New York Theatre Review

Theresa Buchheister on Sleth's " The Wreck of the Unbelievable" as presented by The Brick

2026-10-01T19:45:36.896-04:00

photo by Luis Suarez

The Wreck of the Unbelievable totally makes sense.

It makes sense being at The Brick. The Brick has the genuine desire and unique ability to host intimate, ambitious, queer "theater".
It makes sense as a directing project helmed by Aeon Andreas. Aeon has a brilliant swirling mix of objectively cool visual aesthetic, nightlife dramaturgical sensibility, and an event producer's sense of flow.

It makes sense coming from the mind of SLETH. An unabashedly sexy AND opinionated performance-art-meets-theater romp-tiste who leaves everyone drenched in sweat.

I hope that means various grant organizations shower money on it so that it can return. They love art that makes sense.

- - - - - Don’t read beyond here if you’re a grant organization. Only read the stuff above the dotted line. - - - - - -

It’s also a raucously complex play about selling out, long relationships, destructive tendencies, and The Guggenheim.

photo by Luis Suarez

This play had me grappling with some slippery internal concept of reality, while also being a very horny educational program. It was like watching a TED Talk on poppers where everything is linked to truth but not actually true.

I had to go home and search “Damien Hirst Alive?” and “Damien Hirst Holes” just so I could fall asleep.

However, while seated for this 80-minute neon hallucination, I chose to believe everything playing out in front of me. I did the ol' theatrical instruction to the audience of suspending disbelief! I am typically not bogged down by the feeling of "needing to be in on it" or "understand everything" when watching theater or film or reading a book. I am delighted, actually, when I am seeing something that delves into topics or people I don't know about and/or tells a story in a way that is not A-Z straightforward narrative. However, I was relieved when the Damien Hirst character entered for the first time, at least 30 minutes in, as I had a tickle of concern that the entire show may be art-world-insider snark and shenanigans. That would be fine for a short play, but not something over an hour.

I think this speaks to the way in which SLETH often builds shows... doing short performances at nightlife spaces, like House of Yes, and then eventually weaving them together to create a larger tapestry of ideas. While I did not see any of the experiments leading up to this show, I have followed SLETH's art for a decade and saw the pieces come together for their previous Brick Theater multi-week run. PowerPoint presentations, spicy numbers with wild design components (thanks to longtime collaborator and inventive design wizard, Forest Entsminger), and unhinged lectures are created and shared with audiences over time, allowing the artists to build and learn non-stop. My main critique is that not everything from those experiments needs to live in the text... the set and sound and environment do so much that probably 20 minutes could be cut and the impact of the whole would be even greater.

I am crossing all of my appendages hoping that this show has an opportunity to come back and continue its wild evolution. Do it at The Guggenheim! Get a cease and desist! And then make that into another show! And I will be there for it, already suspended in my disbelief.

The Brick presents
The Wreck of the Unbelievable
by Sleth
Sep 17-26, 2026 (closed)
at The Brick Theater

Art world megastar Damien Hirst has died! Suddenly, scandalously, suspiciously! He leaves behind hundreds of dead animals in formaldehyde, one diamond-encrusted skull and a recently-exposed secret boyfriend, an unknown painter named Shape. Mara, an assistant curator of a rushed Hirst retrospective, scrambles to get Shape’s story first. She interrogates him on failure, legacy and their explosive sex life. The Wreck of the Unbelievable is a horny, gay, messy reflection on being left in the shadow of someone colossal.

Playwright’s note: As of time of writing, Damien Hirst is alive and straight.

CREATIVE TEAM

Written by Sleth
Frankie Placidi as “Kaminski”

Gibson Frazier (Sept 17-20), Zak Sommerfield (Sept 23-26) as “Damien Hirst”
Directed by Aeon Andreas
Set design by Forest Entsminger
Lighting design by Eric Bowers

Stage managed by Tanya Ubeda
Board operated by Arin Edelstein

Props by Vigor Mortis

Featuring on-stage artwork by Sarah Dahlinger
Poster design by Pat Hughes
Crowdfunding production by Paris Adkins

Find them: @sleth.gov_ @aeonandreas @pat_the_bird @forestbents

Thank you to Jesse Mata, Sarah Schuhmacher, Beatriz BB, Alessandra Gomez, Matthew Dailey

Content warning: fog, pornography, mentions of drug use, suicide, death, animal abuse

Pictured: Theresa Buchheister: photo by Walter Wlodarczyk

Theresa Buchheister (they/them) is an artistic director, curator, venue operator, theater maker (writer, director, performer, producer, designer) and voiceover artist (director, engineer, performer, researcher and teacher). Theresa was in NY from 2004-2024 and during that time founded a few projects: Title:Point (an experimental theater company), The Exponential Festival (a Brooklyn-based experimental art festival that happens every January), Vital Joint (a weird basement venue focused on alt comedy, music and durational performance), ?!:New Works (a short form festival with different split bills every night for as many nights as possible) and SalOn! (a gathering of theater people, dancers, poets, musicians, chefs, scientists, doctors, activists, lawyers, freaks and other). They also received an OBIE for their time as artistic director of The Brick Theater and Brick Aux, was a collective member of DIY venue Silent Barn, was a frequent collaborator of Jeff Stark, Night Market and Secret Parks, performed in Richard Foreman's The Gods are Pounding My Head aka Lumberjack Messiah, was a manager at a bunch of bookstores (The Strand, The Drama Book Shop, Housing Works, The Unoppressive Non-Imperialist Bargain Book Shop) and has directed lots of audiobooks, cartoons and podcasts (How Music Works, Pokemon and The Last Days of Cabrini Green). www.theresabuchheister.com and www.titlepoint.org

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Mieko Gavia on Andrea Assaf’s 11Reflections: NYC as presented by Art2Action at HERE Arts Center

2026-09-29T22:48:03.375-04:00

pictured (l to r) Lubana Al Quntar and Andrea Assaf. Photo by Juan Luis Alejos

Art2Action’s 11Reflections: NYC was a mixed bag of storytelling, poetry, music, and dance. Creator/Director Andrea Assaf managed to curate an evening full of vulnerability and tenderness. The beginning was a tense, emotional recounting of September 11th’s events from the perspectives of three artists (including a particularly moving account from James Scruggs), and part retrospective of the past 25 years of the so-called “War on Terror.” Despite the traumatic subject matter, I felt remarkably cared for as an audience member. Kayhan Irani, a writer, performer, and culture worker, swept the audience up in her warm, welcoming energy throughout the beginning and end of the performance. Irani managed to thread the needle between frank honesty and warmth even while recounting a racist encounter with a coworker. The visual design of this performance was simple, yet stunning. Performers were backgrounded (and foregrounded, in the few cases they moved behind a scrim) by a preshow timelapse of lower Manhattan, to floating ash, floating leaves, and avant-garde renderings of fight/flight/freeze responses and warzones.

Unfortunately, the show lagged towards the middle. Despite gorgeous musical interludes from Zafer Tawil, Eylem Basadi, and Lubana Al Quntar, and Nejla Yatkin’s mesmerising dances, the piece as a whole became a bit unbalanced. The bulk of this show consists of Andrea Assaf’s spoken word poetry accompanied by music and projections. Considering that the piece went well over its stated 90-minute runtime, I found myself wishing that the evening was more balanced. Assaf is a bold and thoughtful poet, has assembled a striking group of poets to round out the poetry-heavy evening, but her delivery suffered from many spoken word clichés- including peppering a “blaccent” during moments of anger or attitude. The pieces in the evening were largely arranged chronologically from 2001 to 2026. However, I wished there was more robust connective tissue created between, for example, Scrugg’s twin towers experience, Irani’s experience of Islamophobia, the 2011’s Egyptian Women’s protests, Dia de Muertos, and Assaf’s discussion of her own mixed identity.

Pictured: Andrea Assaf. Photo by Alex Chiu

Uneven in clarity and quality, this bold and much-needed retrospective of the past 25 years managed to thread the needle between honesty and care for the audience. At the top of the show, we were told that the show itself was actually Act One. I wished I could’ve stayed for “act two”- the community conversation/talkback offered directly after. As an audience member, I was hooked from the beginning- a moment of collective breath, and I hoped everyone who stayed was able to breathe out together.

11Reflections: NYC
Creator and Director: Andrea Assaf
Performers:
Andrea Assaf
Lubana Al Quntar
Elyem Basaldi
James Scrugs
Kayhan Irani
Nejla Yatkin
Zafer Tawil
Contributing Writers:
Naomi Shihab Nye
Suheir Hammad
Andrea “vocab” Sanderson
Sahar Assaf
Featured Visual Design:
Eva Auster
Performance Dates & Times
Friday, September 11th at 7:30
Saturday, September 12th at 7:30

Mieko Gavia, photo by Jody Christopherson

MIEKO GAVIA (she/they) is a writer, actor, audiobook narrator, and producer. Her acting credits include Canary in the award-winning film Canary Trap, Joan of Arc in La Pucelle, Lou Salome in Lou at the Paradise Factory, the webseries Quarter Century (Imani), Afterswarm at JACK (Gigi), Gardener of Stars at Detroit’s Light Box (Gardener), The Reenactors at Abrams Arts Center (Actress 2), and Creative Time’s installations: Private Moment (Alice) and The Privilege of Escape (Dr. Crenshaw). Their play Dog has been performed at the Gene Frankel Theatre, Afterswarm (co-written with Heather Harvey) has been performed at JACK, Ophelia: A Prism has been performed at Oberlin College and Mai House, and her non-theatrical writing has been featured in Bustle, Buzzfeed, Oxygen, Efniks, and on Netflix’s Youtube channel. Mieko is also a producing ensemble member for Black Revolutionary Theater Workshop, a Brooklyn based, social justice focused theater company. https://www.miekogavia.org/

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We Have to Talk About John: Cameron Page on Eric Micha Holmes's "Falls for Jodie" at The Tank

2026-09-29T22:27:00.647-04:00

Pictured: Boone Sommers. Photo by Cason Doyle

The two-hander (a play with two characters) is a unique creature in the world of playwrighting. Every moment of joy, rage, love, or any other emotion exists between those two actors and them alone. It's focused and precise, but it means that the two characters must contain multitudes to keep the show compelling.

In Falls for Jodie, playing at The Tank until Oct 18, Eric Micha Holmes gives us two young men with rich inner lives and goals that both align and diverge at different moments in the story. What results is a portrait of youth, both ambitious and frustrated, in the early 1980s.

(Did I forget about the part where one of them tries to assassinate the president? Well, that doesn't happen until the play is over, so it's not really relevant.)

In all seriousness, the play actually works best if you don't think too much about the fact that one of the characters is John Hinckley Jr.
, the man who tried to assassinate President Reagan in 1981 to impress the actress Jodie Foster. Without that context, the play morphs into an affecting story about a man with a crush on an acting student who slowly slides into madness.

The play opens in New Haven, Connecticut, where Jodie Foster is in the acting school at Yale. John Hinkley (Boone Sommers) has checked into a hotel there with the goal of meeting, wooing, and ultimately spending his life with her. At the hotel, he meets Eddie (Harry Thornton), a smooth-talking bellhop, and the two become unlikely friends.

The bulk of the charisma and confidence clearly belong to Eddie, but John is the one with financial resources (a rich father who works at an oil company). They complement each other and end up starting a business together while also scheming ways to bring John and Jodie together.

Pictured: (l to r) Boone Sommers and Harry Thornton.
Photo by Cason Doyle

The script contains some interesting resonances with the times we live in today. With the benefit of hindsight, John Hinckley looks like an early prototype of the modern-day incel. He uses a certain language of ownership and resentment when it comes to women that would have the creepier elements of the manosphere nodding along. "They're laughing at me!" He shouts. Another time he calls her "My Jodie!" even though she barely knows who he is.

Eddie and John are roughly the same age, and the actors have a similar skin tone, height, hair color, and build. This is a perplexing choice at first, but over the course of the play it allows us to see more clearly the differences that matter between the characters. Eddie is slick, driven, garrulous, and ambitious; John is taciturn, wary, resentful, and suspicious.

They are on opposite trajectories. Eddie grows up, and John grows inward. Eddie starts to see the racism and sexism that infuse John's way of thinking, and he starts to need him less and less. "I'm not what you'd call a psychological expert," Eddie says to John. "But here's my diagnosis if you'd like to hear it....You're weird, dude."

Later, Eddie's frustration with his friend hits a breaking point: "Why is it I've never met a lunatic who's an active listener?"

The details of the set (by Chen-Wei Liao) and costumes (by Rodri Hernandez Martinez) effectively evoke the 1980s, with bell bottoms and naugahyde in full effect. I attended an early performance, and the actors were still learning their way around a set scattered with old-fashioned telephone wires and wheel-less suitcases.

Terrence I Mosley directs the duo skillfully, moving them around the very small space, using it to the maximal extent. There's a fight scene that requires audience members to "keep their hands and feet close," as the announcement at the start of the show warns.

Falls for Jodie is a tightly drawn portrait of male friendship, celebrity obsession, and class mobility --- all of which are as relevant today as they were in 1980.

Falls for Jodie

Playing through Oct 18th

at The Tank, 312 W 36th St, New York, NY 10018

For tickets ($28-$53) and more info please visit https://thetanknyc.org/calendar-1/fallsforjodie

Credits

Eric Micha Holmes (Producer/Playwright)
Terrence I Mosley (Producer/Director)
Hillary Bonhomme (Composer)
Padra Crisafulli (Sound Designer)
Reed Gulden (Graphic Designer)
Cailey Harwood-Smith (Props Designer)
Chen-Wei Liao (Scenic Designer)
Rodri Hernandez Martinez (Costume Designer)
Gavin Strawnato (Lighting/Projection Designer)
Caroline Pastilha (Associate Producer)
Jessica Stekloff (Production Stage Manager)
Zoë Parrish (Assistant Stage Manager)
Jon Hayes (Technical Director)
Tim Zay (Fight Choreographer)
Lynn Masako Cheng (Social Media Manager)
Yichun Li (Head Electrician)
Cason Doyle (Photographer)
Ari Cleveland (Assistant Sound Designer)
Nate Dallimore (Music Consultant)

CAST

Harry Thornton* (Eddie)
Boone Sommers (John)

Falls For Jodie is produced with additional support from Clubbed Thumb, made possible by Venturous Theater Fund.

*Falls For Jodie is an Equity Approved Showcase. Equity Member appearing with permission of Actors’ Equity Association without benefit of an Equity contract in this Off-Off Broadway production.

Cameron Page has performed at numerous Manhattan venues that no longer exist, including Baby Jupiter, Luna Lounge, and Collective:Unconscious. His short plays have been performed at the Bowery Poetry Club, the Cherry Lane Theater, and the Bushwick Starr. Prior to that he lived in Washington DC, where his writing appeared in the DC City Paper. He currently lives in East Flatbush, Brooklyn.

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We Are The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For: Michael Niederman on Daria Miyeko Marinelli’s This Is Not Not A Drill

2026-09-20T17:16:45.859-04:00

What is the nature of resistance? How do we come together to advocate, to fight, to build community in an increasingly fractured and isolating world? Is it actually possible to achieve transformative and lasting change, especially when the forces that stand in opposition to revolution or evolution are so entrenched, with deep pockets and even deeper institutional support? These questions and more echoed through my mind as I walked through lower Manhattan on a hot and humid Sunday afternoon, learning about the history of activism in New York City, in Daria Miyeko Marinelli’s live-action audio tour This is Not Not a Drill, directed by Dominique Rider and produced through The Playwrights Realm.

Not not a play, not not a walking tour, not not a protest, and not not an action of praxis, Not Not straddles the boundaries between genres and formats to provide an insightful afternoon detailing the story of how New Yorkers of all stripes - from the abolitionists of the 19th century to the A.I.D.S. activists of the 20th century, not to mention the flora and fauna that populated the island of Mannahatta before it was settled and colonized by concrete and skyscrapers (yes, the plants and butterflies are activists too, I learned) took it upon themselves to, well, activate change when opposing forces seemed insurmountable.

After climbing up five flights of stairs to a facility on Walker Street (the elevator was out), we were asked to choose one of three paths I could take on this choose-your-own-adventure interactive historical meandering and resistance training. I chose Non-Compliance, as, to me, it felt most in line with the needs of the current historical moment (the other options were Mutualism and Institutional Capture), and once waivers were signed, and final trips to the bathroom were achieved, I donned my headphones (remember to bring your headphones) and entered out into the world to learn.

As narrator Brittany K. Allen’s voice intoned into my ears, I tottered over the cracks of Canal street, dodging its denizens who hawk off-brand fashion accessories (I couldn’t help but to think of the fact that these people are perennially vulnerable to the threats of ICE - just another reminder of the threats we all face and the collective efforts we all have to undertake to address them). Allen relayed to me the stories of vigilantes past, regular citizens like you and I who used a variety of tactics to bring about freedom to enslaved people, all either finding ways to wield the law to their advantage, or to mindfully break the law when the rules that we call the law proved to be stacked against common decency. As the day went on and the heat rose and the sun grew high in the sky, the time frame shifted to the late 20th Century, when people were compelled to become activists to fight the social and medical oppression that occurred when whole institutions (looking at you, The New York Times) refused to acknowledge that there was a pandemic going on that was deadly to both men and women, regardless of sexual activity. The Times' silence (and the city government’s, and the federal government’s, and, and, and…) literally meant death.

The tour took me all throughout lower Manhattan, down from Chinatown to TriBeCa all the way to Wall Street. From there I headed back uptown to Collect Pond Park, a little visited patch of tattered greenery that sits under the shadows of courthouses and jailhouses. It was there that I met with kL mays, a "Guerrilla Gardner” who wove a tapestry telling how plants plant themselves into time and space to act as barometers of the changing environments and climates around them. To mays, gardening itself can be an act of rebellion.

kL mays. Image courtesy of Michael Niederman

mays’ presentation was a highlight of the afternoon, but the most challenging lay ahead for me, back at the space on Walker Street, where Workshop Facilitator Brittany Grier led a seminar on resistance training, walking participants through hypotheticals of what we would do if, God forbid, the brownshirts ended up down the block, or worse, at your door. I learned the proper tactics of bystander behavior, that of direct, distract, delegate, delay and document, and how and when to apply each one to the proper scenario.

Exterior of the New York Stock Exchange.
Image courtesy of Michael Niederman

It was here where I was able to see how theory is accurately put into practice - praxis - and the many, many forms that heroism can embody.

