As Broadway flickered, off-Broadway was defiantly lit

The American theater is still caught in the post-pandemic quandary of smaller audiences, higher costs and diminished funding. There have been other successes, most notably an invigorating production of Ossie Davis’ 1961 satiric farce “Purlie Victorious.” But the real action in New York has been off-Broadway, where Aubrey Plaza made her professional stage debut, Alicia Keys released a musical inspired by her life, Stephen Sondheim’s last work was sleekly unveiled and two of the most intriguing dramas of the year, Annie Baker’s “Infinite Life” and David Adjmi’s “Stereophonic,” were launched. Ross Wetzsteon, who was the Village Voice’s storied theater editor and Obie chair for several decades until his death in 1998, reminds us in his introduction to “The Best of Off-Broadway: Eight Contemporary Obie-Winning Plays” that off-Broadway began “in opposition — to the commodity theater of Broadway, to its package products, to its role as part of the entertainment industry.” This dividing line blurred as off-Broadway companies grew more ambitious, smaller commercial venues proliferated and nonprofits began to offer themselves up as Broadway tryout houses. Plaza, who would have been welcomed with open arms by Broadway producers after her breakout performance in HBO’s “The White Lotus,” chose to do a revival of John Patrick Shanley’s “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea” at the Lucille Lortel Theatre on Christopher Street in the West Village, a historic Broadway venue where a landmark production of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s “The Threepenny Opera” starring Lotte Lenya ran for years and Caryl Churchill’s “Cloud Nine” had its New York premiere. As Wetzsteon noted in his off-Broadway anthology, these weren’t plays meant “to comfort our evenings or confirm our values but to discomfort, to challenge, to disturb, to dismay, plays intended to send us reeling out of the theater examining our consciences.” These works placed aesthetic demands on us as well by moving beyond “the fourth-wall, well-made play in search of visionary expression” — in styles that were “oblique, imagistic, elliptical, non-linear, nonrealistic, calling on new modes of acting demanding new concepts of design.” Baker’s “Infinite Life,” which had its world premiere in a co-production with London’s National Theatre at the Atlantic Theater Company tautly directed by James Macdonald, offered another adventure in neo-Chekhovian playwriting from an artist who adapted her own version of “Uncle Vanya.” Baker is continually seeking ways of holding an audience captive without resorting to the normal ruses of conventional plotting.