Calendar year 2025 productions, events, exhibitions at which I counted, built collaborations, and supported theater and its creatives.
Deborah Kass (1993). “4 Black Barbras” from the “Jewish Jackie Series” at Brooklyn Museum of Art.
My year in theater involved viewing and vetting hundreds of shows, playscripts, designs, and performances; deliberating on awards committees; interviewing prospective and existing students at Harvard, my undergraduate alma mater; dramaturging for several playwrights on new work; and developing a short film about the life and career of Albert Poland, a foundational and important Garland fan. It was another year of collaboration, attendance, counting, and coalition building.
This is my FIFTEENTH annual “what Martha has seen” marathon record of theater/event/film adventuring, initiated after moving to Manhattan in summer 2010. A look back through my prior annual reviews: 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018,2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024.
Theater by the Numbers. This year’s number of productions (not readings, not screenings, not conference sessions) suggests that after the dramatic cliff drop we all experienced in 2020 and 2021, the theater world is now fully swinging, at least in terms of Drama Desk eligible Broadway, Off Broadway, and Off Off Broadway production we cover. My subjective and very personal totals over the past six calendar years: 300 ticketed and staged productions 2019, 59 in the 2020 partial theatrical season covid-truncated on March 11, 80 productions in the just-emerging partial season of 2021 (that began in mid summer), 200 in 2022, 239 in 2023, and 244 in calendar year 2024, and 265 ticketed and staged theatrical productions in calendar year 2025 (including the final four months of the 2024-2025 season, and the first eight months of the 2025-2026 season). More to come!
Panels and Other Events. In June, I participated again on a “Tony preview” panel convened by the Coffee House Club, currently holding court at the Salmagundi Club, to mull over the Tony nominations and thoughts about who might win (and who the Drama Desk had already honored for the season) with Simon Jones, David Barbour, and Mark Rifkin. Also that month I was part of a panel convened by Maestra Music at the Museum of Broadway discussing “Gender Equity in Musical Theatre: Navigating a Changing Political Landscape.” In September, The I presented at the second annual RISE Summit held at the Bruno Walter Auditorium. RISE, a collaboration of advocates and practitioners working to build and ensure equity in the theater. This year’s Summit included “a series of panels and seminars led by AXIS Dance Company, Dance Data Project, Expand the Canon, The Harriet Tubman Effect Institute, Invest in Access, Parity Productions and Women Count, all correlating to this year’s theme of Pathways to Access.” Dance Data Project, Harriet Tubman Effect Institute, and my project with Judith Binus Women Count, presented a panel entitled “Data is Revolutionary.”
Travel and Visits. Few journeys out of town this year, but those I had were precious. In September as the new season was just getting on its feet, after a slow summer, we visited home towns and family members in Grand Rapids Michigan (my homeland) and Springfield, Ohio (husband’s childhood home). Both locales have received some national media attention (laughable and annoying in equal measure) over the terms of the current President, and both have solid Blue components that are strong and growing. In November beloved extended family visited from northern California and we all traveled up to Beacon, New York to visit art installations and ponder Hudson River possibilities. Three lovely days in DC later that month for husband’s American Society of Criminology meetings (his 40th year as a member of that group!) rounded out travels.
Board and Committee Service. I continue as webmaster for the American Theatre Critics/Journalists Association — managing posts and layout, connecting members to discussion forums coordinated on the site, and generally developing and coordinating the public and member-only content there. I serve on several ATCA grant-conveying committees, including Helbing Mentorship Program and the Steinberg/ATCA and Osborn playwrighting awards. And this past year I assumed the role of President of the Foundation of the American Theatre Critics Association, founded in 1991 to provide financial and other tangible support for scholarships, institutes, ATCA awards, education talks and seminars, and other programs.
I again served on the hardworking conference planning committee that assembled and delivered the November ATCANY2025 convening. In additional to general conference planning efforts, I arranged for the participation of Brittani Samuel as this year’s Perspectives in Criticism speaker (in conversation with Linda Armstrong) and moderated a terrific conversation “Liberation and Feminism and the Road to Broadway” with playwright Bess Wohl, director Whiney White, and actors Betsy Aidem, Susanna Flood, and Kristolyn Lloyd, maintained the conference webpage, and a final session at the terrific Museum of Broadway.
Women Count. The eighth edition in the Women Count report series was published in July 2025, including the Women Count VIII executive summary and Women Count VIII full report. The Women Count project collects, analyzes, and reports New York City production credits to illuminate the individuals behind company productions beyond Broadway. The Women Count report series, published since 2014, asks: whose plays are being produced, who is directing them, and who is being hired for off-stage roles? Women Count VIII, the eighth report in the series, covers 24 companies and five seasons representing the breadth of the core database that begins with the 2010/11 season. In the current report, 2011/12 offers a baseline for comparison for the four most recent seasons 2021/22, 2022/23, 2023/24, and 2024/25. Across these five report seasons, 393 productions are analyzed including 13 co-productions among companies tracked by the study.
All reports from the past decade are available on the Women Count Reports Series home page, with all reports authored by me with data collection assistance provided by Judith Binus.