Not everybody needs to dive headfirst into the fray to affect change. Resistance can be as confrontational as chaining oneself to the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange to bring awareness of a spreading plague, or as seemingly passive as finding a bare patch of ground in which to plant a few errant seeds. The point of this afternoon, this event, this not not a history lesson, not not resistance training, not not a piece of non-traditional theater - I think - is that there is no calvary coming to save us in this era of world-burning-down-around-our-ears conflagration. We’re living in an incredibly uncertain time, a time where again and again leaders have proven to be ineffectual or untrustworthy or just plain odious. Where principles have been far too easily cast off in favor of access or cash. Where those with influence have tried to convince us not to believe the truths in front of our own eyes. But it doesn’t have to be this way. A leaderless movement is what’s required in these situations, because the true power doesn’t lie at the feet of a shiny figurehead, it lies in the collective strength of our own selves. True grassroots movements can effect profound and lasting change. We just need to believe that the strength that we all wield will be enough to sustain us. Because there’s no one else coming to save us but us.

***

This is Not Not A Drill

Written by Daria Miyeko Marinelli

Directed by Dominique Rider

September 4th – October 4th 2026

A The Playwrights Realm Production

This is Not Not a Drill is an audio-guided walking tour of Downtown Manhattan’s rebellious past meets interactive resistance training. And by resistance training, we mean an offering to help you strengthen the muscles needed in this flood-the-zone semi-fascist mess. Explore the tactics used by this city’s past activists and practice a skill (aka a drill) to add to your tool belt in these very Not a Drill times. Lace up your sneakers, baby. This is a go.

Facilitator, Swing: Soph Askanase

Discussion Facilitator: Rad Pereira

Canvassing Facilitator: Kathryn Fray

Gardener Speaker: kL Mays

Workshop Facilitator: Brittany Grier

Event Manager: Dana Petersen

Asst Event Manager: Israel Orengo

Asst Event Manager: Angela Lopes

Audio Tour Voice: Brittany K. Allen

Environmental Designer: Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew

Dramaturg: Katherine Kovner

General Management: Susan Slotoroff

Assistant Director: samantha estrella

Technical Director: Jackson Berkley

Associate Environmental Designer: Madeline Goddard

Associate Technical Director: Lucas Powell

Audio Producer: James Parker

Audience Specialist: Phoebe Brooks

Ticketing & Front of House Assistant: Jonathan Arkay

Ticketing & Front of House Assistant: Salma Elwy

Field Assistants: Caitlin Collina, Donya Conley , Madison Figueroa-Diaz, Janie Paw, Chris Griswold, Erin Solér

5D's content and training provided by Right To Be _____

Audio Tour content produced by Corey Atkins

Individual activities built in collaboration with Facilitators

For tickets ($5- $60) and more info, please visit https://www.playwrightsrealm.org/not-not

Michael Niederman photo by Jody Christopherson

Michael Niederman is a writer, educator, and clown, based in New York City.

Theresa Buchheister on Eric Marlin's "What a World! What a World!" as presented by The Tank

2026-07-25T16:07:20.218-04:00

Annie Hoeg and Queen-Tiye Akamefula star in Eric Marlin’s What a World! What a World!, directed by Ilana Khanin, at the Tank. Photo by Maria Baranova

It is nice to walk into a theater with a deep certainty that a good time is about to be had. It's a small joy that goes a long way for me.
That is not always the case! Nor should it be, of course!

And yet, last night it was indeed the case. I knew what I was in for (mostly), having seen a version of What a World! What a World! at Prelude NYC at TheaterLab in 2023. I absolutely loved it then. And, despite the squeeze of my derriere into yet another theater seat I will accuse of fatphobia (I am looking at you, Wild Project and Soho Playhouse), I got swept away last night, over and over again, by the pearl in MY oyster, this beguiling play, written with twisting humor and roiling inner monologue that becomes outer monologue by Eric Marlin and directed by Ilana Khanin with an unique choreographic sensibility shared by great directors like Richard Foreman and Tina Satter.

Annie Hoeg and Queen-Tiye Akamefula in a scene from Eric Marlin’s “What a World! What a World!”
at The Tank (Photo credit: Maria Baranova)

Annie Hoeg was back as Not Charlotte and Queen-Tiye Akamefula stepped into the role previously played by Nia Farrell as Not Keith. This was one of two areas where I worried that something I loved might have changed in a way that would make me love it less (the other being the change in location). The vibe between Hoeg and Farrell was so strong - a perfect weaving of athletic, romantic, and combative. Buuuuuut, I need not have worried. Akamefula and Hoeg created a new and equally strong vibe. Somehow it seemed to mingle the past and the present more noticeably... the shifts in vocal candences and physical postures between 1940s silver screen melodrama, present day naturalism and meta theatricalality finding more elasticity.

My other worry area (space) was addressed brilliantly by lighting designer Skye Mahaffie and Khanin, as conceptualizer of scenic. I have never seen The Tank space look so vast and non-theatery! It often feels like a stage with curtains that most people use very similarly (which is totally fine). But three years ago, Khanin used every special quirk and feature of TheaterLab to create an incredibly specific and nuanced show. I was worried that it would become more generic in a space that is just a stage with curtains. However, the reveal of the space that exists without the curtains, carpeted and lit to perfection created the physical and psychic space needed for the devilish writing to possess the performers.

I do not want to say "what happens" in this tight 60 minute whirlwind because it is best to be experienced without spoilers or dramaturgical reveals. But, if you like funny dance, queering and queers and queerness, surprises and reveals, the draginess of theater, the theateriness of drag and a CD player onstage, you should go see this show. If you made your parents tape Turner Classic Movies Humphrey Bogart marathons on VHS while you were at school, you should go see this show. If you want to have some new art crushes, you should go see this show. It runs through August 2nd at The Tank!

WHAT A WORLD! WHAT A WORLD!
Written by Eric Marlin
Directed by Ilana Khanin

July 9 - August 2, 2026

A Tank Core Production

The 1943 melodrama The Pearl of My Oyster could be a camp masterpiece, an erotic transfixion, a flicker of joy amidst utter terror, or it might just be a dumb old movie. Two performers try to sort it out and things get heated…does anyone need an Altoid?

Cast
Queen-Tiye Akamefula…………….Not Keith
Annie Hoeg……………………..Not Charlotte

Dramaturgy: Luke Daniel White
Costume Design: Megan Rutherford
Lighting Design: Skye Mahaffie
Sound Design: Eric Marlin
Scenic Concept: Ilana Khanin
Production Consultant: Ryan Courtney
Stage Manager/ Assistant Director: Maddie Barkocy
Production Assistant: Shatisha Bryant and Austin White
Social Media Manager: Anna Bowman

What a World! What a World! was workshopped at Ars Nova ANT Fest (2019) and Prelude Festival (2023) with cast members Nia Farrell and Annie Hoeg.

CONTENT WARNING: Light sensitivity, simulated gunshots

Pictured: Theresa Buchheister: photo by Walter Wlodarczyk

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Cameron Page on New York Theatre Company's THE CIRCUIT: An Immersive Silent Disco Ballet

2026-07-14T15:02:33.031-04:00

Pictured: (l to r) Macy Deppe, Fabricio Seraphin, Shiloh Goodin, Kaitwan Jackson.
Photo by Rebecca J Michelson

The silent disco is having a moment. In case you haven't been to one, the concept is simple: a group of people wear wireless headphones that are connected to a single DJ. Everyone can dance together without disturbing the people around them. The appeal is obvious: you can have a dance party in a lot more places if you aren't blasting the ears of your neighbors.

Silent discos started to get popular during the COVID pandemic, when we all needed safe ways to get outside and have social interaction while still remaining 6 feet apart. I myself loved one that took place weekly at the end of pier in Williamsburg.

Another popular art form that didn't exist 50 years ago is the flash mob. Initially pioneered by Bill Wasik (now Editorial Director of The New York Times Magazine), the flash mob relies on cell phone technology to create spontaneous public performances. Memorable examples include a 50-person performance of Bohemian Rhapsody in the middle of Paris, and a large scale marriage proposal in the Disney store in Times Square.

Now someone has come along and combined the silent disco with the flash mob, innovating even further on the form by adding both dance and a narrative storyline. The Circuit unfolds over 75 minutes across 5-6 locations in DUMBO and Brooklyn Bridge Park, with audience (and hopefully dancing) along with the performers as they move through one of the most gorgeous --- and most Instagrammed --- areas in all of New York City

Pictured: (l to r) Manatsu Aminaga & Luke Swaller. Photo by Rebecca J Michelson

The show starts in DUMBO plaza with a solo dance performance by a young woman deciding whether or not to go out for the evening. She walks across the Plaza, under the majestic stone archway of the Manhattan Bridge, into a rave type EDM club, where a celebrity (unspecified what type) noticies her and approaches her. She starts to fall for him but he tears himself away and we follow him as meets up with another woman, who then leaves him and meets someone else. The show proceeds in this way, bouncing from club-goer to homebody, experienced raver to wide-eyed newbie.

Josh Zacher's choreography is graceful and elegant and combines elements of ballet and modern dance. He does an especially good job incorporating the physical space of Brooklyn Bridge Park, such as railings, picnic tables, etc.

Pictured: Danielle Louise Bowman. Photo by Rebecca J Michelson

The scripted portion of the show --- monologues and dialogue between the actors, as well as the musical score --- by Jacob Ryan Smith, perfectly captures the experience of a rave. The narrative element does not follow a traditional three-act structure but it does have a gentle arc, which feels appropriate for the “fog-of-a-drug-fueled-party” vibe that the show is set in. For anyone who has felt alone in the middle of party, or lost and scared while surrounded by smiling faces, this show will be recognizable to you.

Pictured: (l to r) Arzu Salman & Fabricio Seraphin. Photo by Rebecca J Michelson

Pictured: Katie Baik. Photo by Rebecca J Michelson

The dancers are uniformly talented and energetic. Part of their role is to interact gently with audience members and encourage us all to dance along with them. When I attended it was still VERY light out, so the crowd was pretty self-conscious and we were reluctant to shake our booties under the gaze of all the World Cup tourists. I would recommend not going to the 7:30 show but waiting until the 9:30 performance --- pitch blackness is liberating and conducive to grooving.

There is a good amount of content that might not be suitable for all children. There is no nudity, since the show takes place in public, but there is some semi-explicit dancing and one instance of simulated drug use. (I brought my 13- and 15-year old kids to the show, and they were completely unimpressed by the “mature content”.)

There are plenty of immersive experiences out there, but when you consider the stunning location and genre-mashing ambition of The Circuit, it’s safe to say there is nothing like it in New York City right now.

Pictured: (l to r) Arzu Salman & Fabricio Seraphin. Photo by Rebecca J Michelson

THE CIRCUIT
An Immersive Silent Disco Ballet

A site-specific performance unfolding across the streets of DUMBO.

Inspired by La Ronde, The Circuit reimagines a cycle of intimate encounters through a pulse-driven silent disco ballet that fuses dance, theater, and nightlife into a visceral experience. Audience members move through DUMBO alongside performers, wearing wireless headphones that deliver a fully pre-recorded audio journey - spoken text, internal monologues, and an original EDM score with immersive sound design.

As the narrative unfolds through sound, the physical world comes alive through choreography: a contemporary movement language that drives the storytelling in real time across shifting locations. The result is a split experience - private and cinematic in the headphones, public and kinetic in the streets - where the boundary between spectator and participant dissolves.

Performance Dates
May 15 - July 31, 2026
DUMBO, Brooklyn

Tickets
Regular tickets: Fever
Digital Rush & Lottery tickets: TodayTix

Website
nytheatrecompany.com

Instagram
@nytheatrecompany
@thecircuitnyc

Co-Directors
Josh Zacher
John Kroft

Choreography
Josh Zacher

Associate Choreography
Bobby Davis

Written by
Connor Wentworth

Original Score & Sound Design
Jacob Ryan Smith

Associate Sound Design
Anna Tobin

Rehearsal Director & Dance Captain
Anna Nader

Intimacy Coordination
Avital Asuleen

CAST

Manatsu Aminaga (The Guest)
Danielle Louise Bowen (The Guest)
Luke Swaller (The Doll)
Tessa Fungo (The Almighty)
Fabricio Seraphin (The Gentleman)
Arzu Salman (The Lover)
Katie Baik (Swing)
Kaitwan Jackson (Swing)
Gigi Hausman (The Keeper)
Kurt Horney (Swing)
Anna Nader (Swing)

Pre-Recorded Voice Performances
Victoria Alec
Jake Horowitz
Vanessa Lynah
Forrest Malloy
Kendra McBride
Blake Roman

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Theresa Buchheister on Michael Kinnan's Goodbye Horses: An Unauthorized Retelling of Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs at The Brick Theater

2026-07-12T22:18:45.391-04:00

photo by Bryan Carpender

Goodbye Horses: An Unauthorized Retelling of Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs is an audacious artistic follow-up to Never Let Go: An Unauthorized Retelling of James Cameron's Titanic, currently showing at The Brick Theater in Williamsburg through July 25th. After years of imagining, building, performing and honing Never Let Go, Michael Kinnan could have said, "I will do this show forever and ever and thrill audiences consistently." Yet instead, he said, "I am going to yank on the thread of another idea that has been materializing in my mind for years and see what happens!"

Now, 7 years after it first blipped into a notion of a concept, it is exquisitely presented onstage for 3 weeks in Brooklyn. You do not want to miss it.

Before we dig into this current run, though - a little background and full disclosure of my involvement with Michael's art:

In 2017 Michael was a barista at Bearcat, a cafe on the corner or Meserole Street and Manhattan Avenue, right across from partially legal basement venue, Vital Joint, which I ran with Title:Point, my theater company. Every day, between my day job and whatever the show was that evening at Vital Joint, I would get an iced coffee. After a few months, Michael said something along the lines of, "I hear you run a theater across the street. I have a one-person show of Titanic I would love to do." I said, "Wellllllll, the space is a weird murder basement in the commercial part of a residential building, but I am happy to show you!" Though I am certain it is not what he expected nor what he desired AND his head practically touched the low low ceiling, he knew he could do the show anywhere. He had so much passion and was fully off-book from day one... He just needed a space to share it. While I was not a fan of the movie (at the time), I thought Michael was genuinely kind and charming AF, so we figured out how to stage it in Vital Joint and presented it twice.

I was honestly stunned at how much I loved the show and NEEDED to see it again, which 100% seemed to be a shared vibe with the audiences we packed into that 20x20 space. So he did more shows in 2018 and 2019 at Vital Joint. And then, when I became artistic director at The Brick, I asked if he wanted to do it in May 2020 with real lights and a taller ceiling. He was excited and, as usual, absolutely ready. However, the pandemic hit and every show from March 15, 2020 through September 2021 had to cancel, like devastating dominoes falling, one after another. In March, we still thought we would be able to do it in May. It was a one-person show, after all. But, of course, that was not possible.

Miraculously, in June 2021 The Brick still existed and fan-of-the-show Kegan Zema suggested we ask Michael if he was still open to doing Never Let Go in the fall, since it seemed pretty likely that theaters would get to re-open, though with tons of COVID protocol in place. As fate would have it, Michael had decided to move to Los Angeles, but we could fit it in right before he left... so he did it!

It became a NYT Critics Pick and a hot point of conversation online between New York's leading arts journalists. Masked audiences came out in droves, thrilled to feel the overwhelming delight, honest-to-goodness sexiness and undeniably real emotional punch of Michael's embodiment of old Rose, young Rose, Ruth, Jack, Cal (etc etc etc).

Since then, he has brought the show back and back again in New York and Los Angeles, as well as Bucks County Playhouse and Edinburgh Fringe. He's done it for Billy Zane and Frances Fisher. He will do it in a living room or on a rooftop.

SO! Here we are now, in 2026. While Never Let Go still vibrates inside of Michael, ready to be shared with audiences at the drop of Rose's gorgeous hat, he is doing something new. And, while it is a one-person show, it is incredibly different, tonally. I wanted to share all of this background because it casts light on how giant a risk it is to do something NEW and DIFFERENT.

photo by Bryan Carpender

Silence of the Lambs has a lower bodycount than Titanic, but the style is far darker and the cruelty much deeper. While Michael brings his trademark balance of sincerity, camp, hyper-obsession, intricate impersonation and personal flare to this material, it requires him to tap into a world that painfully delves into misogyny and class. At least in Titanic it was through a lens of romance... yet somehow, Michael's keen eye for detail allows him to pull many tricks out of the hat (no spoilers), exposing a stupidity, fluidity and magical flare that pushes his performance energy to the brink. It is SO dark. It is not Silence!: The Musical, which was a total romp. But it is also hilarious. The audience was rolling with laughter and gasping with nailed-that-exact-moment-ness for the full 70 minutes.

One of the most mesmerizing aspects of Michael's unique one-person show creations is that he is painstakenly detailed and captures the nuance of alllllll of the characers' vocal stylings and personal quirks. Sometimes it is spot on voice matching and sometimes he dials it up just right to add a bit of menace, sexiness or humor that was lurking beneath. Once he runs onstage at the top of the show, the train has left the station and he will not pause or reset for over an hour, twirling and vibrating between characters. Unlike Never Let Go, where the scenes all contained Rose (thus the hour run time instead of 3 hours and 14 minutes), Goodbye Horses is not only Clarice scenes. In my mind, I like to think this is because Never Let Go trained the audience to watch Michael move between characters, and now he can do it without holding onto one icon and trust that we are along for the ride.

photo by Bryan Carpender

It is a bold move to share something new and, to quote another theater-maker, "Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it" (Goethe). Go check out the sheer magic of Goodbye Horses at The Brick, through July 25.

The Brick presents
GOODBYE HORSES: An Unauthorized Retelling of Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs
Adapted by Michael Kinnan
Original Screenplay by Ted Tally
playing July 9-25, 2026
at The Brick Theater
running time 70 minutes
tickets $40-45 | presale tickets from $35 available thru June 15

From the mind that brought you Never Let Go, prepare yourself for his newest Oscar-winning cinematic tale spin. “Good evening, Clarice.” Now sink your teeth into this wild homage to Hannibal, Clarice, Buffalo Bill seeing them as you never have before. One man, one twisted mind. This ain’t your Mama’s Hannibal… might be careful what you eat beforehand!

