As an idea and as a lived experience, family life loomed large in Boston theater this year.
Makes sense. Family is hard to beat when it comes to story lines, characters, scope, stakes, and the kind of intense interpersonal conflict that revs up the dramatic engine.
The overall portrait of family and home that took shape on local stages in 2025 ranged widely between crucible and refuge. The home was an environment of recriminations, revelations, and reconciliation.
Many family dramas are structured as inquiries into a shared heritage by people who don’t otherwise have a lot in common. For those of us in the audience, it can be cathartic, or disconcerting, to watch actors dig deep into the most personal places. We may recognize aspects of ourselves in the family dramas playing out onstage, or reflections of the people whom we know best — and those who know us best.
There are bound to be plenty of offstage reminders of that dynamic this month, one of the most family-centric periods on the calendar. But it’s worthwhile to look back now at just how much the year in theater focused on family, and how those different stories used the same framework to tell vividly contrasting stories about how family can shape a person.
The Ufot Family Cycle, Mfoniso Udofia’s epic chronicle of three generations of a Nigerian-American family, continued toward the goal of having all nine plays in the saga presented locally. By year’s end, six of them had been, with four of them landing in 2025.
It was The Huntington, led by artistic director Loretta Greco, that spearheaded the ambitious nine-play initiative. Even apart from the Ufot cycle, The Huntington still made family-centered works the center of its efforts to a striking degree, staging productions of “Fun Home,” Ricardo Pérez González’s “Don’t Eat the Mangos,” “The Light in the Piazza,” Jez Butterworth’s ”The Hills of California,” and Ins Choi’s “Kim’s Convenience.”
The year began with a searing production of August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson” by Actors’ Shakespeare Project in partnership with Roxbury’s Hibernian Hall, where the play was performed.
A fierce contest of wills unfolds in “The Piano Lesson” between siblings Boy Willie and Berniece over a precious family heirloom: an antique piano into which likenesses of their enslaved ancestors were carved by another ancestor.
Boy Willie wants to sell the piano and use the money to buy the Mississippi plantation land upon which their family was enslaved, seeing it as a hard-won triumph over the past. But Berniece stands firm in her belief that the piano should remain in the family, saying: “Money can’t buy what that piano cost.”
The choice will define their family, at least partly. Do you try to move on from the horrors of family history, or do you use them as the cornerstone of remembrance, as the best way to honor your forebears?
As subject matter, family has a vitality that can cross time, place, race, and the particulars of stories.
That was illustrated by a pair of dramas staged in March. One was Apollinaire Theatre Company’s production of Henrik Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler,” set in Norway in the late 19th century, and presented at Chelsea Theatre Works in downtown Chelsea. The other was The Huntington’s staged reading of Mfoniso Udofia’s “runboyrun,” with Udofia herself in the cast, at the Huntington Theatre.
Udofia’s play dramatizes the lasting effects of wartime trauma and the ways it can spill into family relationships, with Abasiama and Disciple Ufot’s marriage in crisis because of his struggle to share details of what happened to him in wartime Nigeria in the ‘60s.
In “Hedda Gabler,” the title character is a newlywed, but she already feels hemmed in by her marriage to George, an academic whose mediocrity she’s fully apprehending for the first time.
Hedda is not out to win our sympathy, but she garners at least a portion of it because Ibsen makes sure that we see and understand the force of social pressure that can close in on any woman who makes an unconventional choice about the path her life should take.
In May, “Kimberly Akimbo,” a quirky musical about a New Jersey high schooler suffering from a syndrome that makes her age rapidly, was presented by Broadway In Boston at the Emerson Colonial Theatre. With music by Jeanine Tesori and book and lyrics by South Boston native David Lindsay-Abaire, adapting his play, “Kimberly Akimbo” executed an incredibly tricky balancing act, managing to blend heartache and humor.
There were few onstage moments this year as poignant as a scene where Kimberly’s friends were excitedly talking about their plans for the future in front of her — a future she won’t be able to share in.
Gloucester Stage Company’s first-rate June production of Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie” drove home the different kinds of desperation felt by three members of a family: Amanda Wingfield, a single mother, scheming and maneuvering in the hope of finding a husband for her disabled daughter; Laura, the daughter in question, afraid to venture beyond the world she has constructed with her small glass figurines; and a son, Tom, who fears he’ll never be able to live the life he wants to live unless he leaves them both behind.
There have been countless revivals of “The Glass Menagerie” in the eight decades since it premiered on Broadway, but the Gloucester Stage production proved how resonant it — and the family drama as a genre — remain.
In September came Udofia’s “The Ceremony,” set in Worcester, and produced by CHUANG Stage in partnership with Boston Playwrights’ Theatre and Boston University College of Fine Arts. “The Ceremony” revolved around Ekong Ufot, a 31-year-old Nigerian-American, and Lumanti Shrestha, a 32-year-old Nepali-American.
The duo is preparing to be married, and both of their families bustle about, determined to play leading roles in organizing the wedding. But Lumanti, and especially Ekong, belatedly discover that they need to figure out how to forgive their extremely flawed fathers before either of them can move forward and form a family of their own.
In November, a production of “Kim’s Convenience” — presented as part of The Huntington Selects series — also focused on a flawed father, while raising questions about what one generation owes to another, in both directions.
Appa, a headstrong Korean-American father (played by Choi), is determined to keep his store family-run. But when his daughter Janet makes clear she has no interest in running the store, that leaves only Appa’s son, Jung, from whom Appa has been estranged. For the family to move forward, one of them needs to swallow his pride — a dynamic that plays out in many households.
In terms of sheer complexity, family life takes the prize, a fact underscored by “Fun Home,” which wrapped up its run at The Huntington on Sunday, Dec. 14.
“Fun Home” told its story of a volatile family awash in secrets in triplicate, so to speak. Alison, a middle-aged “lesbian cartoonist,” as she calls herself, is trying to figure out why her closeted father died by suicide shortly after she came out to him.
So the 43-year-old Alison reexamines her past, looking back at herself as a college freshman awakening to her sexuality for the first time, and as a precocious pre-teen child.
In his dealings with Alison, her father alternated between bullying and doting. When we first meet Young Alison, she’s demanding that her father play “airplane” with her, lying on his back and hoisting her up horizontally, as if she were flying. Alison’s final words at the end of the show, spoken by her middle-aged self, are: “Every so often, there was a rare moment of perfect balance, when I soared above him.”
At that moment, she captured one of the disquieting truths about families: You can love them, you can struggle to understand them, and, sometimes, all you can do is try to transcend them.
TOP 10 LIST
“The Hills of California,” The Huntington
“The Piano Lesson,” Actors’ Shakespeare Project in partnership with Hibernian Hall
“300 Paintings,” American Repertory Theater
“Kimberly Akimbo,” Broadway In Boston
“Our Class,” Arlekin Players Theatre
“Her Portmanteau,” Central Square Theater and Front Porch Arts Collective
“Ain’t No Mo’,” SpeakEasy Stage Company and Front Porch Arts Collective
“Hamilton,” Broadway In Boston
“The Glass Menagerie,” Gloucester Stage Company
“Misery,” Merrimack Repertory Theatre
Don Aucoin can be reached at donald.aucoin@globe.com. Follow him @GlobeAucoin.