January
(1/5) The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy [redux] (UTR | NYTW Fourth Street Theatre)
(1/6) Julie Halston Takes the Q Train (Birdland) (streaming)
(1/9) Local Singles (The Players Theatre)
(1/11) Mindplay (Greenwich House Theater)
(1/12) Dead as a Dodo (Wakka Wakka | Baruch Performing Arts Center)
(1/16) Grandiloquent (Lucille Lortel)
(1/18) Radio Downtown: Radical ’70s Artists Live on Air (Civilians | 59E59 Theaters)
(1/20) Kowalski (Duke on 42nd Street)
(1/22) Beckett Briefs (Irish Repertory Theatre)
(1/23) Cymbeline (NAATC + Play On Shakespeare | Classic Stage Company)
(7/27) Memnon (Classical Theatre of Harlem | Richard Rodgers Amphitheater)
(7/31) Can I Be Frank? (SoHo Playhouse)
August
(8/2) Well, I’ll Let You Go (The Space at Irondale)
(8/6) Ava: The Secret Conversations (New York City Center I)
(8/7) The Day I Accidentally Went to War (SoHo Playhouse)
(8/10) Lord Nil: 7 Deadly Sins (Stage 42)
(8/12) Mamma Mia! (Winter Garden Theatre)
(8/13) Jeff Ross: Take a Banana for the Ride (Nederlander Theatre)
(8/15) Amaze (New World Stages)
(8/17) Twelfth Night (Delacorte Theater)
(8/24) Alan Turing and the Queen of the Night (The Players Theatre)
(8/25) Exorcistic: The Rock Musical (Asylum NYC)
(8/28) The Whole of Time (The Brick)
September
(9/1) we come to collect: a flirtation, with capitalism (The Flea Theater)
(9/3) Sober Songs (Theatre Row)
(9/5) House of McQueen (Mansion at Hudson Yards)
(9/6) Brothers Size (The Shed)
(9/7) Color Theories (Performance Space New York)
(9/9) Data is Revolutionary (panel presenter, RISE Summit 2025 | Bruno Walter Auditorium)
(9/10) Wild Duck (Theatre for a New Audience)
(9/12-17) Trip to Ohio and Michigan (Springfield and Grand Rapids)
(9/18) This is Not a Drill (Theater at St. Jean)
(9/19) Slanted Floors (apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn)
(9/20) Mexodus (Minetta Lane Theatre)
(9/21) Weather Girl (St. Ann’s Warehouse)
(9/23) The Essentialisn’t (Movement Theatre Company | HERE Arts Center)
(9/24) Waiting for Godot (Hudson Theatre)
(9/25) Caroline (MCC Theater)
(9/26) This Much I Know (59E59 Theaters)
(9/26) Last Call, a play with cocktails (En Garde Arts | private apartment Central West Side)
(9/27) This is Government (59E59 Theaters)
(9/27) The Honey Trap (Irish Repertory Theatre)
(9/28) The Other Americans (Public Theater)
(9/29) Holes in the Shape of My Father (The Tank)
(9/30) Art (Music Box Theatre)
October
(10/1) And Then We Were No More (La MaMa)
(10/2) Torera (WP Theater)
(10/3) Punch (MTC | Samuel J. Friedman Theatre)
(10/4) Crooked Cross (Mint | Theatre Row)
(10/4) Saturday Church (New York Theatre Workshop)
(10/5) Home? A Palestinian Woman’s Pursuit of Life, Liberty & Happiness (59E59 Theatres)
(10/6) Bull (JACK)
(10/7) Weer (Cherry Lane Theatre)
(10/9) The Pitch (The Actor’s Temple)
(10/10) The Porch on Windy Hill (Urban Stages)
(10/11) Let’s Love! (Atlantic Theater Company)
(10/11) The Least Problematic Woman in the World (Lucille Lortel Theatre)
(10/12) Nothing Can Take You From the Hand of God (Playwrights Horizons)
(10/12) Gwyneth Goes Skiing (SoHo Playhouse)
(10/14) Are the Bennet Girls OK? (Bedlam | West End Theatre)
(10/15) Truman vs. Israel (Theatre at St. Clements)
(10/15) Ragtime (LCT | Vivian Beaumont Theater)
(10/16) Blue Cowboy (The Bushwick Starr)
(10/17) Not Ready for Prime Time (Grove House Productions | MCC Theater Space)
(10/18) (un)conditional (SoHo Playhouse)
(10/19) Oh Happy Day! (Public Theater)
(10/20) Tartuffe (House of the Redeemer) [André De Shields out, need to return]
(10/21) Counting What Counts: Co-Creating Data Frameworks for Theaters of Color (panel member, TCG virtual session on 2022 survey of theaters of color)
(10/21) Joyce Vance in Conversation with Preet Bharara: Giving Up Is Unforgivable (92nd Street Y relocated to Redeemer East Side East 91st)
(10/22) A Midsummer Night’s Dream (The Resident Acting Company | Sheen Center for Thought & Culture)