CREATIVE TEAM

Direction: Tom DeTrinis & Michael Kinnan
Set, Prop, Graphic Design: Nicole Bernardini
Audio/Sound Design: Rosana Cabán
Costume Design: Allison Hewitt
Lighting Design: Kate McGee
Production Photography: Bryan Carpender
Find them: @ofmichaelandmen @detrinis @bernarderner @mybrytography @rosanacaban @mcgeesmagic

Originally Presented in Partnership with Zach Davidson and the Los Angeles LGBT Center, additional workshops hosted at IAMA Theatre Company

Content Warning: Haze, Gunshots, Depictions of Violence and Scenes of a Sexual Nature; Harsh Language

Pictured: Theresa Buchheister: photo by Walter Wlodarczyk

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The Rise and the Fall: Amelia Parenteau Interviews Co-Producers Kathryn Syssoyeva and Diana Zhdanova

2026-07-08T17:20:02.362-04:00

The cast of The Rise and the Fall. Photo by Miller Kiesz.

When I first learned of AnomalousCo's work in January 2025, I was absolutely smitten with the premise of the piece they were working on, (beyond) Doomsday Scrolling, for its unflinching themes of feminism, activism, and multilingualism. Freshly confronting another Trump term, living in Washington, DC, I was hungry for theater that reflected the urgency of our present moment, as well as the solidarity of international resistance, looking to lessons in activism and collaboration from around the world, particularly those transmitted through women, non-binary folks, and people of color.

It is a privilege to be in conversation with AnomalousCo's Co-Artistic Directors Kathryn Syssoyeva and Diana Zhdanova, about their latest work, The Rise and the Fall, and I mean it in the best way when I say our pre-interview chat felt like attending a college lecture! These two passionate, talented, deeply intellectual women have lived storied lives, and are now cultivating a theatrical ensemble that challenges power structures, gender norms, and individualism. Their latest work, The Rise and the Fall, continues in the company's bold legacy of creating theater that flies in the face of fascism.

The Rise and the Fall was supported by developmental residency at the Bechdel Project in June 2026, and will reconvene for a staged reading in October 2026, location TBA.

Amelia Parenteau: What drew each of you to theater as a medium, and who are some of your greatest influences? Which productions or texts have shaped the way you think about the form?

Kathryn Syssoyeva: I was a small child in the 1960s, and my mother was an actress in Boston. There was a great deal of experimental theatre going on there at the time. From a ridiculously early age, I was watching incredibly interesting productions by playwrights like Boris Vian, Brecht, and Peter Weiss. I watched rehearsals of Marat/Sade at the age of five, helped my mother memorize her songs in The Threepenny Opera at the age of four, and participated peripherally in a production of The Empire Builders when I was seven. These productions typified the rebellious political aesthetics of the '60s and '70s, and left an indelible imprint on me, shaping my understanding of theatre as political, theatrical, music-driven, and absurdist.

Later in my life, I had the opportunity to see a great deal of Russian, Polish, German, and French theatre, and was especially influenced by the theatricalist works of Lev Dodin and the work of Ariane Mnouchkine, as well as recordings of work by Tadeusz Kantor and Giorgio Strehler. During my graduate studies and, later, in my doctoral and postdoctoral research as both an academic and a practitioner, I became immersed in the lineages of Meyerhold and Brecht, as well as the French and American devising traditions of the 1960s and '70s. On a more personal level, I was also greatly influenced by my training with two master teachers: Lee Breuer of the Mabou Mines, and Carl Weber, my dissertation advisor, who worked with Brecht at the Berliner Ensemble.

Diana Zhdanova: I, on the other hand, wasn’t in theatre since my childhood—I discovered the form when I was 17, when I got into one of Russia’s most important acting and directing conservatories, the studio of Veniamin Filshtinsky at the Saint Petersburg Institute for the Performing Arts. I’ve since learned not to talk about the education I got with that imperialistic air that typifies Russia’s relationship to its own culture—imperialism is a major engine of the war with Ukraine and the shameless society which Russia has become.

But I also can’t deny the richness and value of the education I received. Those five years of conservatory training were far more robust than what a typical US college theatre program is able to offer; it is closest perhaps to the programs at Yale or Juilliard. The majority of my voice, movement, and acting teachers are the choreographers, speech and voice coaches, music and literary directors of the Maly Drama Theatre, a world-renowned touring company, where I was expected to serve after my graduation. Beyond the fine tuning of the instrument, which is your body, imagination and psyche, we also trained our internal bellwether—our sense of truth—our taste, our compassion, our thinking, our understanding of our fellow human beings, our ability to perceive the world. Our teachers emphasized the necessity of observation of life, of the observation of other art forms, of visual training. And we were expected to continually see theatre, to see good theatre—both live and recorded (during our first year, for instance, we watched and discussed the major works of Tadeus Kantor). We had lessons conducted at the Hermitage Museum, looking at painting and discussing composition; we attended classical concerts; we attended international theatre festivals and dance performances; we toured to other countries, and saw the work of our peers in Latvia and Poland. During my five years at the theatre conservatory, I watched dozens of performances a year, some of them by the finest European directors: Krzysztof Warlikowski, Lev Dodin, Thomas Ostermeier, Peter Brook, Romeo Castellucci, the Kammerspiele Theatre.

I wish I could name more women among those theatre directors. But funding and visibility exist on a gender binary.

And no culture stands above freedom of speech.

After graduation, I left the country.

AP: How has feminism informed your theatrical journey, individually and as part of AnomalousCo?

KS: I've always been a feminist, and there has always been a feminist line in my work. But from the time we started working on (beyond) Doomsday Scrolling—a devised work about women, war, displacement, and resistance, created in response to Russia's 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine—that commitment became intentional, became foregrounded, and the de facto feminist line of thought in my earlier work emerged as the central project. This intentionality has continued through Diana's staging of Beckett. Women, and my stagings of Doruntina Basha's Stiffler—a dark satire of institutional neglect in the face of femicide—and Tino Caspanello's Bounds, about female migrants and guards on the coast of Lampedusa.

With our current show, The Rise and the Fall, we have similarly shifted, from the implicit presence of queer themes to an overtly queer-centric feminist project.

DZ: I was born in Russia, and I studied in Russia—an extremely sexist environment. It was almost impossible, as a female-presenting artist, to be seen or treated with the same attention and the same level of importance as male actors. Regardless of the plays we staged, irrespective of the presence, even dominance of female characters on the page, male actors were centralized and foregrounded in all stories, and all directorial attention went to them as the main drivers of the narrative.

So when I first started working with Kathryn in 2019, it was a revelation that a woman, or multiple women, could be the main drivers of a narrative—or that there could be no man in the story whatsoever. Her ability to see female performers was unlike anything I’ve experienced.

AP: What were your sources of inspiration for The Rise and the Fall?

KS: The Rise and the Fall has its roots in Brecht. In 1927 Bertolt Brecht launched his collaboration with Kurt Weil—with literary support from Elizabeth Hauptmann—with the creation of a short modernist opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagony, about a criminal band fleeing the law in the American Southwest on their way to the Gold Rush. Their car breaks down; panicked, they do what gangsters apparently do when their backs are against the wall: start a government. In short order, they are running a town composed of nothing but a boxing ring and a whorehouse, populated by sex workers and Alaskan loggers. It’s a wild, absurdist parable of dystopia and corruption.

Brecht is my inspiration; he is also, in the most inspiring sense, an ideological nemesis. Despite his own purported bisexuality, Brecht’s worldview is intensely binary; in a sense, his central concept of the actor’s “gestus” is in part the drag of the gender binary. The sex workers in Mahogany have no agency; they are cyphers with deep décolletage, hot stand-ins for the cogs and wheels of the capitalist machine. In the first draft of the opera, just two female characters are given names; the remaining 6 are a nameless chorus of whores.

I fell in love with Brecht’s libretto, and simultaneously, had a deep desire to blow it up.

The Rise and the Fall is the result: an original feminist cabaret-songspiel, it is a savage gangster satire of power, corruption, patriarchy, and collapse, told through feminist drag, post-punk concert theatre, circus aerials, burlesque, and theatrical spectacle. In an act of radical re-authorship, the piece strips Brecht’s work to its structural bones and hurls it into the contemporary political nightmare of extractionism, ecological collapse, patriarchal dominance, and gangster capitalism.

Part scripted, part devised, the show confronts the contemporary machinery of capitalist patriarchy: extractionism, necropolitics, ecological collapse, state violence, the exploitation of gendered and racialized bodies, and the commodification of pleasure, freedom, and desire. Drawing upon my other inspirations—the queer, feminist, and anti-colonial writings of Virginie Despentes, bell hooks, José Esteban Muñoz, Achille Mbembe, Paul B. Preciado, Judith Butler, Naomi Klein, Vandana Shiva, and Cara Daggett—the piece interrogates power through the body: labor, desire, domination, spectacle, exploitation, survival, rebellion.

The Rise and the Fall rehearsal photo by Miller Kiesz.

AP: How is The Rise and the Fall a continuation of your company's previous work? How did the experience of creating (beyond) Doomsday Scrolling shape the fabric of your company? I'm particularly thinking about centering women's voices, and the ensemble work, but please share what else comes to mind!

DZ & KS: The Rise and the Fall is very much a continuation of the company's work, aesthetic, and ensemble practice. From 2022 to 2025, together with our then Co-Artistic Director Jeremy Goren, we developed three, evolving iterations of (beyond) Doomsday Scrolling, a collectively devised, epic-theatre political cabaret with a multigenerational cast of 13 to 15 mostly immigrant performers—all but one of them female—from 12 countries, speaking 10 different languages on the stage. A few company members left along the way; a few joined; and the ensemble we are now grew organically from that work.

After a three-week extended run of the final iteration, co-produced in 2025 by the American Theatre of Actors, we decided to take a break from large-scale ensemble performance, shifting our focus for a time to premieres of intimate, politically engaged drama in translation.

But two years later, audience members still come to us and say that (beyond) Doomsday Scrolling was tremendous, that it was such a gift to see so many female performers of different ages and cultural backgrounds together on stage—and that the ensemble work was outstanding. Several of our current ensemble members joined the company after seeing that show.

An ensemble is an investment—of nurturance, loyalty, time, community connection—and not every company can sustain that. But the return on that investment is incalculable. It’s in the team work, it’s in the partnering, it’s in the shared vocabulary, the shared ethos of the work, the shared methods of creation—the trust. It is also beautiful when groups shift and reconfigure. There's something healthy about that, a kind of breathing in and breathing out. So this year, for the first time since the company’s arrival in NYC, we ran an open call and welcomed ten new performers into our group.

DZ: There's a shared methodology that Kathryn and I have developed in the last year through shared teaching, rooted in an organic merger of the Stanislavsky-based Etude Method I studied and the European and North American devising practices Kathryn works with. That methodology is being carried forward into current work with new collaborators and core ensemble members. Original members talk about how they worked on our previous shows, and feel free to go deeper and explore more boldly now than they did four years ago, which gives a kind of permission to our new partners, and creates a safe artistic space for them to dive deep and go big as well. The process feels thrilling. We can’t wait to get back to rehearsing with this team.

KS: That's very much the fabric of the company—its texture: method + exploration, collaboration, trust, creative risk, and commitment to both feminist-centered work and to holding space for individual voice within collective creation.

AP: How are you exploring "gender as drag" in this piece, and how do you see your work being in conversation with the wider drag community in New York?

DZ: I approach drag through my theatre practice, going deep into the investigation of a human being, character creation, and image creation, rather than a generalized and minimizing depiction of gender. At the end of the day, this is a theatre performance, and I believe in the power of theatre not just to entertain, but also to make us think, feel deeply, and ask questions. Drag is a tool to tell the story of our horrifying, and very binary, reality.

Kathryn and I have also been spending a lot of time looking at, engaging with, and exploring the East Village and Brooklyn drag scene, which is quite amazing these days and encompassing everything from gender-based drag to clowning to pigeon drag, rat drag—in short, to any fantastical transformation that might bring joy, liberation, transcendence.

AP: What are the next steps for The Rise and the Fall, and where might NYTR readers be able to see it for themselves this year?

DZ & KS: We completed our casting and the first phase of development this June, and will reconvene this fall for a two-month development period in October and November, hopefully culminating in a staged reading. We're currently looking for a presenting partner for the performance and hope to announce where audiences will be able to experience the work soon. A third phase of development and performances are slated for spring 2027.

The Rise and the Fall rehearsal photo by Miller Kiesz.

AP: Anything else you wish I'd asked you?

DZ & KS: We wish you would ask about our marvelously talented, predominantly immigrant and first-gen ensemble, whose names should be seen: Ylfa Edelstein, ⁠Merve Atabek, ⁠Bri Joy, ⁠Wilemina Olivia-Garcia, ⁠⁠Lesya Verba, ⁠Shadae Alexa Makeda Hyde, ⁠Miller Kiesz, Jianing Zhao Emmy Brett, ⁠ Dora Batinović, ⁠Samm Martinez, ⁠Joanne Octave, ⁠Sky Pasqual, ⁠⁠Emmanuelle Zagoria, ⁠Greta Rustani, ⁠Rhiannon Ling, ⁠⁠Vivi Vozniak, Piotr Siwek, ⁠⁠Diana Zhdanova. They hail from Iceland, Turkey, Cuba, Ukraine, Chile, Russia, China, France, Poland, and the US—or are the first generation American children of immigrant families from Albania, Haiti, Croatia, Jamaica, China.

THE RISE AND THE FALL

Kathryn Syssoyeva — Playwright, Director, Co-Producer

Diana Zhdanova — Co-Producer

Ylfa Edelstein — Development Partner

Emmanuelle Zagoria — Music Director

⁠Liam Grandsard — Composer

Janette Hough — Aerial Choreographer

For updates on The Rise and the Fall, visit the AnomalousCo site and follow the company on Instagram

Amelia Parenteau is a writer, French-to-English translator, and theater maker based in Washington, D.C. An alumna of Sarah Lawrence College, her work explores the intersections of art, culture, and social justice. Previous writing credits include American Theatre Magazine, BOMB Magazine, Burnaway, HowlRound, and Eater. Find her full writing portfolio on her website. Amelia is the founder of Dinner and a Show, a weekly curated listing of live performances and local restaurants in New Orleans, New York, and Washington, D.C.

Photo by Miller Kiesz

Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva is a theatre director, writer, scholar, and founding artistic director of AnomalousCo, New York’s queer/women-led, feminist, immigrant ensemble. Her work is driven by an investigation into power, gender, and displacement and a commitment to theatre as a site of collective authorship and political encounter. Her productions foreground the actor as creator and center the voices of women and cultural minorities. Working across avant-garde and contemporary performance, she focuses on transdisciplinary forms fusing dramatic text with music, movement, and image, and directs original devised works, radical reinterpretations of modern drama, and premieres of politically engaged international plays.

She is a 2026 recipient of a three-month residency with The Bechdel Project for the development of The Rise and the Fall, and winner of the Jean Dalrymple Independent Theatre Award for Best Director in Feminist Drama.

Dr. Syssoyeva’s work has been seen across the US and in Europe, and in New York City at the American Theatre of Actors, the Center at West Park, and HERE Arts. Her productions have received financial support from the Puffin Foundation, LMCC, ART/NYC, Brooklyn Arts Council, and the Nancy Friday Foundation; residencies from Bechdel Project, Chashama, Target Margin, LEIMAY, and Center at West Park; and co-production support from the American Theatre of Actors.

A Fulbright Fellow and a Mellon Fellow, Dr. Syssoyeva holds a PhD from Stanford University, and is widely recognized as a leading international voice in the study of collectively devised performance. She frequently lectures and leads workshops on devising practices in Europe and China, and has taught at Yale School of Drama, Stanford University Department Department of Theatre and Performance Studies, Florida State University School of Theatre, and Bowdoin and Colby College Drama Departments. Her publications—including A History of Collective Creation, Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance, and Women, Collective Creation, and Devised Theatre (Palgrave Macmillan)—have helped define the field. Other areas of specialization include avant-garde and contemporary theatre practices, theatre for social justice, and the work of V.E. Meyerhold.

Photo by Miller Kiesz

A New York-based queer dissident artist, Diana Zhdanova is an actress, director, producer, and multimedia performance maker. A graduate Summa Cum Laude of the renowned V. Filshtinsky Studio at the Russian State Institute of Performing Arts (St. Petersburg), Diana combines the Stanislavsky psychological theatre tradition and the Etude Method with devised theatre, multimedia, and performance art to create politically engaged work.

Diana is a 2025 recipient of the Boris Sagal Directing Fellowship at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, where she served as Assistant Director on Spirit of the People, a new work by Tony-nominated playwright Jeremy O. Harris (Slave Play).

Since 2020, Diana has served as Co-Artistic/Producing Director of AnomalousCo, New York's queer, women-led, immigrant feminist theatre ensemble. Her work with the company includes Beckett.Women at HERE (director/co-producer); (beyond) Doomsday Scrolling at Center at West Park, HERE, and the American Theatre of Actors (co-director/co-producer/actress); and, most recently, Stiffler and Bounds at the American Theatre of Actors (actress/co-producer). Diana has also performed at numerous New York venues, including 59E59 with Labyrinth Theater Company, Culture Lab LIC, and the Bechdel Project.

Zhdanova has also performed in Russia, Latvia, and Poland, and has taught theatre in the United States and China.

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July 2026 Listings Guide

2026-06-29T16:05:23.458-04:00

through Jul 3rd

Queerly Festival

Tickets $22.50-$27.50

UNDER St Marks Theater, 94 St Marks Pl, New York, NY 10009

Queerly provides a space for queer artists who’ve rarely or never seen their identities portrayed on stage to be able to represent themselves and tell their stories their way, as well as to provide a space for queer celebration, pride, and strength. The theme for this year’s festival is Then, Now, and Always. With this theme, we are creating a line-up of work that speaks to the ways queerness has thrived and will continue to thrive across time. Show offerings will include queering mythology, historical fiction, science fictional, biography-based work, storytelling, queer futurism, and more.

Jul 6th-Jul 25th

HOT Festival

Tickets $10-$35

Dixon Place, 161A Chrystie St, New York, NY 10002

Theater, Dance, Music, Hybrid Performance, Literature, Music, and Homoeroticism for the whole family! Dixon Place's annual HOT Festival, a NYC tradition for 34 years & counting... the longest-running LGBTQIA+ festival in the world. Everyone is welcome!

