Shows That Defied Categorization Offered Audiences a Stark Choice

It was possible for Broadway theatergoers to shock their systems raw with the sexual and racial dysfunction portrayed in Jeremy O. Harris’ “Slave Play” and then soothe themselves in the vast Champagne bubble bath that is “Moulin Rouge! The Musical.” Then there was “American Utopia,” David Byrne’s sui generis performance piece, which suggested that while we might all be on a road to nowhere, we could at least enjoy the ride together.

The differences among those productions reflect a year of shows that defied categorization and expectation. The customary generic stickers slide right off a piece like Jackie Sibblies Drury’s “Marys Seacole” — which turned the biographical drama inside out — or Dave Malloy’s “Octet,” an a cappella chamber opera about internet addiction. And with “Is This a Room,” the experimental theater company Half Straddle reinvented — and reignited — the hard-core documentary play.

The list here is therefore highly eclectic, with a majority of the productions coming from off-Broadway. (Full disclosure: Because of advertising-driven deadlines, it also includes only shows from the first 10 1/2 months of the year.) As befits a season in which ranking such diversely surprising entries seems unjust and impossible, they are listed in alphabetical order.

‘American Utopia’

Far more than the concert it first appears to be, this invigorating production — created by and starring the former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, with precision-tooled choreography by Annie-B Parson — is an unexpectedly hopeful paean to collective individualism, to the shared pleasures and anxieties of this outsize nation of oddballs. Like “Springsteen on Broadway,” it presents a rebel rock hero of yesteryear as an unexpectedly comforting, philosophical father figure for today.

‘Betrayal’

The only revival on my list, this British import reconfigured the central triangle of Harold Pinter’s drama of infidelity into hauntingly fluid new patterns, in which none of the three central characters were ever absent from the others’ minds or the audience’s line of vision. Under Jamie Lloyd’s filigree direction, Tom Hiddleston, Charlie Cox and Zawe Ashton made complicated thoughts and concealed emotions acutely visible.

‘Fleabag’

The one-woman play about sex and the single bed hopper that begat the streaming series of the same title, while jump-starting the ever-ascending career of its creator, Phoebe Waller-Bridge. As performed by her with a physical focus and intensity that even the most probing cameras could never capture, this hourlong work of very live theater felt like the most bracingly intimate show in town.

‘Heroes of the Fourth Turning’

How the other half thinks. Will Arbery’s ensemble play about a college reunion of sorts presented a perspective seldom seen on New York stages: that of pro-Trump, Catholic conservatives groping in the dark for answers, just like their left-leaning Manhattan equivalents. As directed by Danya Taymor, with a cast that burrowed into its characters’ uncomfortable skins like ticks, it made ideological debate seem as fraught and potentially wounding as a boxing match.

‘Is This a Room’

A pause-for-pause, cough-for-cough rendering of the FBI transcripts of the first interrogation of the federal contractor Reality Winner, who is now serving a more than five-year sentence for whistleblowing. Director Tina Satter turned this exercise in theater vérité, in which the blandest conversational clichés come loaded with unspecified menace, into a Kafka-like nightmare with a tension level worthy of Hitchcock. And as the beleaguered, unwittingly self-sabotaging Winner, Emily Davis gave one of the season’s most riveting performances.

‘The Lehman Trilogy’

Three first-rate actors — Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Ben Miles — created a centuries-crossing multitude of characters in this panoramic tale of financial rise and decay, based on the history of the Lehman Brothers. Staged with infinite inventiveness by Sam Mendes, Stefano Massini’s epic drama of familial and economic accumulation and attrition became a juggernaut ride to ruin. (Seen at the Park Avenue Armory, it opens on Broadway next year.)

‘Marys Seacole’

Jackie Sibblies Drury, whose iconoclastic “Fairview” won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for drama, continued to surprise with a cubist vision of a heroic 19th-century war nurse from Jamaica. The extraordinary Quincy Tyler Bernstine portrayed both the original Mary Seacole and an assortment of latter-day avatars in Lileana Blain-Cruz’s kaleidoscopic production.

‘Moulin Rouge! The Musical’

Based on Baz Luhrmann’s film of the same title, this hedonist’s delight of an extravaganza, set in a fin-de-siècle show palace, goes over the top and stays there, in some giddy ether where it feels as if every pop song you ever heard is played in perpetuity. Directed with senses-saturating virtuosity by Alex Timbers, and starring a ravishing Karen Olivo as a dying Parisian vedette, this ne plus ultra of a much maligned form, the jukebox musical, found unlikely elegance in excess.

‘Octet’

In a year plump with idiosyncratic, small-scale musicals (which also included Michael R. Jackson’s bold erotic memoir “A Strange Loop”), none reached deeper or stretched further than Dave Malloy’s sung-through account of a support group for internet addicts. Directed by Annie Tippe, this a cappella show offered the season’s most sophisticated and heartening artistic paradox, as a dauntingly high-tech subject was embraced and exploded by that most low-tech of instruments, the human voice.

‘Slave Play’

In a barrier-busting Broadway debut, young playwright Jeremy O. Harris turned a sex therapy workshop into a scathing consideration of the great and unbridgeable American racial divide. Robert O’Hara directed what is surely the bravest cast on Broadway.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .