I expect that will be true on fourth viewing too, even though its Broadway debut, in a Manhattan Theater Club production that opens on April 22, seems to invite déjà vu: It stars Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse, who headlined the original 23 years ago.

What you hope in such cases is that the story will feel different because both you and the world do. When “Take Me Out,” Richard Greenberg’s dramedy about a major-league baseball star’s announcing he’s gay, opened in 2002, it seemed only a matter of moments before the same thing would happen in real life. Eighteen years later, it still hasn’t. The pressure of unfulfilled history can hardly fail to reshape Second Stage Theater’s revival, opening on April 23.

Likewise, I assume that the humor of Neil Simon’s “Plaza Suite,” built on notions of marriage that were already crumbling in 1968, will sound utterly different at a moment when those notions are in flux again. Whether the comedy will be more lighthearted or despairing depends on how the director John Benjamin Hickey encourages his stars, Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick, to play the roles originated by the rather different pairing of Maureen Stapleton and George C. Scott.

But those are plays not often seen here. For others, so frequently revived they can seem like obligatory visits from bossy relatives, casting and direction are even more crucial. That’s especially true for the fourth Broadway revival of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” — and the first since the death of its author, Edward Albee. How much freedom will the director Joe Mantello, who staged Albee’s “Three Tall Women” in 2018, have to rechart the course of George and Martha (Rupert Everett and Laurie Metcalf) now that Albee’s firm hand is off the tiller?

Nor is David Mamet known for a laissez-faire attitude toward productions of his work. “American Buffalo,” the play that kick-started his New York career in 1977, has been revived on Broadway twice, most recently in a 2008 production that bombed. That makes its third revival, which stars Laurence Fishburne, Sam Rockwell and Darren Criss under the direction of Neil Pepe, somehow more exciting.

Looked at that way, the return of classics is an opportunity, not a problem. Plays we know well can, over decades, become measuring sticks of our own development (or lack thereof). But since I doubt anyone develops much in just a few months, it’s trickier to handle shows that, though new to Broadway, have recently been seen elsewhere in similar or nearly identical productions.