Jul 7th-Jul 8th

SpinQueen™

Tickets $33.87

Brooklyn Art Haus, 24 Marcy Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11211

Trapped on a stationary spin bike she can’t unclip from, a woman pedals through her need to please, her addictions and her eating disorder. A standard fitness class quickly spirals into a confession, a confrontation, and a bloody reckoning with body, mind and self. After a violent, sleepless night with her abusive boyfriend, Meg has to go back to work at her spin studio like nothing happened. It doesn’t take long for her to spiral into a manic breakdown as she realises her version of self-care is actually brutal self-destruction. Throughout this absurd one-woman show, Meg discovers that the only thing more exhausting than the workout is running from herself.

Jul 9th-Jul 25th

GOODBYE HORSES: An Unauthorized Retelling of Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs

Tickets $35-$45

The Brick Theater, 579 Metropolitan Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11211

Jul 9th-Jul 26th

Julius Caesar

Tickets $16.50-$47.50

The Flea Theater, 20 Thomas St, New York, NY 10007

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar tells the story of a murder that changed the course of western civilization. Far more, however, than dramatizing a bloody assassination, the play invites us into the hearts and minds of the humans whose words, actions, and ambitions transformed their society and indeed our world. The play never decides who is right but invites the audience to engage with its debates on democracy, leadership, morality, and honor.

Jul 9th-Aug 2nd

Taming of the Shrew

Tickets $40-$60

La MaMa's Club Space, 74 E 4th St, New York, NY 10003

TAMING OF THE SHREW is Shakespeare's classic comedy about an eccentric fortune-seeker who courts and marries a wealthy, defiant woman widely known as a "shrew." To counter her rebellious temperament, he uses a number of tactics to render her an obedient wife.

Jul 9th-Aug 2nd

What a World! What a World!

Tickets $28-$53

The Tank, 312 W 36th St., New York, NY 10018

The 1943 melodrama The Pearl of My Oyster could be a camp masterpiece, an erotic transfixion, a flicker of joy amidst utter terror, or it might just be a dumb old movie. Two performers try to sort it out and things get heated…does anyone need an Altoid?

through Jul 11th

Camping

Tickets $30-$120

HERE Dorothy B. Williams Theater, 145 6th Ave, New York, NY 10013

This is a love story. It’s hands that smell of Dolce and Gabbana Light Blue after days spent clutching fistfulls of her hair. It’s the rain hitting the earth in a way that reminds you of blood, that makes you think the world's holding a knife to your underwear. It’s the spins. It’s running out of air because you gulped too much of it while you were sobbing. It’s waking up hot and sticky. It’s desperately falling in love with your best friend inside a camping tent while everything outside rages.

Jul 13th-Jul 19th

DarkFest

Tickets $18-$23

The Tank, 312 W 36th St., New York, NY 10018

For twelve years, The Tank has hosted DarkFest: a week of shows that do not use conventional theatrical lighting in an effort to reexamine how we can make theater more sustainable. DarkFest celebrates innovative performance that utilizes self-sufficient and alternative energy sources.

a cold evening with ethan and lee

An experiment, a return to form, a performer in the dark, for one night only.

post-modern prometheus

Oz is tired of Men. The most reasonable conclusion is to become God. A Frankenstein-esque tale on hating men, being a man, and becoming a man.

Track My Feet Please!

Hey! Hey you! Yeah, you... I see you over there. Come on over to The Tank and track my feet please! Betcha can't do it hehehehe >:) It's way too dark and I'm too fast for ya! Lmao! XD But hey, if you're around, maybe I'll letcha in on a little secret... :O

In the Dark Times

Part poetry reading / part immersive theater, In the Dark Times invites performers and audiences to a post-apocalyptic gathering to tell stories, preserve memories, and establish a collective oral history.

big blue

Two women–Alicia, a naval officer and Viv, an oceanographer–are on a mission from the US military to find the source of a mysterious deep sea humming. But when their tiny submersible gets knocked loose, they must contend with their respective land-bound griefs, tension with each other, and the fear of the inevitable bottom of the ocean.

Honor Shmonor

A celebrated knight and his loyal squire arrive at a witch’s cave to carry out a righteous execution. What follows is a fast, profane, and increasingly absurd debate about honor, faith, and obedience, as certainty collapses into circular logic and sanctioned violence. A fantastical dark comedy about what we excuse in the name of “goodness.”

Jul 13th-Jul 19th

TrashFest

Tickets $18-$23

The Tank, 312 W 36th St., New York, NY 10018

It is often difficult to wrestle with the environmental impact that our daily lives and our work have, especially in theater, where so many resources are needed to develop sets, props, and costumes that are only used for a short amount of time. TrashFest centers work that produces no waste by reusing materials discarded as garbage.

MEAT

Ham, a West Texas meatpacker, longs for a promotion. He will do anything to get it. Beleaguered by his grim career, eccentric libertarian coworker, and stalled long-distance relationship with a woman 30 years his senior, Ham is plagued by the looming presence of his manager and visions of his dead mother. MEAT fleshes out the unsustainable nature of capitalism, climbing the ladder, and a hunger for your own piece of the pie.

The Devil You Know

The second installment in the Greek Myths for Our Troubled Times play cycle, The Devil You Know, is about a young woman who takes a four-year lease in Hell, and the roommate who embarks on a mission to get her back. This play explores the purpose and meaning of friendship in these troubled times through a postmodern retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice.

DIM

A new play by Jack Frederick about family, life, and finding light in the darkness.

Trashy Humans

Join the ladies of Punchline Loading for a trashy good time! This brand new sketch show is all about trashy people of all kinds- littering, manspreaders, greedy greenwashing campaigns and more! Come on down to the Tank for original comedy sketches and lots of laughs!

Waiting in A Time of Revelation

Waiting In A Time of Revelation is about three Black women who wait in a world of things discarded. With each woman having been 'discarded' for years, decades, or centuries, Phyllis, Zora, and Candy sit tossed away in the trash the world leaves behind, and are deadset on convincing themselves they can only leave this place if someone gives them permission to. They've gotta wait on a man! They've gotta wait on a meritocracy! They just gotta wait, damn it! That is, until Sal—one of many custodians tasked with cleaning the place out—starts talking about things like power, choice, and the future.

Last Show with Miss Rose

Amidst fading stage lights and discarded props, performers question what it means to create for Miss Rose, and whether theater can remain a lasting place of memory, ritual, connection, and return.

S.E.R.V.E.

When intergalashtastic space parasite Tryna Bank descends on Earth, four unremarkable women must unite to defend the Earth using the power of S.E.R.V.E.

Imagination Strings: Art, Puppets & Participation

Imagination Strings: Art, Puppets & Participation is a visually inventive puppet experience featuring handcrafted marionette puppets made from scrap materials, discarded objects, recycled materials, and handmade creatures brought to life. Blending clown, physical theater, and unexpected transformation, the show invites audiences into a playful world where junk becomes magic and imagination takes control. Created and performed by Broadway puppeteer Arlee Chadwick, Imagination Strings celebrates creativity, curiosity, and the beauty hidden inside forgotten things.

Jul 16th-Jul 19th

Planet of the Grapes

Tickets $30

Under St. Marks, 94 St Marks Pl, New York, NY 10009

In Planet of the Grapes, Astronaut George Taylor crash lands on a strange planet ruled by speaking grapes who enslave mute humans, and soon discovers the shocking truth about their warped world. Packed with insane puppets, ingenious sets, intergalactic irreverence, and uncorked madness!

Jul 16th-Aug 1st

As You Like It

Tickets are FREE

Parking Lot of Lower East Side Prep, 145 Stanton St, New York, NY 10002

Blending romance, political exile, comic mischief and questions of personal freedom, the production finds fresh relevance in Shakespeare's tale of characters escaping an authoritarian court for a more humane community. It also reimagines Phoebe and Silvius as older lovers, suggesting that the exhilaration, confusion and folly of love are not reserved for the young.

Jul 17th-Jul 19th

Object Permanence

Tickets $35 (or Pay What You Can)

Kestrels, 200 6th St, Brooklyn, NY 11215

In a house where every sneeze is dangerous, every footstep is calculated, and every attachment is a liability, six siblings turn silence into an art form. Their captors want perfect stillness — but the siblings master the choreography of silent communication. They invent. They entertain. They keep watch. And, with an impossible self-control, they teach themselves how to disappear. Object Permanence is a half-silent drama based on true events — a bizarre household fueled by vehement play, a peculiar ecosystem, teetering hierarchies, partnerships with lit fuzes. Through physical feats, the captive siblings eke out an idea of what is real and what doesn’t exist.

Jul 17th-Jul 26th

Moments After Aias

Tickets $45-$330

JACK, 20 Putnam Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11238

As a decade of war draws to a close, Aias faces the devastating loss of his closest friend and the betrayal of his commanders. Consumed by rage and despair, he commits an act of unspeakable violence. “Moments after Aias” combines classical and contemporary voices to show how a community narrates and remembers tragedy in moments of ideological fracture.

Jul 20th-Jul 25th

The Ballad of Bonder Thrashman Fitzqualudes

Tickets $8

Paradise Factory Theater, 64 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003

A new comedic play written & directed by Fletcher Michael & presented by Infinite Monkey Theater Co. as part of the 2026 Manifestival, The Ballad of Bonder Thrashman Fitzqualudes is a picaresque comedy involving a bastardization of Doctor Faustus inside a rip-off of the Frankenstein tale inside a made-up sports story inside a satire of the New York theater industry. After receiving a scholarship to an MFA playwriting program as a prize for winning the Apartment Ball World Championship, Bonder avoids expulsion by agreeing to have his brain swapped with the recovered brain of the Renaissance playwright Christopher Marlowe.

Jul 22nd-Aug 1st

Chapter Meeting

Tickets $40

wild project, 195 E 3rd St, New York, NY 10009

An all-night DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) chapter meeting in Brooklyn devolves into chaos when one member reveals the unthinkable: he got a job.

Jul 25th-Jul 26th

Shangri-La-La

Tickets $20.52-$39.19

American Theatre of Actors, 314 W 54th St, New York, NY 10019

Shangri-La-La is a bold, irreverent comedy musical set inside the glittering illusion machine of Las Vegas. This abbreviated one-hour festival version focuses on Siegfried & Roy and their extraordinary reinvention at Steve Wynn’s Mirage Hotel. Created as global icons to fill its 3,044 rooms, they helped usher in a new era of family-friendly entertainment, replacing topless showgirls with white tigers, sequins, spectacle, and magic on an epic scale. But behind the glamour lies a carefully manufactured myth — and a legal battle where the search for justice goes up in smoke. Visually playful, sharply comic, and inspired by true events, Shangri-La-La captures the moment Las Vegas reinvented itself — and two performers became its most dazzling illusion.

Jul 30th-Aug 2nd

Funeral of god

Tickets $30-$40

AMT Theater, 354 W 45th St, New York, NY 10036

A theatre company sets out to stage a funeral for god and discovers they cannot agree on what died, who should attend, or why the ritual even matters. What starts as a practical problem becomes a funny, searching reckoning with belief, grief, and responsibility, as personal histories surface and reveal how faith, silence, and the things we hold sacred can be used to avoid facing what hurts. It is a play for believers and skeptics alike: it takes faith seriously and doubt seriously, and it asks the questions that belong to both.

Jul 30th-Aug 2nd

Strange Men

Tickets $20-$50

BrickAux, 628 Metropolitan Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11211

Four men are brought together by a dating coach who promises to help them make meaningful connections with women. In this dark comedy about what it means to be a man, both the coach and his clients try to find the balance between vulnerability and masculinity without destroying each other or themselves in the process.

through Sep 9th

The Circuit: An Immersive Silent Disco Ballet

Tickets $45

Superfine, 126 Front Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201

Inspired by La Ronde, THE CIRCUIT is a site-specific immersive work that fuses dance, theater, nightlife, and public space into a moving experience unfolding throughout the streets of DUMBO. Audience members wear wireless headphones and move through the neighborhood alongside the performers while choreography, spoken text, and an original EDM score unfold around them in real time.

through Oct 2nd

CLAWS

Tickets $47.50

Performed live via phone call (the audience can call in from anywhere)

CLAWS places you at the center of the narrative as you assume the role of a volunteer operator for the fictional “Etcetera Helpline.” Moments into the call, a terrified teenager begs you for help with a monster in his closet – but as the night unfolds, you may start to wonder which side of the closet door is really on. Your choices influence the outcome of the story in this suspenseful, psychologically-charged experience. What begins as a simple request for help quickly spirals into a series of high-stakes choices, leaving you to question what you believe - and whether your decisions will save Danny or unleash something far worse.

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Kodi Lynn Milburn on Bazeed & Shadi Ghaheri’s faggy faafi Cairo boy as presented by National Queer Theater and HERE arts as part of Criminal Queerness Festival

2026-06-22T12:42:50.887-04:00

Pictured (LtoR): Anton Obeid, George Shakkour, and Hassan Nazari-Robati. Photo by HanJie Chow.

When you walk in and Sherine is playing, you know it’s gonna be a good time. This multigenerational, multicultural, multidimensional play strikes a beautiful balance of comedy and layered trauma. The show moves seamlessly through grief for a dying parent, a lost relationship, and a life lived in fear. Bazeed’s faggy faafi Cairo Boy follows Mo (George Shakkour) as they navigate returning home to Cairo to be with their Baba (Anton Obeid) in their final moments while holding onto their relationship with American fiancé, Jacob (Jakeem Powell) and reckoning with their closeted love from high school, Yasser (Hassan Nazari-Robati). The plot thickens when a yassified angel of death, Angel G. (Jae W. B.), guides Baba from coma to death, from hate to acceptance.

Speaking about the play structurally and theatrically, there were elements that worked for me and some that didn’t. I loved the preshow speech. It was such a nice break from being taken out of the moment. It was funny, kept us in the vibe they curated when walking in, and it was voiced by the “angel” (Jae W.B.), which was a clever touch. There were moments in the play that had overlapping scenes between Mo and Yasser or Jacob while Baba and Angel G. spoke. As a playwright, I can appreciate that stylistic approach; however, I felt like I missed important information. Perhaps the intention was only to pick out certain lines, but I found it busy at times. I enjoyed this choice when lines were not on top of each other, but rather intertwined. Bazeed has a lush and poetic way of writing almost Shakespearean couplets for Angel G., and Jae W.B. ate up the language with masterful delivery and juicy inflection, perfuming the heightened aspect of the text with ease and style. Jae W.B. stole the show for me — so funny, witty, and never one-note.

Speaking on the theatrical vehicles, the stage was split into two play spaces. The main stage had a projection screen with a bed, and on stage right, a green screen with apple boxes. From the green screen zone, scenes were played out and live streamed to the projector on the main space. This was a rather ambitious choice by projection designer Gavin Strawnato. I thought it was interesting at first, but then I found myself not wanting to see how the sauce was made, so to speak. Putting the green screen behind a curtain or just watching the very talented actors and powerful direction by Shadi Ghaheri stand on its own would have been my choice. I find the use of live feed in theater to be overdone, and it was splotchy at moments when actor Jakeem Powell was delivering truly moving monologues and scenes. Design should be in service of the story, not a cool trick, and this element took me out of the moment. Technically speaking, it also tied the hands of the lighting team. A green screen requires bright light, but a projection screen cannot have too much light pollution for images and text to be legible. The moments without use of the live feed had stunning and emotionally evocative lights by Maryam Sweirki. I actually enjoyed many of the (non-live-feed) projections when they moved in tandem with the plot or with other design elements in mind, especially the ones featuring the Queen Boat incident. I didn’t know about this historical event before seeing the show, and I was interested to learn this piece of Queer history and resistance. Addressing the sound design by Jeremy Kadetsky and Lola Basiliere, I felt the music choices were superbly aligned with the text, marrying queer beats with Arabic pop and atmospheric underscoring that was evocative of Egypt without being cliché. I thought the sharp cuts into scenes were nice and whoever was board operating had impeccable timing. Personally, I am not a fan of going dark for a scene change. I would have liked to see these shifts happen stylistically or have tech visually support the change so we didn't feel like we just paused the story. The costumes by Jasmine Canjura and Mireya Velasquez for Angel G. were *chef’s kiss*. Forest Entsminger was able to capture a beautiful scenic element in a sugar cane field scene. Lighting and Scenic departments worked together for this flashback moment in the fields, and the design support elevated an already gut-wrenching and heartfelt monologue by George Shakkour. Shakkour moved through scene and space skillfully and with a gentle touch.

I feel the play covered a lot of ground in terms of themes — queerness, self-love, cultural identity, leaving religion and its pressures, blood family vs. chosen family, death, and resistance. There was a line in the show I’m paraphrasing, but I walked away moved by it — “there is comedy to heal and comedy that makes you bitter.” Being queer myself, lgbtqia2s+ people have this resilience in comedy; however, it can be a defense for some deep-rooted trauma. I felt seen by the naming of this pain. Anton Obeid as Baba deserves a standing ovation for the performance delivered. Obeid’s tender moments met with rage at their son’s identity, giving a performance rounded out with comedy and fear of what lies beyond death. A lot was demanded of this character, and Anton’s work should be celebrated. Hassan Nazari-Robati’s character, Yasser, struck me as a parallel to Mo’s Baba. Hassan did a fantastic job of embodying internalized homophobia, delivering a cutting yet nuanced performance. Jakeem Powell was loveable and complex, and I found myself rooting for them as if they were the primary protagonist of the story. I really enjoyed that this show did not wrap up all of the story lines with a bow. Bazeed left us in the gray area, and such is life.

National Queer Theater and HERE arts as part of Criminal Queerness Festival present

faggy faafi Cairo boy

Written by Bazeed
Directed by Shadi Ghaheri

Featuring:
Hassan Nazari-Robati* as Yasser
Anton Obeid* as Baba
Jakeem Powell* as Jacob
George Shakkour as Mo
Jae W.B.* as Angel G.

