By Ben Schachne
Each Broadway season culminates with one new play joining an exclusive group of works recognized with the Tony Award for Best Play, the highest honor bestowed upon an original dramatic production. More than recognizing the year’s finest new play, it serves as a snapshot of the stories that resonated most with audiences and voters, reflecting the artistic priorities, social conversations, and theatrical innovations of their time. Some Best Play winners have gone on to become modern classics with enduring productions around the world, while others remain closely tied to the specific moment in which they premiered. Looking back at the Best Play winners from the 2016 through 2026 Tony Awards reveals a decade of Broadway defined by bold new voices, timely themes, and an ever-evolving vision of what great theatre can be.
2026: Liberation
Liberation is the most recent winner of the Tony Award for Best Play and one of the defining new dramas of the 2025–2026 Broadway season. Written by Bess Wohl, the memory play intertwines humor with emotional insight as it follows a present-day woman revisiting the unfinished feminist ideals of a 1970s women’s liberation group, exploring how each generation inherits, challenges, and reshapes the dreams of those who came before. In a season with seven other new plays and many esteemed revivals, Liberation distinguished itself through its timely themes, inventive structure, and poignant storytelling, emerging as the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Drama winner that speaks as powerfully to contemporary audiences as it does to the past.
2025: Purpose
Purpose opened during the 2024–2025 season alongside thirteen other original plays and was the 2025 winner for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, the play follows a prominent Black political family whose carefully cultivated legacy begins to unravel during a tense family gathering, using humor and emotional honesty to examine power, generational expectations, and the burdens of inheritance. In a season filled with accomplished and beloved new plays, Purpose deliverd a gripping theatrical experience, acting as a thematic cousin to Jacobs-Jenkins Tony Award-winning play revival Appropriate from the previous season.
2024: Stereophonic
Stereophonic opened during the 2023–2024 season alongside ten other original plays, quickly becoming a critical and commercial sensation through its immersive realism and extraordinary ensemble performances. Written by David Adjmi, with original music by Will Butler, the play transports audiences into a 1970s recording studio, where a rising rock band struggles to complete a career-defining album as artistic ambition, creative tension, and personal relationships threaten to tear the group apart. Exploring the cost of collaboration, the pursuit of perfection, and the fragile nature of success, Stereophonic captivated audiences with its intimate, fly-on-the-wall storytelling and authentic 1970s-inspired rock score, becoming the most Tony-nominated play of all time.
2023: Leopoldstadt
Leopoldstadt opened during the 2022–2023 season alongside a whopping sixteen other original plays, quickly emerging as one of the season’s most acclaimed dramas through its semi-autobiographical historical context and emotional depth. Written by Tom Stoppard, the play spans more than fifty years as it follows a prosperous Jewish family in Vienna through assimilation, rising antisemitism, and the Holocaust, exploring identity, memory, and heritage across multiple generations. Deeply personal for Stoppard, Leopoldstadt offered a moving examination of one family’s history against the backdrop of one of humanity’s darkest chapters.
2022: The Lehman Trilogy
The Lehman Trilogy opened during the 2021–2022 season alongside eleven other original plays, captivating audiences with its epic 2 and remarkably inventive theatrical storytelling. Written by Stefano Massini and adapted into English by Ben Power, the play traces the rise and fall of the Lehman family across more than 160 years, charting their journey from immigrant shopkeepers to the founders of a financial empire whose collapse helped trigger the 2008 global financial crisis. Told by just three actors portraying dozens of characters, The Lehman Trilogy transforms the rise and fall of a financial dynasty into an intimate saga about ambition, legacy, and the pursuit of the American Dream.
2020/2021: The Inheritance
The Inheritance opened during the 2019–2020 season alongside ten other original plays, earning widespread acclaim for its ambitious and emotional examination of contemporary queer life. Written by Matthew López, the two-part epic follows a group of young gay men in New York as they grapple with love, loss, identity, and the legacy of the AIDS crisis, drawing inspiration from E. M. Forster’s Howards End. Balancing intimate personal stories with larger questions of history, community, and belonging, The Inheritance offers a powerful reflection on what one generation owes the next and the importance of preserving collective memory.
2019: The Ferryman
The Ferryman opened during the 2018–2019 season alongside twelve other original plays, bringing a critical chapter of Northern Ireland’s history to the Broadway stage. Written by Jez Butterworth, the play unfolds over a single harvest day in rural Northern Ireland in 1981, where a close-knit family’s gathering is disrupted by the lingering violence and political tensions of the Troubles. Weaving together family drama and political tension, The Ferryman examines the lasting consequences of conflict, revealing how history continues to shape families long after the fighting appears to have ended.
2018: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child opened during the 2017–2018 season alongside seven other original plays, expanding one of the world’s most beloved fictional universes onto the stage through an entirely new theatrical experience. Written by Jack Thorne from an original story by J. K. Rowling, John Tiffany, and Thorne, the play takes place nineteen years after the conclusion of the original Harry Potter series, following Harry’s son Albus and Draco Malfoy’s son Scorpius as they navigate friendship, family expectations, and the consequences of their parents’ pasts. Combining elaborate stagecraft, illusion, and a richly imagined continuation of the wizarding world, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child redefined what the Broadway play can do, becoming the highest-grossing and third longest-running straight play in Broadway history.
2017: Oslo
Oslo opened during the 2016–2017 season alongside ten other original plays, transforming one of the late twentieth century’s most consequential diplomatic negotiations into a riveting work of political theatre. Written by J. T. Rogers, the play dramatizes the secret backchannel talks that led to the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords, following the Norwegian intermediaries in pursuit of peace between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Adapted into a Critics’ Choice Award-winning HBO television film in 2021, Oslo reveals the human complexities behind international diplomacy and the extraordinary risks required to bridge seemingly impossible divides.
2016: The Humans
The Humans opened during the 2015–2016 season alongside twelve other original plays, turning an ordinary Thanksgiving dinner into one of Broadway’s most unsettling and evocative family dramas. Written by Stephen Karam, the play follows three generations of the Irish-American Blake family as they gather in a cramped Manhattan apartment, where long-buried anxieties, financial struggles, and personal disappointments gradually surface over the course of a single evening. A finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, The Humans uses grounded dialogue and psychological suspense to capture the quiet fears and fragile relationships that define contemporary American family life.