The 20 best Broadway and Off Broadway shows of 2016

Jennifer Kidwell and Scott Sheppard enacted amusing and unsettling scenes from America’s divided past and present in a time-hopping, bruise-pressing two-hander on themes of racial guilt and role play.

The Royal Shakespeare Company delivered 12 hours of ultra-traditional, uncut history play—Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 and Henry V—to BAM for top-shelf Bard-binging. Antony Sher’s Falstaff was perhaps the greatest we’ll ever see.

The immigrant experience never seemed so cool or full of kickass fights as in Qui Nguyen’s culture-jamming comedy-drama about South Vietnamese fleeing the war at home: rap battles, ninjas and plenty of sex and drugs

One of the year’s more daring and divisive Broadway offerings, this audio-intensive odyssey from Simon McBurney explores much territory: telepathy, civilization and the nature of time. It was kind of mind-blowing.

Set in a shabby church basement in rural Idaho, Samuel D. Hunter’s probing drama shone light into minds and motives of young Christian missionaries whose search for meaning drives them to extremes.

Anna Deavere Smith’s latest solo documentary piece, based on interviews she conducted around the country, plumbed the school-to-prison pipeline with sensitive intelligence and protean virtuosity.

William Finn and James Lapine’s 1992 groundbreaking gay-themed musical about a Jewish family in crisis—divided by divorce and sexism, then united in pain by the AIDS epidemic—returned in all its deeply idiosyncratic glory.

Corey Stoll was a magnetically creepy Ulysses in Daniel Sullivan’s insightful, action-packed Shakespeare in the Park production of the Bard’s pitch-dark Trojan War play, which punctures all notions of heroism and romance.

A bit like Annie Baker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Flick, this suburban comedy-drama by Dan LeFranc moves at a patiently unhurried pace over three hours, telling the story of several neighbors’ intertwined lives. As with Baker, the organic, “slow theater” approach leads to unexpected depth and plenty of laughs.

Embedding actors in digital animations projected on a stage, the British multimedia troupe 1927 achieved astonishingly precise tableaux. The story was a grotesque and weirdly sweet variation on the Yiddish fable about a man-made puppet come to life.