Creative Team:

Nat Kelley DiMario* (Stage Manager)

Dmitri Barcomi (Production Manager)

Anushka Srivastava (Production Assistant)

Forest Entsminger (Props/Scenic Designer)

Maryam Sweirki (Lighting Designer)

Jeremy Kadetsky (Sound Designer)

Lola Basiliere (Assoc. Sound Designer)

Jasmine Canjura (Costume Designer)

Mireya Velasquez (Assist. Costume Designer)

Dezi Tibbs (Dramaturg)

Gavin Strawnato (Video Designer)

Peter Dunn (Casting Director)

Sean Griffin (Fight/Intimacy Coordinator)

Desmond Picotte (Promotional Photographer)

*Denotes Actors’ Equity Association (AEA) member

Performance Dates & Times

Wednesday, June 17th at 8:30pm (Preview)

Thursday, June 18th at 8:30pm (OPENING)
Saturday, June 20th at 5pm and 8:30pm

Link to tickets:

https://here.app.getcuebox.com/o/CCTQ0T6B/shows/CMNJC7C7

Kodi Lynn Milburn, dubbed as the "Swiss Army Knife of Theater," embodies a fusion of creativity and activism. As a mixed indigenous neurodivergent queer, Kodi’s artistry resonates with a commitment to justice, harmony with nature, amplifying lost voices, and reflecting contemporary issues, echoing the ethos of the Jester's Privilege. Kodi’s work has been described as “inspired” (Alix Cohen, Women Around Town), “amazing” (Travelanche), “sound designer, Kodi Lynn Milburn deserve(s) much credit for the show’s aesthetic” (David Shengold, Opera News), “lush compositions and evocative soundscapes…a fantastic collaborator: creative, proactive, generous, organized, versatile, and indispensable” (Nathan Davis, Drama Desk Nominated Sound Designer)

Cross-discipline credits include: The Other Mozart (Hong Kong, Edinburgh Fringe, London, NYC, U.S.Tour, Canadian Tour), What We Become (NYC, Edinburgh Fringe), Treaty (The Foundry, Middlebury Town Hall Theater), Funny Guy (59e59, London, Edinburgh Fringe), 7 Magdalenes (Baryshnikov Arts Center, TheaterLab, HERE), Uta Hagen Centennial Salon (Lincoln Center), Heart Strings (Atlantic Theater Co), Hail Mary! (Fresh Fruit Fest), Manon (Irondale Theater), Talking With Angels (TheaterLab), Faust (Baruch Performing Arts), Salome (Irondale Theater), Orgy & Bess (Judson Church), AMP (HERE), Tussaud/Antoinette (IRT), Big Wave (TaDa!, The Tank), Enjoy your Meal (Edinburgh Fringe), Tiffany Caputo (Edinburgh Fringe), Anime-Zing Gameshow! (Edinburgh Fringe), Empty NeXt (TheaterLab), Vice & Virtue (NYTF), My Onliness (The New Ohio), Chess (American Theater for Actors), Bananas (The Rat), Sparkle Spa (BMI), Ewalt & Walker (54 Below), Good Samaritans (The Tank), Ghost Shower (The Tank), Halalish (The Tank), The Companion (Moxie Arts), Mary & Max (Bobby Cronin & Crystal Skillman), Voyage en Chanson (National Sawdust), L’autre Mozart (Fringe North, Halifax Fringe), Rhinoceros (Atlantic Acting School) and more. Kodi is a New York Foundation for the Arts Music Fellow. Kodi’s fine art has been featured in partnership with Arts Gowanus and Red Hook Art Project. Kodi has an original show called The Friend Breakup that she would love if you followed @thefriendbreakup. Kodi has an album available on all streaming platforms under Kodi the Composer called "Sound the Alarm"! kodilynnmilburn.com IG @heythereitskodi

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Mieko Gavia on Jason Tseng’s Fear and Wonder as presented by Flux Theatre Ensemble

2026-06-15T13:18:31.374-04:00

Pictured (l to r) : Brian Tong, Tonia E. Anderson and Neil Tyrone Prichard. Photo by Justin Hoch

My prevailing emotion while watching the queer romantic dramedy Fear and Wonder at A.R.T./New York Theatres was “Awwwww!” The audience apparently felt likewise, as we collectively gasped, giggled, and (forgive my millennial internet lingo) squee’d at the awkward teenage romance on the stage.

This play within a play uses the framing of an interfaith church service (led by Tonia E. Anderson) to tell the earnest love story between two roommates. In 2002, tightlaced scholarly Ryan and floppy haired rebel Jabez (played by Neil Tyrone Prichard and Brian Tong) meet at a conservative Christian summer camp. What follows could be best described as an opposites-attract teen romance complete with awkward yearning, romantic playfighting, and an end-of-camp talent show– were it not for the period-accurate homophobia. This forces them to suffocate their emotions, call each other secretly for years, and search their souls and their God for guidance.

Pictured (l to r) : Neil Tyrone Prichard and Brian Tong. Photo by Justin Hoch

Pictured : Brian Tong. Photo by Justin Hoch

The design elements of the show were pitch perfect- from Will Lowry’s impressive church set, to Kia Rogers’ lighting, and Erin Bednarz’s sound design augmented with Benjamin Balatbat’s churchy keyboard playing and music by Adam Reneer, Rick Burkhardt, and Brendan Fox. Izzy Fields, HJ Farr, and Ningning Yang brought the nostalgia with pitch perfect period props and costuming. Braxton Rae’s intimacy coordination was possibly the best I’ve seen while reporting for NYTR- I was at the edge of my seat watching the actors’ awkward advances, but it never felt unsafe. Additionally, The call-and-response church service segments led by an ebullient Tonia E. Anderson felt authentic and welcoming, and the lobby exhibits invited deeper reflection on queer joy and spirituality.

Pictured: Tonia E. Anderson. Photo by Justin Hoch

At several moments I remarked to my guest that Fear and Wonder felt like the kind of Hallmark/Lifetime movie my mother would enjoy. I meant this, dear reader, as a compliment. However, I would have liked to see a little more un-Hallmarkey exploration of religion as well as the underbelly of their teenage love affair. Nobody’s perfect, and even without the oppressive force of cisheteronormativity, insecurity and teenage hormones can lead to some gnarly relationship dynamics. The play scrapes the surface of this by showing us flashes of Jabez’s avoidance and Ryan’s temper. Prichard and Tong are earnest and responsive actors, and these moments cut through the sugary sweetness like a nail through candy glass. But I felt the play brought up, and then seemed to speed through, discussions of BIPOC masculinity and the marginalizing/demonization of non-White/Non-Christian cultural practices, and–most relevant to the play’s premise- exactly where and how queerness fits within Christianity. At 100 minutes, I’m not sure if this piece had time to adequately walk the characters through these journeys, but I do wonder what could be accomplished with a bit more time in the last act.

But maybe, dear reader, I am being unfair. Perhaps I came into this, like Jabez and Ryan on the first day of camp- expecting to see my own point of view digested and reflected back to me onstage. If you, dear reader, plan to go to this show (and I hope you do, it’s delightful), I hope you will come with room for wonder and love and tenderness. Because that is what this play will give you. And I posit that during dark times like these, a little wonder and love and tenderness is what we need.

Pictured: Brian Tong and Neil Tyrone Prichard. Photo by Justin Hoch

Fear and Wonder
Writer: Jason Tseng

Director: Emily Hartford

Performers: Neil Tyrone Prichard*, Brian Tong, Tonia E. Anderson*, Benjamin Balatbat

Set Designer: Will Lowry

Costume Designer: Izzy Fields

Lighting Designer: Kia Rogers

Props Coordinator/Assistant Director: HJ Farr

Sound Designer: Erin Bednarz

Music Director/Composer: Adam Rineer

Spiritual & Community Engagement Coordinator: Brian G. Murphy

Stage Manager: Alice McKay

Intimacy Coordinator: Braxton Rae

Production Assistant: Donovan Rogers

Performance Dates & Times
Sunday, June 14th at 4pm

Monday, June 15th at 7:30pm

Wednesday, June 17th at 7:30pm

Thursday, June 18th at 7:30pm

Saturday, June 20th at 7:30pm

Sunday, June 21st at 4pm

Monday, June 22nd at 7:30pm

Wednesday, June 24th at 7:30pm

Thursday, June 25th at 7:30pm

Friday, June 26th at 7:30pm

Saturday, June 27th at 7:30pm

Web Link to tickets: https://www.fluxtheatre.org/productions/fear-wonder

Content Warning: Please note the play contains religious trauma, profanity and mature themes. If you would like further specifics on content, please contact us at fluxthtr@gmail.com.

Mieko Gavia, photo by Jody Christopherson

MIEKO GAVIA (she/they) is a writer, actor, audiobook narrator, model and producer. Her acting credits include Canary in the award-winning film Canary Trap, Joan of Arc in La Pucelle, Lou Salome in Lou at the Paradise Factory, the webseries Quarter Century (Imani), Afterswarm at JACK (Gigi), Gardener of Stars at Detroit’s Light Box (Gardener), The Reenactors at Abrams Arts Center (Actress 2), and Creative Time’s installations: Private Moment (Alice) and The Privilege of Escape (Dr. Crenshaw). Their play Dog has been performed at the Gene Frankel Theatre, Afterswarm (co-written with Heather Harvey) has been performed at JACK, Ophelia: A Prism has been performed at Oberlin College and Mai House, and her non-theatrical writing has been featured in Bustle, Buzzfeed, Oxygen, Efniks, and on Netflix’s Youtube channel. Mieko is also a producing ensemble member for Black Revolutionary Theater Workshop, a Brooklyn based, social justice focused theater company. https://www.miekogavia.org/

The Asian Burlesque Festival: An interview with Calamity Chang by Mieko Gavia

2026-06-11T13:15:02.612-04:00

Asian American Burlesque fest-Night 1 Cast: Stella St. James (LA), Bunny the D'vine (Switzerland), Princess Moonface (Singapore/Halifax), Lychee Minx (Quad Cities), Ruby Revel (Vancouver), Phoenix A'Blaze (NYC), Filthy Mari Chino (NYC), Felicia Oh (NYC), Joona Bae (NYC/NJ), Kitana Louise (Houston), Andrea Flow (NYC), Calamity Chang, Persimmon Peaks & Sweet Cheeks, Ceruleanna Blue & Cashlee Banks

The 14th annual Asian American Burlesque Fest- hosted by Calamity Chang and produced by Chang and Jen Gapay- was a sexy, hilarious, and rebellious evening filled with performers both new and seasoned performing songs, acrobatics, drag, poi, and-of course, numbers in sequined dresses, thongs, and pasties.

The raucous event I attended at Le Poisson Rouge was punctuated by Calamity Chang’s sharp wit and spectacular costumes. Several days later, I was able to shoot Calamity some questions about the past, present, and future of this under-appreciated medium. Here are her responses:

Calamity Chang in the Asian American Burlesque Fest

MIEKO GAVIA: What was the first Asian Burlesque Festival like, and how has it changed over the past 14 years?

CALAMITY CHANG: The first Asian Burlesque Festival in 2013 was much smaller. We only had eight performers compared to this year’s cast of 20. Back then, the show was by invitation since there were only a handful of performers in the NYC area that I knew of, as well as performers in other cities, like Seattle, where The Shanghai Pearl is based.

Over the past 14 years, the festival has grown in size, visibility, and artistic scope. The show has become more expansive. Some performers bring classic glamour, some bring comedy, some bring political work, some bring experimental performance, drag, circus, storytelling, or cultural references. What has changed most is that the festival is no longer just about proving that Asian burlesque artists exist. Now it is about showing the incredible range of what Asian and AAPI performance can be. The energy of having a group of like-minded individuals who share common life experiences is so powerful. I feel it backstage every year so palpably.

Kitana Louis in the Asian American Burlesque Fest

MG: What’s the process for selecting performers for the festival?

CC: Up until 2025, applications were open year-round and free. We never received that many applications until last year, when we received over 30. Next year, we are going to have a specific application window from January to March.

As far as selecting acts, we look at the strength of the act, stage presence, point of view, costuming, and how the act might fit into the overall shape of the show. These are pretty standard festival requirements, but for the Asian Burlesque Festival, applicants also have to answer a few questions such as, “How did you grow up culturally as an Asian person?” and “What are your Asian family connections, practices, and influences?” Stella St. James from LA said it made her feel like she was applying for college again.

These reflective questions have two functions. First, I genuinely want to know each applicant’s background. Where did their families immigrate from? Where did they grow up? What shaped them culturally? Second, it helps filter out applicants who think this is a festival for non-Asians who simply appreciate Asian costumes and aesthetics. We have had a couple of applicants who were not Asian but performed “Asian-inspired” costumes and acts. That is another topic.

Every year, we strive for a lineup that is varied and shows a range of burlesque expressions. That means balancing classic burlesque with variety, newer voices with seasoned performers, and different styles of performance. Not every act has to be about identity or heritage. But we do want performers to understand why this space exists and what it means to participate in it.

Ruby Revel in the Asian American Burlesque Fest

MG: How has the burlesque scene changed since you began performing, and what is your biggest hope for new performers in the field?

CC: One of the biggest things I have noticed about when I started performing compared to now is that there were fewer online resources and fewer rhinestones. If you wanted to learn how to make a feather headdress, you were on your own or you had to pay an expert to teach you. Now, with social media, a lot of DIY content is free, which means what used to be “expert information” is not as gate-kept anymore.

New performers have access to so much more information, which is wonderful. But there is also more pressure to brand yourself immediately, produce content constantly, and look polished before you have had time to explore your onstage persona and style.

My biggest hope for new performers is that they give themselves patience and grace. Take your time to learn and grow. Burlesque is not just about getting booked, how many followers you have, or making viral clips.

Lychee Minx in the Asian American Burlesque Fest

MG: Can you tell me more about the importance and limits of representation in the burlesque world?

CC: Representation matters because it changes what feels possible. For many women, we grew up with very narrow ideas of who was allowed to be glamorous, sexual, funny, powerful, strange, or desirable. Asian performers have often been exoticized, desexualized, hypersexualized, or erased entirely. So a festival centered on Asian and AAPI performers creates a space where we are not the sidekick in someone else’s story. We are reclaiming our bodies and how we express ourselves sexually and sensually.

But representation has limits. No single festival can represent every community, every diaspora, every mixed-race experience, every immigration history, or every relationship to heritage. “Asian” and “AAPI” are huge umbrellas. Having said that, I would love to see more Blasian performers in the festival. I would love to see more Pacific Islander performers, more South Asian performers, more Southeast Asian performers, more mixed-race performers, more adoptee voices, and more people across the Asian diaspora.

Some performers I have connected with may have Asian ancestry, but do not feel connected to that side of their family, or they may not feel comfortable taking up space in an Asian-centered festival. I respect that. I do not want to pressure anyone to perform an identity they do not feel connected to.

I hope the festival becomes a beacon for other AAPI diasporic artistic voices and encourages them to consider applying.

Stella St. James in the Asian American Burlesque Fest

MG: Where do you see the future of the art form going? Are there any trends you’re cautious about or excited for?

CC: On good days, I think burlesque will continue to be this amazing community of weirdos and rebels creating fantasy and visual art. On bad days, especially when I reflect on current politics, I worry about how easily art forms rooted in women’s bodies, sexuality, and autonomy can become targets, along with any bodies that do not fit into a binary structure.

I also worry about newer performers feeling like they have to spend a lot of money before they have developed their craft. A beautiful costume is so exciting, but it cannot replace intention, musicality, stage presence, or a clearly executed concept. Costumes are an investment, and it is smart to invest in a couple of strong, repeatable acts, but not every act needs to start with a huge budget.

Joona Bae in the Asian American Burlesque Fest

MG: Bonus: What do you wish I had asked you, and what’s your answer?

CC: “What do you want people to feel when they leave the Asian Burlesque Festival?”

My answer would be: I love receiving messages after the festival from attendees who felt empowered and inspired by what they saw. I want Asian and AAPI audience members to feel seen in ways they maybe did not expect. I want non-Asian audience members to understand that there is no single Asian story, no single Asian body, no single Asian aesthetic, and no single way to be powerful or sexy onstage.

My dream would be to host a weekend camp away hosting AAPI performers to connect, workshop developing acts, talk about shared experiences, eat hot pot and dim sum. You know, do Asian shit.

Calamity Chang photo by Mike Webb

CALAMITY CHANG "The Asian Sexsation" is one of the busiest burlesque performers and producer based in NYC with 2 of the longest running weekly shows in NYC. Her burlesque style is a unique blend of classic and fetish. Named by The Huffington Post as one of the "20 Burlesque Stars To Know", Calamity has performed for numerous esteemed events such as Inked Magazine (Pinup Issue Release Party 2015), Design Industries Foundation for Fighting Aids NYC), and celebrities such as Brooke Shields and the cast of The Addams Family, Corey Miller of LA Ink, and guest starred in Moby's metal band DiamondSnake ("Woman, Yea"). Calamity has also appeared in reality TV shows such as "Oddities" (Science Channel) and "My Big Redneck Vacation" (Country Music Television). You can also see her in the controversial NC-17 film of 2011 "Shame" by Steve McQueen starring Michael Fassbender as "Late Night Lover #1".

In her free time, Calamity is a NY School of Burlesque instructor where she regularly teaches the class "Producing Burlesque" and "Fan Dance with Calamity". Born in Taipei, Taiwan, Calamity grew up in Bolivia (Santa Cruz), Florida (Tampa), and various cities in Texas including Houston and Dallas. Though she has lived in NYC for 22 years then bought a house in the Poconos Mountains in eastern Pennsylvania in 2020 where she has started producing shows.

Mieko Gavia photo by Jody Christopherson

MIEKO GAVIA (she/they) is a writer, actor, audiobook narrator, and producer. Her acting credits include Canary in the award-winning film Canary Trap, Joan of Arc in La Pucelle, Lou Salome in Lou at the Paradise Factory, the webseries Quarter Century (Imani), Afterswarm at JACK (Gigi), Gardener of Stars at Detroit’s Light Box (Gardener), The Reenactors at Abrams Arts Center (Actress 2), and Creative Time’s installations: Private Moment (Alice) and The Privilege of Escape (Dr. Crenshaw). Her audiobook work includes From the World of Percy Jackson: The Court of the Dead: A Nico di Angelo Adventure, and the AUDIE nominated Devil Reached Toward the Sky, Their play Dog has been performed at the Gene Frankel Theatre, Afterswarm (co-written with Heather Harvey) has been performed at JACK, Ophelia: A Prism has been performed at Oberlin College and Mai House, and her non-theatrical writing has been featured in Bustle, Buzzfeed, Oxygen, Efniks, and on Netflix’s Youtube channel. Mieko is also a producing ensemble member for Black Revolutionary Theater Workshop, a Brooklyn based, social justice focused theater company. https://www.miekogavia.org/

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Theresa Buchheister on The Derangements, part of Summerworks 2026 at The Wild Project

2026-06-10T14:09:38.425-04:00

Marceline Hugot and Crystal Finn photo by Maria Baranova

Perception forms the world, no matter how you slice it. Your perspective is your perspective, whether you are a gynecologist, a womb-centric cultist, an unaffiliated woman, a flasher, or an audience member. Your body and mind filter "reality" into your experience. Based on these individualized, personalized facts, our desires drive the bus, either through traffic stopping at reds or off a cliff.
Derangements by Nadja Leonhard-Hooper delightfully allows for this poetic chaos to reverberate in the world she created, which allows everything to feel normal with an edge of imminent danger.

