Charles Isherwood

It’s an arresting image that signals the production’s bold, stylized approach to this canonical text, often treated as an antique that requires only a feather duster to be brought back to life. More than any staging I’ve seen, this version, directed by Joe Mantello and starring Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf as Willy and Linda Loman, casts the play in an existential light. We witness not just a critique of the fallacies inherent in the so-called American Dream (or Willy’s meretricious understanding of it), but also a more resonant examination of the isolation and loneliness of life, the fear that comes with the waning of hope, the tenuousness of human connection, and the desperation that follows.

First produced in New York by Second Stage off-Broadway, the play was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2009. The same company has revived it at its Broadway house, the Hayes Theater, in a crisply staged and terrifically acted production directed by Trip Cullman that keeps the play’s serrated edges as cutting as ever.

At times the strain of keeping up the brisk timing of the movie to fill two hours of stage time on essentially a single set results in comic vamping. A passage in which an argument erupts over which nearby shop sells the best donuts, for instance, descends into absurdity when Mr. Eddy suddenly rises from his state of near-unconsciousness to offer his opinion. (Again with the shtick!) “Dog Day Afternoon” makes for a largely diverting evening, but like many if not most stage versions of beloved films it never entirely succeeds at laying to rest the ghosts of its cinematic past.

Thanks in no small part to the radiant emotional authenticity Mr. Radcliffe brings to the role, the narrative of the protagonist’s life maintains our interest as he matures and himself begins to suffer from a persistent melancholy. As the list of matters that make the slings and arrows of life worth enduring grows into the hundreds of thousands—closing in on a million—I found it harder to give credence to this element of the story. But ultimately the inventive staging, which also includes invigorating bursts of recorded music, from Nina Simone, Ray Charles and Curtis Mayfield (the glorious “Move On Up”), succeeds at the high-wire challenge of blending sincerity and levity in disarming but effective, and affecting, proportions.

Ms. Ziegler structures her play as a blend of the contemporary and the classical, with longer monologues alternating with dialogue. The director, Tyne Rafaeli, smoothly integrates the two styles, and the wonderful Ms. Keenan-Bolger, who has most of the choral duties, is excellent at finessing the longer passages (some of Dicey’s personal history could benefit from telescoping) so that they do not devolve into hollow speeches. That said, the central theme—of women’s powerlessness through the ages, even over their own bodies—gets a perhaps over-thorough workout.

Unlike Mr. Shawn’s previous plays such as “Aunt Dan and Lemon,” “The Designated Mourner” or “The Fever” (which Mr. Shawn is performing on Sunday and Monday nights when “Moth Days” is not staged), “Moth Days” has scant sociological, political or philosophical dimensions. The closest approach it makes to evoking more universal truths probably comes in a grim monologue from Tim reflecting on fate, and humanity’s evolution: “The creature that we are wasn’t made by anyone, and if you were to look at it closely as if it were something designed . . . you’d have to say, ‘Oh no, this is terrible, this is an appalling, dreadful design,’ because the creature that we are is so full of characteristics that only a totally demented designer, or a demonically evil designer, would have dreamed of including in it.”

“The Unknown” is primarily a potent entertainment, but Mr. Cale also slyly raises intriguing questions about the relationship between a writer’s life and his work—familiar territory, true, and fodder for innumerable discussions of literary biographies, but depicted here in a fresh dramatic guise. As Larry says to Elliott at one point: “So let me get this straight, you’re living your life and you’re also spying on it at the same time. Is that what all writers do?” Elliott brushes off the question, but I would guess that many fiction writers would find it just as uncomfortable to answer.

And when these apparitions vanish, the text’s overriding theme—of life’s evanescence but also its beauty—does finally dovetail with the ghostly images created by the technology. If “An Ark” were presented as a traditional play, it would be gossamer-thin. Dressed up in the latest digital wizardry, it becomes a memorable, even unforgettable experience.

While one of the hallmarks of Chekhov’s work is its emotional authenticity, “The Disappear” never quite dispels a feeling of artificiality. Ms. Schmidt’s dialogue has a sheen of sophistication (Ben describes the tenor of his movie as “Artaud meets Poe”) and can be archly funny, but it’s also wearyingly talky, and Ben’s egoism and pretentiousness are more tiresome than amusing.

While one of the hallmarks of Chekhov’s work is its emotional authenticity, “The Disappear” never quite dispels a feeling of artificiality. Ms. Schmidt’s dialogue has a sheen of sophistication (Ben describes the tenor of his movie as “Artaud meets Poe”) and can be archly funny, but it’s also wearyingly talky, and Ben’s egoism and pretentiousness are more tiresome than amusing.

Carrie Coon is unleashed from her corsets—and every other stitch of clothing—in the blistering Broadway revival of her husband Tracy Letts’s macabre thriller “Bug,” being presented by Manhattan Theatre Club roughly 20 years after it was first seen in New York off-Broadway. (Due to the prevalence of nudity, audiences must turn off their phones and have them put in secure pouches for the show’s duration.)

