Salem Witch Panic of 1692, I was worried that I might be influenced by this piece which has been getting a lot of attention.

I need not have worried. If anything, Belflower's play script has inspired me to return to my own text and push it further. Because her play is startlingly biting and beautiful and just what we need right now. I hope it gets produced all over the place.

And it is in reading such pieces that I feel challenged to create more and better work.

I love the title, that's first. And I was stunned and delighted that the holding company for Arthur Miller's written works granted permission for text from The Crucible to be quoted in this play. We could compare and contrast how those gatekeeping works by dead white men such as Samuel Beckett or Edward Albee have (mis)managed their estates, in this case I was gratified to know the keepers of Miller's work appreciate that criticism does not mean erasure.

Taylor Atwara, Anna Nicolosi 
Academy for the Performing Arts, 2023
Photo: Daren Stahl

John Proctor Is the Villain is a high school drama which excellently describes the familiar manner in which woman is still pitted against woman in American society, a society still haunted by its Puritanical roots, for the continued domination by men. The cracks are beginning to show, though the light shining through them remains dim. It's a hopeful story, but also realistic. There's so much work left to be done.

This script is tense, taut, humorous, dramatic, powerful, poetic, and devastating, and high schools everywhere should be producing this.

In the past two days, I have read plays about transgressive relationships between teacher and student, this one and Meet Me In The Bathroom. One of the iconic taboos, as it is not only a violation of our communal understanding that it is criminal for adults to engage in sexual activity with children, but also represents a violation in the bond of trust between student and mentor.

It is a power play; one uses their position of power to satisfy their own desires, with little or no regard for the damage that might cause the disempowered.

Broadway Premiere
Starring Sadie Sink
The Booth Theatre (2025)

As a child, or pre-adolescent, I was exposed to the Kubrick film version of Lolita, and also the popular song which name checks the author of the novel from which it was adapted, "Don't Stand So Close to Me." At that time, in these cases, such titillating fare made an impression on me because I thought of myself as the child, receiving forbidden knowledge, and not as the adult, and I was caught up in the romantic danger of it, instead of paying attention to the very apparent abuse.

This was further complicated as I entered high school and as a freshman was complicit in turning a blind eye to an actual teacher-student relationship. "Tell my parents I'm with you," is a lie teenagers have been pressed into telling on their friend's behalf since before the invention of the telephone.

Whether it be Nabokov or Sting, we used to learn about these stories from the predators point of view, one who positions himself (usually himself) as the hero. Increasingly, as with these two scripts, we see it from the student's. And that is a powerful thing.

Who should I read tomorrow?