Just like a sitcom.

Will it all be ok?! Is 60-90 minutes enough time to tie up all the shenanigans into something that looks like a bow?! Everything is so wild, a perfect storm, an unbelievable but totally relatable mess! How will it resolve?!

As a child of the 1980s, I was raised on fresh sitcoms straight from the coked-up minds of marketing bros and classic sitcoms airing on Nick at Night. So obviously, as soon as the show ended and the enthusiastic audience erupted in applause, I leaned to my showgoing-mates and said something like - what a wonderful homage to Laverne and Shirley!

Upon inspection... I can find no proof of this undeniable personal truth I experienced while watching the play. I re-examined my perception to try to unpack why I felt so sure of the Laverne and Shirleyness of it all.

Here is what I found when plunging my mind:

-There were two incredible leads with great timing, good hair and sizzling chemistry (Crystal Finn and Hannah Cabell).

-It was placed in a decade that is not our present decade but also not really. When were we all?!

-The hijinks! Dinner and drinks interrupted by a dude addicted to flashing! A gyno exam that IS actually too personal! A therapy session with the wrong doctor who's not a doctor but a patient! An escape from a pregnancy cult into a witchy hut in the woods and back again ... with snowmobiles!

-The sitcom-esque sound design by Johnny Gasper (sorta more like "haunted by sitcom").

-The array of supporting characters who are defined by their jobs (The Gynecologist, The Waiter, The Flasher, etc) (if you consider exposing yourself a job... or a vocation...)

-Pregnancy.

Could it be that all of those signs were not actually signs? Even though they felt as real to me as a big ol' monogrammed L on a sweater?

Of course.

And that is why I love love theater so much. The audience was very much sharing an experience - laughing full out throughout, finding delight in surprising moments and happy to be sardined into the knee-crunching chairs of The Wild Project. But, it is also true that we came in with our own references and vibes and let our unique opinions shape our 90 minutes.

In the same way that Roxanne (Crystal Finn) can feel the entire world relentlessly coming onto her, I can feel the spirit of Laverne and Shirley in a play actually inspired by Christopher Durang (after watching, I read this lovely interview between Leonhard-Hooper and Maria Striar, the artistic director of Clubbed Thumb). That is just how people are. Messes of our own perceptions.

All in all, I would say - Come for a Clubbed Thumb show and get one in spades. Femme-centric, quick-paced, laugh-a-minute with performers you will Google when you get home and then see everything they do into the far flung future (if you are not already a fan, of course). If you are a theater-maker (decently likely), you will also get ideas about lights thanks to Alejandro Fajardo's playful design. Leaving with sore cheeks from laughing and a brain full of inspiration? Not a bad night out on the town!

PS - Trend Alert! Grown men playing dogs onstage! Very 2026.

DERANGEMENTS
by Nadja Leonhard-Hooper | directed by Annie Tippe

with
Hannah Cabell, Camila Canó-Flaviá, Crystal Finn, Marceline Hugot, Allan K. Washington and Danny Wolohan

sets Cate McCrea costumes Brenda Abbandandolo
lights Alejandro Fajardo sound Johnny Gasper
production stage manager Dominique Nadeau

In which two girlfriends catching up over dinner have their lives changed in a flash. Maybe it’s the ‘80s, but it’s probably just gas.

June 1 - 12, 2026
Monday - Saturday @ 7:30pm

Plus three matinees:
Sat June 6, Thu June 11 & Fri June 12 @ 3pm

at the Wild Project
195 E 3rd St, New York, NY 10009

TICKET PRICES - ALL FEES INCLUDED:
$35 General Admission | $25 Students
$45 Reserved Seating | $65 Pay It Forward

click here for tix

Pictured: Theresa Buchheister: photo by Walter Wlodarczyk

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On Curation, Theatermaking and Sugar Sugar! : an interview with Theresa Buchheister by Jody Christopherson

2026-06-05T16:33:41.067-04:00

Pictured: Lena Engelstein and Lisa Fagan
photo by Maria Baranova

Repping the Sugar Sugar festival (made by so many incredible folx) + talking curation, theatermaking and more, Theresa Buchheister sat down with NYTR this month.

I don't remember when I met Theresa. To me, they are a foundational entity in the experimental indie scene. As long as I've been a artist in NY, they've been around, making delightful space for the weird and wonderful, working in the basement of the Strand, running Indie festivals, seeing just about every single show in every experimental festival from Brooklyn to Queens.

When I read the news Sugar Sugar was back and saw Theresa's name attached, I was in.

For context here's what you need to know about Sugar Sugar:

Returning to Domino Park for its second edition, Sugar Sugar! will transform Domino Square’s waterfront amphitheater into a festive open-air stage for free, experimental performances. The series runs June 3 to 25, 2026, presenting performances on Wednesday and Thursday evenings each week. Over the four-week run, some of the city’s most exciting artists working across dance, puppetry, clowning, theater, performance art, and music will premiere ambitious, site-responsive works—many artists presenting large-scale performance outdoors for the first time.

This year’s program features new work by New York artists Amando Houser and Pussypaws Puppetry; Julia Antinozzi and Isa Spector; HOLE PICS; and Malcolm-x Betts and Kat Sotelo. Three of the four performance weeks were conceived as pairings, with each curator shaping different weeks, inviting unexpected connections or illuminating shared artistic sensibilities, alongside one week devoted to the queer art collective HOLE PICS.

Each week of curated programming reflects and extends the legacy of North Brooklyn’s vibrant creative community, foregrounding artists who continue to shape the neighborhood’s avant-garde performance culture.

Founded by Annabel Thompson and organized by Public Assembly, a Brooklyn-based creative strategy and producing practice, Sugar Sugar! is curated by Alessandra Gómez and Theresa Buchheister, with Buchheister returning from last year’s inaugural edition.

Free admission by reservation The full schedule of events can be found on the Domino Park website: www.dominopark.com/sugarsugar

Pictured: Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener
photo by Maria Baranova

JODY CHRISTOPHERSON: Congrats on this fun huge festival! Tell us about the performers you've curated for Sugar Sugar? What stands out about each for you and ultimately what helped guide your decision to program them?

THERESA BUCHHEISTER: The curation team (me, Alessandra Gomez and Annabel Thompson, with incredible support from Nora Chellew) discussed many many artists for quite some time before reaching out to any of them. It was great because there were artists we all knew and felt passionate about and artists we were able to introduce to each other. The full four programs really reflect those group discussions and where we all landed together. The artists I really went hard for and are officially considered "my curation" are Pussypaws Puppetry and DeliaDelia!: The Flat-Chested Witch. I am lucky to know a wild amount of great artists, but the reasons these folx were the ones I pushed forward....

-I love a split bill because it creates a totally unique event that not even the individual artists could really plan on.

-I wanted to platform experimental performance in a variety of mediums. We had agreed on some great dance and nightlife artists for some of the other programs, so I was like - we need puppetry, we need comedy, we need sexy stuff, we need music.

-All of the involved artists are not only great at what they do, they are wonderful collaborators and would be down to figure out how to perform in an environment that was 100% new to them and not totally within my control.

-Both groups have a project they could adapt, so they had a really great starting point. There was not a lot of time between curation meetings and June.

-They both make me laugh and smile a great deal.

-I want to mention that last year I was invited to curate by Ellpetha Tsivicos and it was a blast to bring in Nile Harris, Lena Engelstein, Lisa Fagan and Tiresias, whose performances you can see in the photos by Maria Baranova in throughout this interview!

Pictured: Nile Harris

photo by Maria Baranova

JC: It's absolutely incredible that these shows are free and open to the public. What elements came together in order to make that possible?

TB: Resources resources resources. Because this is a program of Two Trees and Domino Park, we have the funding to make it possible. The artists nor the venue suffer by making it free. Even more, they benefit from it, massively! Accessability benfits everyone. Wouldn't it be great if a wealthy person or organization decided to sponsor $50k of free tickets at venues we love, like The Brick or JACK or La MaMa? To cover 300 tickets for all 8 nights of Sugar Sugar! at $20/ticket is $48k. The Brick can only seat 50, so $50k would cover 50 shows! $50k is not a significant amount for Two Trees. It is a staggering amount to an underfunded space or hustling artist.

JC: Let's talk about space, the site of Sugar Sugar, formerly the Domino Sugar Refinery which hosted Kara Walker's "A Subtlety" in 2014 which I saw and thought was a powerful examination of the location's history and cultural impact. It seems likely that we have Kara Walker to thank for beginning the conversation about art making ties to that location. Do we know how that conversation continued? Any nods to former spaces in that area?

TB: I am not privy to the conversations that led to Kara Walker presenting or between then and now, but I am certain they are all connected, whether intentionally or not. You cannot erase or pave over the vibes. The spirits. For me, when I am in the area, I am particularly possessed by the ghosts (and touched by feelings of loss and longing) of 285 Kent, Glasslands and Death By Audio.

I would love to share some history from Annabel Thompson, who has so much to share. From Annabel:

I can actually tell you exactly what led to A Subtlety! Jed Walentas – owner of Two Trees and also my husband – was Creative Time's Board Chairman at the time, so his donation of the space and facilitation of the commission were instrumental in making that moment possible.

The connections between then and now are countless but for this purpose I'll say twofold:

For Two Trees, Domino Square was always built on a spirit of public engagement – and art has been one vehicle for that, but whether it's the ice rink, salsa nights, or Sugar Sugar!, the thread running through everything is a commitment to free, open access for the public. That's the true inheritance from A Subtlety, more than any artistic lineage.

For me personally when conceiving Sugar Sugar!, I was thinking about the artist relationship to Williamsburg specifically. A Subtlety was extraordinary as a piece of public art and held the integrity and energy of that neighborhood in a really rare way. But that artistic energy predates 2014 by decades. And in some ways – however poignantly or ironically – A Subtlety marked something like a closing chapter for that particular creative era of the neighborhood. With Sugar Sugar!, I wanted to pay homage to the legacy of artists who worked and lived there, to the DIY spaces like Glasslands and Death by Audio, to the world that Williamsburg used to be. RIP, and long live.

One beautiful full-circle footnote: A Subtlety's production crew was led by Art Domantay (Director of Fabrication, Creative Time) and Al Henriquez (Site Manager, Two Trees), and both Art and Al are reunited here onsite building Sugar Sugar! at load-in as we speak.

And one more personal origin story: I first set foot in Williamsburg in 2006 and stumbled – entirely by chance – into a Jelly's party at the (then abandoned) McCarren Park Pool, where Sonic Youth were playing. I spent the next two decades living and breathing that world of artists and happenstance and magic. If Sugar Sugar! can summon even a little of those spirits into the transformed and sanitized waterfront we have today – let's go.

Pictured: Jarret Key (Tiresias presents MYSTERIOSA)
photo by Maria Baranova

JC: How do you define the role of curator and what kind of worlds are you facilitating?

TB: First and foremost, I think curators need to go see shows, exhibits, happenings, events all the time.

Second, I think they need to talk to artists about how it is to create and dream and build and what their struggles are.

Third, they need to have opinions.

Fourth, they need to consider micro and macro needs, implications, goals and intentions all the time.

Fifth, they need to understand that they will have to say no, hurt the feelings of real people, feel hurt themselves and still wake up every day willing to continue.

The worlds I have tried to build and continue to try to build and support prioritze with the resources they have:

-accessibility (physically, financially, emotionally, technically)

-wildness (not risk averse)

-artistic ambition (as opposed to career ambition)

-people (staff,artists, audiences, community)

-collaboration (gotta actually work together)

-multi-generational (don't lock out the youngs, the olds nor the mids)

Pictured: Mizuho Kappa (Tiresias presents MYSTERIOSA) in Sugar Sugar!
photo by Maria Baranova

JC: We both grew up in the Midwest. What are your favorite things about that region, and what influences from that region show up in your work?

TB: Indeed! I grew up in Manhattan, KS. I think the vibes of horizon, the sky and the expansiveness make it into my plays, as well as the utter weird bizarre absurdity of the people, places and things. Malls, traditions, cults, sports fans, parking lots, cemeteries, gas stations, passive aggressive activities for adults...

JC: When did you begin making theater and why?

TB: I began when I was a kid - in basements and yards. So essentially, that's what I am still doing. My grade school library that was in the basement, my grandparents' basement behind the brown accordion doors, the basement of the house I grew up in—which had a tiny stage because it had previously been a recording studio—and my backyard. When I was younger, my imagination was limitless and my joy was untouched by the idea of "career". There is something essential about it for me, though, no matter how old I get or how much my circumstances change.

JC: plugs please: what else are you making this year or have you seen recently or are excited to make or see that's coming up?

TB: I would love to be able to make something for live performance or film again. I have hopes and goals. I do have two podcasts, though! SPLASH ZONE with Blake Bolan and What Was I Saying ... with Doug Weaver. SPLASH ZONE is about experimental performance! Blake and I have been making and talking about experimental performance together for nearly 30 years. We are extreme enthusiasts. Doug is a dear friend, who is also a director, actor, writer and was my professor 25 years ago. We talk about book culture, theater culture, film culture and everything in between!

Aside from Sugar Sugar! of course, I am soooo looking forward to:

-The Glorious and Stunning Death of a Faithful Mormon by Loading Dock. They always create incredible worlds and this one promises to delve, expand, question and explode. There is much in the title. So, if the title hooks you, GO!

-SUB by Alex Aguirre. Alex writes truly wild stuff. AND Mitchell Polonksy is directing! I have never been to ERF, so the allure of a new space also has me.

-Slanted Floors by Billy McEntee. Thank goodness I am here for this iteration. I was devastated to miss it before. I love that apartment shows are back, but this one also has a full meal. YUM.

There are so many more things I am excited by, but those are in my first weekend after Sugar Sugar! Program A.

If you want to follow what me and some other freaks are into, check out www.staffpicks.fun!

JC: Your personal song of the Summer?

TB: My personal song of the summer is gonna be Dreams by The Cranberries on loop.

Pictured: Theresa Buchheister: photo by Walter Wlodarczyk

Pictured: Jody Christopherson, film still by Natalie Deryn Johnson

JODY CHRISTOPHERSON is a multidisciplinary artist working in the mediums of theater, music, photography and journalism. She is the founder of the New York Theatre Review blogspot and proudly serves as the site's Co-Editor in Chief, in partnership with Amelia Parenteau.

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Lights Narrow: Chloe Olewitz interviews Playwright Vincent Marano

2026-06-05T12:08:51.594-04:00

I usually want to see the art about the afterlife. Dealing with death in such explicit terms (instead of refracted through metaphor) puts me right back in my body; I leave the theater with my brain busy and my feet firmly on the ground. Manhattan smells a little sweeter, tomorrow shines a little brighter. When we’re lucky, art about the afterlife reminds us what matters now.

“A meth dealer and an angel struggle to see who is more in need of saving” in Vincent Marano’s Lights Narrow, billed as “a meditation on life, death, and forgiveness.” DeLisa White returns to direct, after winning the New York Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Direction for the 2014 production. CK Allen and Ryan McCurdy star.

Lights Narrow runs at Guild Hall on June 6 & 13 at 2pm and 7pm and June 7 & 14 at 7pm.

Chloe Olewitz: How did the original idea for Lights Narrow come to you? Was there a moment of inspiration or an inciting event?

Vincent Marano: I remember questioning some life choices I made and how they might have determined the status of my creative and emotional life. It seemed like I hit a wall, that I would always be on the outside looking in while the cool kids get all the nice stuff and the applause. Then, I thought, "what if there was an angel who wasn't allowed to enter heaven, only usher people to the pearly gates and what if he had to guide a particularly disgusting person to paradise he's been denied." How would he feel and would it make him question his faith completely and his entire identity?

CO: What are some of the iterations the work went through to reach its current form? What preconceived notions or strongly held beliefs were challenged or overturned while you were writing it?

VM: The play was first called Cat on the Roof, after a stupid joke and it just didn't work. Then two actor friends I met at Manhattan Theatre Source (back in the day) read an early draft and something clicked. I started writing the characters in their voice, a proud and intense African American man and a goofy, laid back Caucasian musician/actor. The play then evolved into this Russian Doll-like structure. As the two men argued, they discovered neither is exactly who they seemed, nor are they even aware why they are where they are. As I wrote it, my theology evolved into this belief that a Godhead and afterlife are probably nothing like what has been conceived by man so far, that every millennia or so religion evolves to match mankind's evolving humanity. That man needs still needs faith to explain the unknowable, even when man knows so much more about the world today. I also realized, I can improve and finish plays if I have particular actors in mind for the roles, writing to their voices and for their natural states of being. No great character is created out of whole cloth.

CO: You’re known for creating theatre in a wide variety of genres. How did that breadth of experience influence your work on Lights Narrow?

VM: I feel much of playwriting is making an effort to replicate a story that moved and inspired you. How did that writer do that, how did they get to me? It wasn't until I started directing and got my MFA, did I realize stories decide how they want to be told. Genre is like cuisine, the components of characters and plot are often the same, it's just how you cook and serve them up that changes. For Lights Narrow, I did a deep dive into medieval mystery plays like Everyman, revisiting the Catholic theology I grew up with and my dabbling into Judaism, Kabbalah, Sufism, Hinduism and Buddhism. I had written semi-absurdist and agit-prop pieces for FringeNYC that did well and had just come off producing a evening of One Acts of my work called What I Meant Was... In that line up, I created an Beckett-like take on the Jesus birth story. I wondered what was it like for Joseph waiting, like all expectant fathers, for Christ to be born. A variation, in a way, on Waiting for Godot. I gave Pew (the main character) two Wisemen (the title of the piece), Windsor and Easy. Named after places where we often sit and think, the Wisemen represented polar opposites of authority and parenting. Writing about this now makes me think that Lights Narrow was rooted in the existential questions I was asking myself years before in Wisemen.

