American Theatre has been doing some version of these most-produced plays lists since 1994, and we’ve watched trends come and go. One that has been clear in recent years: When a title is hot, it comes blazing out of the gate. With one exception, in each year since the post-Covid-lockdown reopening in 2022, the coveted No. 1 spot has gone to titles making their first appearance on the list. In 2022, that was Lynn Nottage’s Clyde’s; in both 2023 and 2024, it was Heidi Schreck’s regrettably timely What the Constitution Means to Me; and last year it was Come From Away, which had only just ended iterations of its wildly successful Broadway tour and become available for licensing (that 9/11-themed musical also makes a strong showing this year).

This year we have another come-out-of-nowhere winner with Kimberly Belflower’s searingly humane riff on Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, John Proctor Is the Villain. Like all seeming overnight successes, though, Proctor didn’t actually come out of nowhere: It began nearly a decade ago as a commission by the Farm Theater’s College Collaboration Project, with its first workshops in 2018 and 2019 at three colleges (Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, and Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida) and a workshop at the Ojai Playwrights Conference’s New Works Festival in 2019. Its professional premiere came in 2022 at Washington, D.C.’s Studio Theatre, and last year it had a triumphant run on Broadway.

The vagaries of licensing explain the sudden reemergence of the 1980s warhorse Les Misérables, and indeed there are plenty of returning perennials on both the plays and playwrights lists (August Wilson, who tops this year’s playwrights list, has been on every one of those lists since we started that tally in 2014). But in addition to Proctor and Belflower, there are other notable firsts this year: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Purpose marks his first play on the Top 10 list (he’s been on the top playwrights list several times before), as does Bess Wohl’s Liberation and Gordon Greenberg and Steven Rosen’s Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors.

A few other hopeful tidbits we gleaned from this year’s data: We drew these lists from a pool of 1,634 productions (more details below), which is nearly 2,000 more than last season’s 1,446. The trend line since reopening after the Covid lockdowns has ticked steadily if slowly upward (though it is still well short of the pre-pandemic tally of 2,229). Also: Bucking a trend toward smaller cast sizes that predates the pandemic but has also been noticeable since reopening, nearly all of this year’s top plays have ensemble casts. As in most things theatrical, we’re better together.