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