CO: In 2014, Lights Narrow was nominated for three NY Innovative Theatre Awards and won for Outstanding Direction. How did that recognition impact how you approached this new limited engagement run, 12 years on?

VM: I always felt Lights Narrow is one of my strongest plays. Audiences really connect with the spiritual crisis at the center of the work. Since 2014, I've lost siblings and friends, the world has become more brutal and chaotic, and I wanted to see if Lights Narrow held up. Also, I have been dying to work again with DeLisa White (director), CK Allen and Ryan McCurdy (who was Pew in Wisemen, his first NYC production). Also, presenting it at the Episcopal Actors' Guild seem apropos. It is my new artistic home and the vibe accents the message of the play well.

CO: Why is this the right time for audiences to experience Lights Narrow? How do its themes connect with the specificity of our current moment?

VM: Many of us came of age in a relatively peaceful era, experiencing little of the hardship previous generations endured. The polarization and division today is all the more jarring and seems unsolvable. We question what other people can possibly be seeing when they vote for this person, or spout that opinion, or dismiss this group or that horror. So much of our identity and beliefs have been manipulated by outside forces and "truths" coming at us 24/7 through our screens. The main characters in Lights Narrow, Elgin and Stanton, have nothing in common, except they don't want to be seen as evil, as unsalvageable. They don't want to be abandoned or dismissed. Most, even as they curse everyone around them, crave forgiveness.

CO: What can exploring the afterlife teach us about existing on this plane? What did the exploration illuminate for you?

VM: As our context changes, so do we. Audiences need to think about their choices, how they are living, and never forget the world is this wonderous place with so many opportunities to do and feel good. Though it provides more questions than solutions, I think Lights Narrow demands us to think about our attitudes and actions and how often we withhold our generosity, until we are sure people and/or strangers merit our kindness. What we are actually doing in this rationing of empathy is denying ourselves a bit grace we all so desperately need. I have become thoroughly committed to random acts of kindness, supporting our community of artists without expectation reciprocal support, the "never let the right know what the left hand's doing" kind of stuff. Doing good, helping, is the point and that's enough. It has to be.

LIGHTS NARROW

By Vincent Marano

Directed by DeLisa White

Starring CK Allen and Ryan McCurdy

Lights Narrow runs at Guild Hall on June 6 & 13 at 2pm and 7pm and June 7 & 14 at 7pm

Tickets: https://ticketstripe.com/events/5617108905401523

Chloe Olewitz is a writer and producer in NYC. Hire her at chloeolewitz.com and read her essays at wanderthief.com.

Vincent Marano is one of the most prolific and versatile emerging playwrights working today —active across every genre, constantly developing new work. Lauded for his rich dialogue and complex stories of morality and justice, he is a two-time BRIO Award Winner for Playwriting, a winner of nearly a dozen film festival awards for his short screenplay By Some Chance and numerous nominations for his plays, My Baby, Artistic License, By Chance, and Confirmation. He is a member of the Actor’s Studio, Workshop Theater, New York Theatre Workshop and Episcopal Actors. Mr. Marano’s most recent production, Squire D. Rathbone, Esq. enjoyed a near sell out run at the New York City Fringe Festival this past March.

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June 2026 Listings Guide

2026-05-25T18:02:08.249-04:00

through Jun 1st

Rehearsal for Truth International Theater Festival

Tickets are FREE

Bohemian National Hall in New York, 321 E 73rd St, New York, NY 10021

Rehearsal for Truth International Theater Festival is an annual showcase of contemporary Central and Eastern European theater, established in 2017. The festival is a shared endeavor of the Václav Havel Center and the Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association in partnership with numerous other cultural and performing arts organizations. The festival honors the artistic and political legacy of the Czech playwright/dissident/president Václav Havel. We support exchanges between American and European theater professionals and celebrate the power of the theater to transform our lives.

Jun 3rd-Jun 25th

Sugar Sugar!

Tickets are FREE

Domino Park, 12 S 3rd Street, Brooklyn, NY 11249

Sugar Sugar! is a free outdoor experimental performance series that takes place on Wednesdays and Thursdays in June at Domino Park, right under the Williamsburg Bridge!

Jun 4th-Jun 7th

SUB: An Underwater Workplace Comedy

Tickets $32.07-$63.12

ERF Gallery, 1 Ingraham Street, Brooklyn, NY 11206

The year is 2085. A submarine named Meteora floats above sunken San Francisco, serving as a boutique weapons and uniforms shop for the CEO-led militias that control the planet. A paralyzed armourer, nepo-baby seamstress, cheery security guard, and dangerous power couple helm this dark and hilarious new play directed by Mitchell Polonsky of the Goat Exchange.

Jun 5th-Jun 13th

[.../+*^%<>€£¥$&@!!!!^^^]

Tickets $15-$275

The Chocolate Factory Theater, 38-33 24th Street, Long Island City, NY 11101

[.../+*^%<>€£¥$&@!!!!^^^] confronts the body as a site of political and existential conundrums. The title is intentionally unsayable, engaging that which cannot be uttered in the ineffable present, a way to stay with the body. It resists the explicative we so often demand of the historical moment and instead offers dance and performance as a form to negotiate these complex times. The work probes how material, immaterial, biological, and sensorial resources coexist in dancing actions that oscillate from the unstable and unresolved to unified group choreographies of mesmerizing dance steps. In this maze of interdependence, [.../+*^%<>€£¥$&@!!!!^^^] proposes non-linear thinking and embodied ways of knowing, questioning how bodies can and cannot be isolated from social, economic, and political urgencies.

Jun 6th-Jun 14th

LIGHTS NARROW

Tickets $25

Guild Hall, 1 E 29th Street, New York, NY 10016

Indie theater veteran and award winner Vincent Marano brings his acclaimed two-hander drama LIGHTS NARROW back to New York for a limited engagement. The 2014 production was nominated for 3 New York Innovative Theatre Awards and won for Outstanding Direction. A meditation on life, death and forgiveness, LIGHTS NARROW is an intense two-hander set in a limbo where a meth dealer and an angel struggle to see who is more in need of saving.

Jun 8th-Jun 27th

Fear & Wonder

Tickets $26-$66 (NOTAFLOF)

A.R.T./NY Theaters, 502 W 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019

Flux Theatre Ensemble is proud to produce the world premiere of FEAR & WONDER, written by Jason Tseng and directed by Emily Hartford. Forced to share a room at a conservative Christian summer camp, picture-perfect Ryan and cynical rebel Jabez expect nothing but a week of forced prayers. Instead, their late-night debates spark a magnetic, dangerous attraction that threatens everything they know. When the real world crashes in, will the fear of losing it all tear them apart, or will they risk everything to make something wonderful?

Jun 9th-Jun 27th

Criminal Queerness Festival

Tickets $10.50-$126

HERE Mainstage Theater, 145 6th Ave, New York, NY 10013

National Queer Theater’s Criminal Queerness Festival (CQF) showcases groundbreaking new works written by artists from countries where queerness is criminalized or censored. At a time when authoritarianism is on the rise globally, CQF elevates refugee, asylee, and immigrant queer voices and enriches the cultural fabric of New York City by introducing audiences to bold, original works that challenge Western norms and inspire global change.

AREA D

In AREA D, a scrappy Palestinian band lands an unexpected shot on the Eurovision stage. What starts as a lucky break spirals into a glitter-drenched spectacle, forcing the band to wrestle with whether visibility is worth compromising their identity. AREA D is a bold, genre-smashing musical fusing Arab-pop, punk, and electronic sounds.

Syrian Soap

Eat, Pray, Bathe with your exasperated ancestors in an intergalactic bathhouse and ponder: What kind of future ancestor do I wish to become? How far am I willing to go to express my authentic self? How much lotion is it acceptable to put on in front of other people? Full of heart and irreverence, Syrian Soap is part clown show, part stand-up, part fever dream.

faggy faafi Cairo boy

In the space between living and whatever the hell comes next, between daddy issues and Daddy issues, between the city that never sleeps and the city that never even blinks… Mohammad, the prodigal, closeted son returns to Cairo, and to his father's rapidly failing, irrevocable body. Distanced from his NYC boyfriend, Mohammad reunites with an old Cairo flame who now has a life of his own. And who’s to judge him, besides that angry little angel in the corner of the hospital room?

Jun 11th-Jul 3rd

Queerly Festival

Tickets $22.50-$27.50

UNDER St Marks Theater, 94 St Marks Pl, New York, NY 10009

Jun 12th-Jun 13th

LILIA

Tickets are FREE

TheaterLab, 357 W 36th Street, 3rd Floor, New York, NY 10018

Parity Productions Presents a Free Staged Reading of LILIA by Monet Hurst-Mendoza. Synopsis: In a small Yucatecan town, circa 1960s Mexico, 14-year-old religiously devout Lilia is forced to turn to prostitution as a means of making a living. When young Lilia develops an unconventional friendship with a compassionate new priest in town, everyone's faith is tested. Caught between the secrets and lies that force us to question the morality of human nature, "Lilia" presents a passionate allegory about choosing between duty and desire.

Jun 13th-Jul 11th

Camping

Tickets $30-$120

HERE Dorothy B. Williams Theater, 145 6th Ave, New York, NY 10013

through Jun 14th

Feltman: World's First Hot Dog

Tickets $40

The Chain, 312 W 36th Street, 4th Floor, New York, NY, 10018

Travel back to 19th century Coney Island as German immigrant Charles Feltman rises from struggle to revolutionize street food. Writer/performer Michael Quinn, who himself successfully revived the legendary brand before facing his own challenges, weaves a powerful parallel between past and present.

Jun 16th

Belle Noire: A Dazzling Tribute to the Icons of Jazz

Tickets $39-$69

Theater For the New City, 155 1st Ave, New York, NY 10003

Belle Noire is a dazzling musical tribute to the iconic Black songstresses who defined American music from the dawn of early jazz to the height of the swing era. It traces a historical and cultural through line from early Black women entertainers to contemporary performers, weaving music, movement, narration, and archival imagery in an immersive theatrical concert celebrating the sound, style, and soul of jazz legends like Lena Horne, Billie Holiday, Eartha Kitt, Dorothy Dandridge, and Ella Fitzgerald. Blending vintage visuals, cinematic projections, elegant costuming, tap dance, and live jazz, Belle Noire offers a cabaret-meets-theater experience that is both nostalgic and strikingly contemporary.

Jun 17th-Jun 21st

Beyond Encounters: An Evening of Three One-Act Plays by Hannah Benitez, Miriam Kulick and Lanford Wilson

Tickets $20-$30

Teatro Circulo, 64 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003

Directed by Lorca Peress and starring Miriam Kulick and Jacob Harran, the evening of one-acts, which explore the unexpected ways people meet each other and themselves, begins with Lanford Wilson’s rarely-staged A Betrothal, followed by two new works by up-and-coming female playwrights: Bound by Miriam Kulick, and The Call by Hannah Benitez. Together, the three plays create a compact, character-driven theatrical event that moves from a witty comic encounter between strangers, to heightened historical drama, to 1920s noir cosmic horror. It is designed as an intimate theatrical presentation with a minimal set and a focus on performance, language, and atmosphere.

Jun 19th-Jun 30th

PrideFest

Tickets TBD

The Tank, 312 W 36th Street, New York, NY 10018

A festival of new and imaginative performances from queer artists that center our community. The shows of PrideFest 2026 address queer joy, laughter, struggle, resistance and beauty through a range of mediums including theater, comedy, puppetry, storytelling, and music. These performances will reflect where we've come from, where we are, and where we can go.

Jun 20th

Growing Takes Time: Games, Grapples, and Growth Grit

Tickets $17.94-$51.84

Noo Arts Wildflowers Green Roof, 520 Kingsland Avenue Brooklyn, NY, 11222

Movement artist Karley Wasaff presents Growing Takes Time, a life-sized interactive arcade and immersive performance world where the audience becomes the astronauts. Presented on the rooftop, this experience unfolds against stunning NYC sunset skyline views. Inspired by Pikmin, performers are PIKMII inside a living environment where collective survival depends on responsiveness, care, and collaboration. Participants move through childhood anxiety-driven game structures — including slap hands, floor is lava, rock paper scissors, and hot potato — which function as levels that build respect, trust, and community coordination. Blending contemporary dance with jiu-jitsu–inspired partnering, the work uses conflict, resistance, and cooperation as engines for collective growth. Tensions build. PIKMII grapple in real-time duets. Resolution becomes necessary for progression. Work together and the group levels up. Lose coordination and the game stalls. Through navigating friction and repair, the audience collectively shapes the evolving world.

through Jun 20th

The Downtown Urban Arts Festival

Tickets $25

Joe’s Pub, 425 Lafayette Street, New York, NY 10003 & La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, 66 E. 4th Street, New York, NY 10003

In 2001, the theater program at DUAF was founded with the purpose to build a repertoire of new American theatre that echoes the true spirit of urban life and speaks to a whole new generation whose lives defy categorizing along conventional lines. That purpose has been realized, as 232 writers have created and refined their work for the stage.

Jun 21st

Don’t Cry For Me, My Yeshiva

Tickets $18

The 92nd Street Y - Warburg Lounge, 1395 Lexington Ave, New York, NY 10128

A 90-minute musical memoir about a lifelong search for family, love, acceptance, and that elusive rainbow connection, written and performed by Joe Fox. Directed by 23-time Manhattan Association of Cabaret’s award-winner Lennie Watts, with musical direction by Dan Furman. Part musical parody, part memoir, part love letter to Broadway, with reimagined show tunes, original songs, and razor-sharp storytelling, Don’t Cry for Me, My Yeshiva grows in part from Fox’s experience returning “back into the closet” while filming a 2009 documentary in Maine around a same-sex marriage referendum. A story of identity, family, and acceptance, told through music and memoir, this unforgettable evening follows his journey from the yeshiva classroom to the most unexpected of places.

through Jun 21st

I Wanttt a Unicorn Frappe!!!

Tickets $28-$53

The Tank, 312 W 36th Street, New York, NY 10018

Jenny just got engaged and she's very very excited although her fiancee doesn't seem to want to help plan the wedding or talk to her. But when a Prince on a unicorn offers Jenny some sexy solace, maybe things will work out ok? I Wanttt a Unicorn Frappe!!! is a frothy satire about wedding culture, addiction, societal pressure on women, and just how far we will go to avoid the truth.

Jun 24th-Jun 27th

Bequeathed

Tickets TBD

Dixon Place, 161A Chrystie Street, New York, NY 10002

Bequeathed is a surreal, playful, semi-autobiographical puppet show about the fight to unravel the gender binary, all told through a fantastical fiber arts world. A young person, questioning their assigned gender identity, receives an unusual gift of an embroidery hoop on their birthday. The hoop acts as a portal, and the young person is swooped up into a Georgian/Regency era world of strict gender roles, and sewing notions. Through a series of trials and tribulations, the young person struggles to perform the ideal view of womanhood. Ultimately they see what’s behind the embroidery hoop – a sparkly and wonderful fluidity.

Jun 24th-Jun 28th

PICASSO: LE MONSTRE SACRÉ

Tickets $26.25-$36.25

La MaMa, 66 E 4th St, New York, NY 10003

Created for the 50th anniversary year of Picasso’s death, PICASSO: LE MONSTRE SACRÉ asks how should he be judged? Picasso was an undisputed genius and visionary artist, yet his obsession with his work often destroyed those he professed to love. Brilliantly incarnated by Peter Tate, in a challenging, powerful, intelligent study, Picasso passionately defends his reputation. It’s an explosive, deeply passionate voyage of self-revelation, leaving the audience as his jury… Should we condemn or forgive him? How do we judge our great artists?

through Jun 28th

A Night of Chekhov

Tickets $60-$90

Actors Temple Theatre, 339 W 47th St, New York, NY 10036

A Night of Chekhov focuses on three of Anton Chekhov’s shorter works that are not as frequently staged as his major works, offering audiences a compact way to experience a broader range of the playwright’s material in one sitting. The evening includes one intermission and runs approximately 95–110 minutes total. The program includes Swan Song, The Proposal, and The Bear. Swan Song follows an aging actor reflecting on his life after a final performance. The Proposal centers on a marriage proposal that quickly escalates into conflict. The Bear depicts a confrontation between a widow and a creditor that shifts in tone and intensity. moves through the full range of Chekhov's genius - his recurring obsession with people desperately trying to connect and failing, and how funny and heartbreaking that can be all at once.

through Jun 29th

The Circuit: An Immersive Silent Disco Ballet

Tickets $45

Superfine, 126 Front Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201

through Jun 30th

SUMMERWORKS

Tickets $75-$135 (Festival Pass)

wild project, 195 E 3rd St, New York, NY 10009

Clubbed Thumb's SUMMERWORKS Festival presents TITANS by Jesse Jae Hoon, directed by Tara Elliott; DERANGEMENTS by Nadja Leonhard-Hooper, directed by Annie Tippe; and THE FAMILY DOG by Bailey Williams, directed by Tara Ahmadinejad.

TITANS

In which the ordinary residents of an overrun American city answer the Signal and discover their extraordinary powers. Unfortunately, they must be brave.

DERANGEMENTS

In which two girlfriends catching up over dinner have their lives changed in a flash. Maybe it’s the ‘80s, but it’s probably just gas.

THE FAMILY DOG

In which Whiney returns to her childhood home to say goodbye to the pet who replaced her. Miracles abound, some in meatball form.

###

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DIE CUTE: Theresa Buchheister interviews Creator & Director Yiseul LeMieux

2026-05-13T15:37:32.976-04:00

Yiseul LeMieux's DIE CUTE opens on May 21 at The Brick Theater in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. A little over 2 years ago, she presented a gallery show with interactive elements at Brick Aux, called The Circus is Coming to Town. Perhaps I am so drawn to her multi-layered artistic endeavors because I am also fascinated with the circus and with funerals? The portals she opens with specificity, detail, delight, and curiosity are ones I am interested in stepping into. It feels like following a sweet ghostly giggle down a dark alleyway and finding a psychedelic hug from the universe. You know what I mean? You're in luck, because I had the pleasure of asking Yiseul some questions before her show opens, so you can learn a little more about her from the brilliant source.