Chess matches can be agonizingly long, lasting for numerous hours at the professional level. So maybe it’s perversely apt that the Broadway revival of the musical “Chess” should feel eye-glazingly interminable, despite a cast of thrillingly good singers in top form.

I thought what might follow would be Mr. Icke’s most provocative—and logical and interesting—departure from Sophocles, an ending of a more ambiguous and less gruesome kind. Instead he reverts to tradition. It’s an understandable move: Many might feel shortchanged if Mr. Icke had chosen otherwise. Nevertheless, it’s a Grand Guignol finish to what has previously been an effective, affecting and strictly naturalistic new interpretation of this canonical drama.

While “Queens” casts unsparing light on the experience of the women in America, Ms. Majok is hardly sentimental about what they left behind. Emblematic are scenes set in Ukraine in 2016, with Inna and her American-husband-hunting friend Lera (Andrea Syglowski) discussing the unpromising futures in their country.

Mr. Hunter’s writing has a clarity, delicacy and crisp simplicity that allows us to watch as Sarah and Ethan negotiate the minefields of their relationship, drawing comfort from one another’s company even though both would be loath to admit it. Under the astutely unfussy direction of Joe Mantello, Ms. Metcalf’s remarkably fine performance is flinty, funny and savagely unsentimental. And Mr. Stock’s Micah is sensitive to the point of seeming to squirm inside a constricted, wounded soul.

Standing ovations on Broadway are so common you might imagine the seats have been booby-trapped to eject patrons as the curtain calls begin. But at a recent performance of the brightly shining revival of “Ragtime,” the ovation came early—actually two came early—so transported was the audience by the emotional and musical potency of this panorama of America at the turn of the 20th century.

Impeccable though both performances are, these fine actors almost seem to fade into, um, blank white canvases with a few gray streaks when Mr. Corden bounds or blusters onstage, and sends the comic temperature soaring. This isn’t entirely surprising. The British actor and comic shot to fame (at least in the U.S.) on the strength of a single, dazzling performance in the commedia dell’arte update “One Man, Two Guvnors,” a sensation in London and later on Broadway.

Her performance captures with precision the voice that emerges in the book: mercurial; still vain but gloomy about her diminished looks; instinctively or merely reflexively seductive and flirtatious. But, more enjoyably, also self-deprecating, realistic about her wayward path through life, and, as noted, flaunting a vocabulary heavily larded with salty humor. It’s an accomplished performance that captures the woman in all her complexities and contradictions.

Although ‘The Weir’ is nominally a play focused on tales from the crypt, it’s more broadly and movingly a study in loneliness: how it grows upon you, how it can be soothed by the company of even casual friends and acquaintances met by chance, and how it can and probably will sidle into the lives of just about everyone at some point.

Cleverly conceived—and often sharply funny—“Trophy Boys” nevertheless often feels like a debate itself, with Ms. Mattana expounding upon various ideas about the current discourse around gender and the reverberations of the MeToo movement, sometimes at eye-glazing length.

But ‘Lowcountry’ springs a few too many shock, or shock-adjacent, twists to be believable, among them the revelation that Tally and David knew each other as kids (he doesn’t recognize her), and Tally has sought him out for a confusion of reasons, including vestigial gratefulness at his kindness when her mother died when she was young, and she was ‘fat.’ The violent conclusion, in particular, seems more sensationalistic than persuasive. But ‘Lowcountry’ is at least novel in departing from the toxic-male-drama playbook: Here it is Tally, much more than the registered sex offender David, whose behavior proves most destructive.

Ms. Smart never strikes a false or histrionic note, even when she steps from Izzy into the half-dozen or so other characters, all crisply delineated. It’s a terrific performance, but one that nevertheless remains constrained by the material’s limitations.

The production is technically impressive in all respects, but when the sinister Dr. Brenner (Alex Breaux)—Matthew Modine in the series—made his ominous appearance at the close of the first act, I fantasized about pulling him aside to ask for a sedative. Although in truth the show itself was already soporific enough.

Although its subject is inherently sad, Floyd Collins depicts the title character and his family with a tenderness that allows the musical to transcend any abiding sense of despair. Floyd’s final solo, ‘How Glory Goes’—one of Mr. Guettel’s most rhapsodic and best-known songs—is performed with a transfixing ardency by Mr. Jordan, and leaves you with a sense of spiritual uplift that, in contrast to similar climaxes in many musicals, feels not manufactured to manipulate the emotions, but absolutely authentic... A seasoned actor giving his finest performance to date, Mr. Jordan provides the musical with an affecting emotional center... This one-of-a-kind musical leaves you not with the chill of the cave but with a warmth that glows.

For sheer fertility of imagination, there may be no dramatist writing today to match Caryl Churchill. Across a distinguished career spanning more than five decades, the British playwright has written about a vast array of subjects, from the evils of colonialism to the global financial system to the morality of human cloning. And with each work she seems, astonishingly, to find a fresh form, a newly minted theatrical vessel for her ideas. The four short plays currently on view at the Public Theater reveal the writer at her most economical—her works have become more concentrated in recent years—and often at her most provocatively enigmatic. These are plays that startle with their strangeness, but also leave you with much to ponder.