Reed Birney, Jayne Houdyshell, Cassie Beck, Sarah Steele, Arian Moayed, and Lauren Klein in The Humans (Photo by Joan Marcus)

With Broadway’s seasonal winnowing of the herd well underway – only 29 shows running, with nine closing by the first weekend in September – it seems a good time to look back at what was, and what we know about what will be.

What we know is that in the last Broadway season, only eight new plays opened on Broadway, and only one of them is still running, Stephen Karam’s The Humans. Based on productions with firm opening dates and theatres for the coming season, there are only three new plays on tap so far, and even that’s generously allowing Andrew Upton’s The Present, based on Chekhov, into the group.

It’s not that Broadway will lack for plays, but they’re predominantly revivals, everything from The Little Foxes to The Cherry Orchard to August Wilson’s Jitney – these from our subsidised companies with Broadway homes. Commercially, we’ll see The Front Page, Les Liaisons Dangereuses and The Glass Menagerie.

That’s not to say that more new plays won’t find their way to Broadway, and surely more productions will be announced between now and early January, at which point the season is usually pretty well set. At this time last year, we didn’t yet know about Eclipsed or The Humans, which made quick trips from Off-Broadway to on. Off-Broadway’s institutional companies have a raft of new work on tap, any of which could catch fire and make the leap, as could a sudden UK hit, or even, though it’s increasingly rare, a play emerging from the array of regional companies around the US.

But the ongoing problem of how plays manage to hold a place on Broadway, especially if they don’t come with a true box office draw star attached, is certainly apparent from last season and the one to come. The risk of mounting new plays, sans stars, is now incompatible with Broadway, unless buoyed on a wave of critical acclaim and industry awards. Even Off-Broadway, subsidised producers are hedging their bets with stars such as Daniel Radcliffe at the Public Theater and Matthew Broderick at the Irish Rep this summer.

Musicals have no such problems. Indeed, at any given moment there seem to be more musicals circling Broadway hoping to secure a theatre than there are landing slots. These are largely new works, too, and the coming season will include stage adaptations of films, such as Amelie and Anastasia; transfers from London, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Groundhog Day; and original pieces such as Come from Away and Dear Evan Hansen (both of which were first seen regionally). There is no dearth of new musicals, a far cry from 1994/95 when Sunset Boulevard and Smokey Joe’s Cafe, the latter a revue, were the only new musicals of the season. Even when many new musicals come and go quickly, losing $10 to $12 million each, there seem to be more waiting in the wings.

Are the successful, and even the unsuccessful, musicals driving plays away?

That’s not necessarily the case, since so many factors go into producing decisions. But it’s worth noting that The Color Purple – like Once before it – has made a good home of the intimate Jacobs Theatre, and while American Psycho’s run was short, it colonised the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, another smaller house more commonly used for plays. If musicals can be budgeted to work in smaller houses even more frequently, it’s likely they’ll proliferate there as well, since there seems to be so much less willingness to lose $4 million on a play and so much more financial upside to a hit musical.

Plays aren’t disappearing from Broadway any time soon, but the opportunities for new plays, at least from the current vantage point, seem to be on the wane. That’s a by-product of Broadway’s overall robust health, and perhaps the bounty of creative musical theatre talent, as well. But there’s no dearth of talented playwrights, either. Without the boost that being on Broadway can bring, in popular perception and in the media, will plays come to be seen by some as a truly separate form of theatre, if they can’t stand side by side with musicals everywhere theatre is found? Let’s hope that’s not where we’re headed.

Lynn Hawley, Amy Warren, Maryann Plunkett and Meg Gibson in Hungry (Photo by Joan Marcus)

I’m writing this column during an interval. I’ll still be waiting out that interval when I write again next week. In fact, I won’t be getting in for Act II until September, after which I’ll wait about six weeks for Act III.

Of course, this is an exaggeration, but as I try to explain the experience of seeing Richard Nelson’s The Gabriels: Election Year in the Life of One Family, it gets at what Nelson is doing with his new trilogy, akin to what he previously achieved with his quartet, The Apple Family Plays.

Offering glimpses of a few hours with a family at something approaching real time, these works are not unlike dropping in on relatives that you manage to see only a few times a year. In some ways, it’s the opposite of immersive theatre: it gives you a very small taste of a story, and then makes you wait for months before you get another shot. To be fair, each play can stand on its own, though the collective experience gains a cumulative power.

I saw the first of The Gabriels plays, Hungry, on March 6; the events of the play took place on March 5, 2016 – and they always will. That’s why subsequent stagings of these Nelson works will never quite match the temporal verisimilitude of their first productions, because even if they’re spaced out to approximate real time, they can never again be exactly of the original moment. For all their simplicity, these Nelson works are almost daring in their formal approach to time.

Usually when we think about time in the theatre it’s durational: how many hours did it take? The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, The Mahabarata, The Norman Conquests, Gatz: part of the experience is how long we sit for them – and subsequently we brandish our stamina in front of others. Nelson not only wants audiences to allow their own lives to pass before they next experience the work, but he also wants time genuinely to pass in the life of his characters – and it forces him as a playwright to grapple with intervening events in the world, beyond the Rhinebeck NY village where both multi-play works are set.

The tradition of playing with time in theatre is longstanding; J.B. Priestley used it frequently, in such plays as Time and the Conways; Ayckbourn has toyed with it as well, adding the geographic complications and simultaneity of House and Garden. More recently, Annie Baker has pushed the perceived boundaries of what can be done with naturalistic dialogue in The Flick, mandating gaps in conversation that mimic halting, awkward real speech, but are contrary to the snap and pace of so many stage works.

Sarah Steele, Arian Moayed and Jayne Houdyshell in The Humans (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Even as The Gabriels unfolds its first chapter and leaves us wondering what will be part of the next, another experiment in time is taking place on Broadway, but so subtly that few people realise they’ve seen one.

Moving from Off-Broadway, Stephen Karam’s The Humans has once again been acclaimed for its portrait of a family at Thanksgiving as they reveal the threads that may be unraveling in their permanently linked lives.

But what people miss is that while the play appears to unfold in real time, from the arrival of guests for dinner right up to the moment the guests depart – with drinks and meal included – it takes only 90 minutes from start to finish, never seeming rushed or abbreviated. Karam packs in an enormous amount of information about his characters’ lives in circumstances as mundane and everyday as those in The Gabriels. His sleight-of-hand compression, played out without a pause, takes an event we know to be lengthy from our own experiences and leaves us thinking we’ve watched the real thing.

Though it is often held up as an artistic goal, nothing in the theatre can ever truly be natural; a certain artificiality is inherent in the form. But right now in New York, in the least apparent of productions, we’re watching playwrights alter how we perceive time and how it can be employed in the theatre, invisible stage magic played out at extraordinary length and deceptive brevity.