Reader, you know the drill.

Or, at least, you should, if you followed along with my Favorite Movies of 2019 series.

It’s time to do the same for my favorite theatre of the 2018-2019 season. Plays and musicals and revivals of both, oh my!

But first, most importantly: (please) READ MY THOUGHTS REGARDING THE ARBITRARY NATURE OF THESE SORTS OF QUALITATIVE RANKINGS!!!

The following citations will be plucked from every non-Broadway show — AKA: off, off-off, and non-NYC — that opened between June 2018 and May 2019, except those that transferred to the Great White Way, or have plans to do so (I’ll cover Jagged Little Pill, The Sound Inside, Girl from the North Country, and Sea Wall / A Life next season, and Oklahoma and What the Constitution Means to Me…um…whenever I get around to seeing Tootsie. I know I know! I’m so behind! What a dereliction of duty!).

And now, my favorites from a season that, on a macro level, seemed interested in deconstructing inherited structures — of all kinds — that, in order to live amongst them, we must find a way to reconstruct them to our own liking, keeping the good bits and expelling the corrosively regressive…if that’s possible. One of these structures is the form of theatre itself, comprised of traditional building blocks with radical capacity that we can use to reshape figurative artistic worlds, and in turn the literal worlds of each audience member, and in turn their collective world outside the theatre.