New York, NY – The New York Drama Critics’ Circle has announced Bruce Norris’s Downstate as best play of the 2022-23 season. The award for best foreign play went to Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt.  No award was given for best musical. The selections were made at the organization’s 87th annual voting meeting.

The awards will be presented during a private ceremony on Tuesday, May 22, and are made possible by a grant from the Lucille Lortel Foundation.

Special citations were awarded to the Broadway revival of Parade (book by Alfred Uhry, music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown), to playwright Adrienne Kennedy for lifetime achievement, and to La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club for ongoing achievement in Off-Off Broadway theatre.

Downstate, written by Bruce Norris and directed by Pam McKinnon, had its New York premiere on November 15, 2022, at Playwrights Horizons; it closed January 7, 2023.  The play had its world premiere at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre in October 2018.

Leopoldstadt, written by Tom Stoppard and directed by Patrick Marber, had its American premiere on October 2, 2023, at Broadway’s Longacre Theatre where it currently plays.  The play had its world premiere in January 2020 at Wyndham’s Theatre in London’s West End.

The New York Drama Critics’ Circle comprises twenty drama critics from daily newspapers, magazines, wire services, and websites based in the New York metropolitan area. The New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, which has been awarded every year since 1936 to the best new play of the season (with optional awards for foreign or American plays, musicals and special achievements), is the nation's second-oldest playwriting award, after the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

For more information on the New York Drama Critics' Circle, please visit www.dramacritics.org. A full breakdown of this year’s voting is available on the organization’s website.