THERESA BUCHHEISTER: Hi Yiseul! So great to talk to you about this show. The doll you made me before I left NY is one of my cutest treasures. They also came in a little coffin-like box, which is also very cute. How did this project, DIE CUTE, come to you? Was it an idea you expanded? Or a concept you wanted to explore?

YISEUL LEMIEUX: I’ve always had this great anxiety about losing someone who feels like a part of me. Death is something no one can avoid, and I’ve been searching for a way to deal with the process of death, the idea of death, what death means… I thought maybe cute, cutifying death could be a method to cope with my own fear around it. Thinking about cute things has helped me throughout my life. Cuteness has sometimes been comfort, escape, pride, medicine, and more…. It could be an answer for death too. (Personally)

TB: When you create your worlds, what kind of space do you need? Do you create a workshop? Do you listen to music? Are there sounds? Smells? Vibes?

YL: For guaranteed inspiration, attending a boring event where I can’t leave in the middle of it, really helps. I used to play piano at churches for a living, and many of my world building ideas came during long, boring sermons. Oh, and currently, when I am taking a particularly dull class also. So yes, I guess there are some sounds that inspire me. When the sounds are in the range of boring to medium boring… they give me the best ideas. I don’t listen to music much. Hmmm… (I was a musician once, and I do have three degrees in music) It’s just too stressful listening to music. Smell. I guess when there isn’t human odor overpowering the room, and the humidity is under 40% with a scent of dust, it really helps speed up my process of ideation.

TB: What do you want people to know before coming to DIE CUTE, if anything?

YL:

There is no dress code. You don’t need any preparation for Die Cute.
If you have dietary restrictions, a surprise may be ruined.
I am not suicidal, so NO need to worry.
This bunny won’t bite (in case you are scared of bunnies), but this bunny also has very sharp teeth.

TB: What delights you most about making art objects and performances? What is the most challenging?

YL: I guess envisioning what the true function this object will serve is the most delightful part. The function can sometimes be revenge, and sometimes surprise or terrifying people. Also how truth can be hidden under texture, color, shapes….making and performing feel similar to me. The most challenging thing is that what feels most delightful to me may not quite come through, or what to hide and how much to hide, while still creating an experience that is not just about me. Finding and gauging the right balance is the challenge.

TB: When you go to a performance, what pulls you into it? What do you like to experience?

Details. Finding details and experiencing someone else’s performance through those details make it feel more personal, pulling me in to build a relationship with the piece.

show details:

DIE CUTE

May 21-24/ May 28-31 8PM at The Brick (579 Metropolitan ave.)

Yiseul LeMieux -Creator & Director

Masson LeMieux - Technical Director

Lilly Qualls - Producer & Production Assistant

A full-evening experience centered on the intersection of the adorable and the inevitable. From the bunny choir to the final reception, the play guides guests through a "super cute death" and the funeral that follows. It is a sincere, immersive look at how we deal with loss, balanced with humor, cake, and a takeaway that ensures the experience stays with you long after the curtain falls.

Website: Die Cute

Photo by Elyse Mertz

YISEUL LEMIEUX is a Korean-born artist living in New York City. Her work transcends disciplinary boundaries, often bringing together components in numerous media to create vivid narratives and alternative realities. She collaborates frequently with her partner Masson LeMieux, as well as with other artists, and her work often has a special focus on direct audience engagement and community feedback. LeMieux's disinterest with conventional boundaries between various media, between the artist and the viewer/listener, and the creative and receptive process are a part of her larger creative vision. She locates herself within a global network of entities - a world of unconventional interchangeability and a rejection of assigned values. The artist is interchangeable with another human, an animal, a vegetable, and/or a mug, et cetera. This ethos of interchangeability allows her to explore the infinite potential both of herself and of the entire world around her.

photo by Walter Wlodarczyk

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Talking Band 50 Years On: Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva on The Door Slams, a Glass Trembles, written and directed by Paul Zimet

2026-05-12T11:11:00.000-04:00

Steven Rattazzi and Tina Shepard in The Door Slams, a Glass Trembles. Photo by Maria Baranova.

Paul Zimet’s The Door Slams, a Glass Trembles is a stylized work at play on the border between physical theatre and selective realism. The play is a response to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, a bildungsroman of sorts, set in a tuberculosis sanitorium high in the Swiss Alps, during the decade leading to World War I. Mann’s novel follows the evolution of a young man who, while visiting the sanitorium, himself contracts tuberculosis and is persuaded by the head doctor to stay. The Magic Mountain is principally concerned with the philosophical conversations that transpire in this land of the dying, with the impending threat of World War I, with illness, death, stasis, institutional entrapment, and time.

Zimet’s play, by contrast is set here and now—so very much now, that I wondered if there had been updates to the text during the rehearsal process to make the political references sharply topical. Zimet’s “magic mountain” is a rural bourgeois enclave (suggestive of parts of upstate New York) inhabited by retired dropouts from urban life. The play follows three couples: Clara (Ellen Maddow, who also composed the work’s accompanying score) and Marc (Jack Wetherall), a semi-retired couple whose retreat to the country is relatively recent and ambivalent; their local friends, Rick and Rita (Steven Rattazzi and Lizzie Olesker), who retreated years earlier to run a family farm; and Jenny and Norm (Amara Granderson and Patrick Dunning), a young couple with a child (whom we never see) who have come for a visit. There is a seventh character, Oona (Tina Shepard), an elderly friend and neighbor, and two characters who exist in memory only (staged via projections), Anne and Young Marc (Delaney Feener and Jesse B. Koehler). The Bildungsroman of Mann’s novel gives way to Zimet’s focus on Clara and Marc, as they grapple with the remoteness of their country idle, and their anxious sense of irrelevance in the face of a seemingly terminal retirement. In Mann’s novel, the hero will eventually escape the sanitorium to serve in World War I—its own form of terminal diagnosis. Zimmet’s Marc and Clara are “saved” from uselessness and boredom by a job offer—in the pharmaceutical industry. Like the war in Magic Mountain, the sense of menace this suggests is at once collective and personal: Marc and Clara escape isolation (and, specific to Mann’s play, the work-life irrelevance of the aging in an ageist society) to return to a corrupted world, spending their final years serving an immoral industry.

In The Door Slams, a Glass Trembles, it is the (rural) bourgeois home which constitutes institutional isolation. The play opens with a ritual of table setting: Clara and Marc, Jenny and Norm set and unset the dining table, the action running forward and backward, with repetitions and variations, against Ellen Maddow’s (deliberately) repetitive, clock-evoking score. The set, by Anna Kiraly, is unchanging throughout: a dining room with a downright balustrade suggestive of a porch, and an upstage flat in the shape of a house. This upstage wall is dominated by a large projection screen, at once evocative of a window and a television set. Projections (also designed by Kiraly) play throughout: nature, clouds, changing seasons, memories. Like the table setting, the images of nature are at once repetitive and subtly changing. Likewise, the action: Couples come and go, gathering around repetitive meals; their conversations drift across politics, memory, lost opportunity, past love, and death. Their political positions, generically to the left, are marked by a vague, fretful helplessness (reminiscent of the thought processes of characters in Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information). Characters enter, depart, return; games are played; relations are mostly warm; everyone listens politely to one another, with little mutual engagement. The table is reset; the music ticks and repeats; the seasons change. It is a slow death by banality.

The difficulty with banality and repetition is that they are fundamentally anti-theatrical, and the feeling of entrapment is contagious. The conceit of the play is thus difficult to sustain effectively. Zimet handles this in part by drawing upon the Walpurgisnacht scene in Mann’s novel; perhaps halfway through the play, the actors reenter, dressed now as figures from the novel, in (increasingly) preposterous 19th century masquerade costumes: wild hats, ball gowns, a donkey’s head in a gas mask. The dialogue shifts to the world of The Magic Mountain. Everyone is dying of tuberculosis. The latter half of the play is marked by several incursions from Mann’s world into ours, at the same time that change slowly emerges from stasis, bringing death, departures, and loss. Nonetheless, for me as a viewer, central ideas became quickly clear, and I felt myself entrapped together with the characters. This was by no means a universal experience; audience reception was very warm (most audience members gave a standing ovation).

Talking Band is a venerable downtown company with a remarkable fifty-year New York career. Co-founded by Zimet, Maddow, and Shepard—veterans of Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theatre—the company has produced over 50 original works concerned with “illuminating the extraordinary dimensions of ordinary life,” earning some 18 OBIE awards along the way. Founders Maddow and Shepard, along with longtime collaborators Lizze Olesker and Steven Rattazzi, seemed most at ease in the play’s shifting stylistics. The entire company was charmingly enlivened by Mann/Zimet’s carnival masque sequence (and Olivera Gajic’s delightful masquerade costumes), freeing them to play overt style and comedic character work. Rattazzi was particularly funny in his earnest donkey’s head dance. Tina Shepard’s powerful voice, dry delivery, and marvelous physical character work are etched in my memory. And a special mention is due to Delaney Feener, for the sheer force of her presence in a series of repeated entrances and crosses as the love interest, Clavidia, in Walpurgisnacht.

***

THE DOOR SLAMS, A GLASS TREMBLES

Presented by La MaMa in association with Talking Band

April 24–May 10, 2026

Tickets can be purchased at https://ci.ovationtix.com/42/production/1263489

With Ellen Maddow, Tina Shepard, Jack Wetherall, Steven Rattazzi, Lizzie Olesker,Amara Granderson, Patrick Dunning, Delaney Feener, and Jesse B. Koehler. Original music composed by Ellen Maddow, lighting design by Mary Ellen Stebbins, set and projection design by Anna Kiraly, and costumes by Olivera Gajic. Choreography by Flannery Gregg.

For more information, visit talkingband.org

***

Dr. Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva is a theatre scholar, director, and Founding Artistic Director of AnomalousCo, a queer/women-led, immigrant, feminist theatre ensemble. Her work is driven by the investigation of power, gender, and displacement and a commitment to theatre as a space for collective authorship and political encounter. Syssoyeva is author of three foundational works on the practice of collaboratively devised theatre: A History of Collective Creation, Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance, and Women, Collective Creation, and Devised Theatre (Palgrave Macmillan). A Fulbright Fellow and Mellon Foundation Fellow, she holds a joint PhD in Drama and Humanities from Stanford University. She is a 2026 recipient of a three-month COHO Residency with The Bechdel Project for the development of her play, The Rise and the Fall, and 2026 winner of the Jean Dalrymple Award for Best Director in Feminist Drama for AnomalousCo's (beyond) Doomsday Scrolling.

***

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May 2026 Listings Guide

2026-04-27T15:08:00.001-04:00

May 1st-May 17th

The Censorship of Dreams

Tickets $10-$40

Ellen Stewart Theatre @ La MaMa, 66 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003

A restarted civilization stripped of memory and ruled by constant surveillance, where brain-computer technologies shape truth, and dreams are the last remnants of the past. They become a dangerous currency for those who struggle to survive. A timely and resonant exploration of how love, language, and the body are reshaped in a world without privacy, Armenian director Arthur Makaryan creates visually striking, interdisciplinary performances that blend theater, technology, and political inquiry. Rooted in international collaboration, the company explores themes of memory, control, and resistance through immersive storytelling, bridging experimental forms with urgent social questions to provoke, unsettle, and inspire.

through May 2nd

LATE BLOOMING

Tickets $23

wild project, 195 East 3rd Street, New York, NY 10009

In LATE BLOOMING, closeted novelist Libao struggles between his sexuality and his parents’ expectations. When his childhood friend Shan returns to a gentrifying Elmhurst, Queens, buried desires and family tensions are forced to the surface.

May 2nd-May 16th

NEEDLE & BONE and THIS IS NOT A DEATH CULT

Tickets $25-$35

The Flea, 20 Thomas St, New York, NY 10007

In NEEDLE & BONE, the proprietress of a haunted tattoo parlor attempts to connect with her father on the anniversary of his passing. In THIS IS NOT A DEATH CULT, a legacy media journalist and her protege help a whistleblower expose a philanthropist’s secret cult. Two shows in rep.

May 2nd-May 24th

Canciones

Tickets $35-$55

The exact address of the venue, which is a private home located in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, will be provided when you reserve tickets.

Join three generations of the legendary Guerrero family as they gather for a special family reunion. In the kitchen, Kati and Ellie are digging up old feuds. In the living room, Maestra will tell you about the generations of musicians that came before, while you sit next to her sipping your drink. And on the patio, you can get high (on life) with the cousins! As the evening unfolds, secrets are unearthed, old rivalries are revived, and the family is forced to decide who will carry on their musical legacy. Inspired by the seminal Linda Ronstadt album Canciones de mi Padre, Canciones is a site-specific party, an acoustic Mariachi jam, and a family reunion all rolled into an immersive, interactive experience. Come for the tamales—stay for the chisme! The performance will run approximately two hours and includes a family-style dinner served in the middle of the show (gluten free and vegan options available).

through May 3rd

CUMULO

Tickets $30

MITU580, 580 Sackett St Unit A - Ground Fl, Brooklyn, NY 11217

Whimsical and violent, CUMULO is a puppet allegory that examines how we reclaim autonomy when life sends us into freefall. Protagonist Plum plummets through a skyscape of sentient cotton candy clouds and creatures in an immersive journey of embodied self-transformation, supported by a cotton candy set embedded with fans, and a large-scale mobile of floating cloud islands.

through May 3rd

Fresh Fruit Festival

Tickets $23

wild project, 195 E 3rd St, New York, NY 10009

All Out Arts is proud to announce the return of the Fresh Fruit Festival, New York City’s landmark multidisciplinary LGBTQ+ arts celebration. Marking over two decades of "Fighting Prejudice Through the Arts," the 2026 festival will take place from Monday, April 20 through Sunday, May 3 at its long-time home, The Wild Project, in the heart of the East Village.

through May 3rd

The Menopause Monologues

Tickets $10.50-$126

HERE Mainstage, 145 6th Ave, New York, NY 10013

The theatre movement that’s bringing real life menopause stories out of the darkness and into the spotlight through a collaborative and multi-disciplinary production. Each performance is followed by a Q&A with a certified menopause doctor or specialist.

May 4th-May 24th

DAD DON'T READ THIS

Tickets $30-$95

St. Luke’s Theatre, 308 W 46th St, New York, NY 10036

In suburban Central Ohio, four girls meet weekly for a sleepover. They talk and sleep and play The Sims, a computer game that simulates real life, on a laptop. They gossip, snack, and attempt to get drunk. They strive to fulfill their needs, struggle to understand the relationship between doing and being seen, and begin to suspect they don't have a whole lot of agency. Wait, nevermind; that's The Sims. Dad Don’t Read This is about the people who know you before you know anything.

May 5th-May 19th

In Scena! Italian Theater Festival NY

Tickets are FREE

Various venues across all 5 boroughs

Each year In Scena! showcases some of the best Italian theater from Italy, in New York City. The festival features productions that have already toured in Italy as well as readings of Italian plays in translation, mentorships and exchanges between Italian and International artists. The goal is to promote greater awareness of Italian theater and Italian artists among New York City theatergoers, and to build a bridge between the artistic scenes in Italy and the US.

May 6th

Wild Works: Puppetry on the Edge

Tickets $24.50

wild project, 195 E 3rd St, New York, NY 10009

Wild Works: Puppetry on the Edge is a new performance series spotlighting artists who are reinventing and expanding the language of puppetry today. Curated by Resident Curator Amanda Card, the series features bold, boundary-pushing work that experiments with form, embraces risk, and explores the emotional and imaginative power of the animated.

May 7th-May 30th

Come and Knock Down My Door

Tickets $38.62

The Gene Frankel Theatre, 24 Bond Street, New York, NY 10012

Come and Knock Down My Door is a riotous political-situation comedy in two acts. It’s January 7th, 2021…The U.S is still in the throes of a deadly Pandemic, and the 2020 Presidential Race has yet to be conceded. After “Storming the Capitol”, Pablo, a freewheeling pot dealer, returns from Washington, DC to the Lower East Side apartment he shares with his liberal roommates, James, an African American musician, and Mina, his Russian speaking girlfriend. Hilarity ensues, misunderstandings abound, and their world nearly spirals into chaos as Pablo’s roommates fear the FBI will come and knock down their door.

May 8th-May 9th

“W=S” (The Transistor Shock)

Tickets are FREE

Polaris North Studio, 245 W 29th St, New York, NY 10001

William Shockley, 1956 Nobelist, co-inventor of the transistor and indisputable Father of the Information Age, is the center of this work which explores the co-existence of his scientific genius with his very controversial theories about intelligence and race.

May 8th-May 10th

LA CASA DE BERNARDA ALBA & GALICIA

Tickets $25

Newport Center, 525 Washington Boulevard, 3rd Floor, Jersey City, NJ

New York City Players' Incoming Theater Division presents a double-bill evening of performances directed by Richard Maxwell. The performances will be presented consecutively, with a 30-minute intermission. They will be presented in Spanish with English supertitles.

through May 9th

You & Me

Tickets $30-$100

The Jeffrey and Paula Gural Theatre at The A.R.T./New York Theatres, 502 West 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019

Chloe's twin sister Delilah was responsible for a school shooting. Delilah's girlfriend, Mackenzie, survived the attack. When Chloe and Mackenzie cross paths, an unexpected bond forms.

May 9th-May 31st

Falling Out: A New Musical

Tickets $20-$55 (Please note that there is a $25 food and drink minimum.)

Chelsea Table & Stage, 152 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001

Following an acclaimed run downtown, FALLING OUT makes its anticipated Off-Broadway transfer. In a downtown New York music bar, ballads of lost loves and missed opportunities float on the air. Worlds collide when a melancholic transplant meets a musician with a past. Together they create a discordant harmony that will uncover the truths they both need to reshape their lives. Hailed as "so deeply felt-so exquisitely rendered" (Opening Night Reviews) and "intimate and immersive" (TheatreLife), this hit, experiential folk rock musical is not to be missed.

through May 10th

The Door Slams, A Glass Trembles

Tickets $10-$40

La MaMa Downstairs, 6 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003

This world premiere, written and directed by Paul Zimet with music by Ellen Maddow, takes its cue from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and looks at what happens when time stretches, warps, and slips out of sync during moments of personal and collective unease. The play looks at the passage of time, mortality, and complacency in two separate planes.

through May 11th

I AM NOBODY

Tickets $25

The Magnet Theater, 254 W 29th St, New York, NY 10001

Lucas’ phone has seized control of his mind. It gives him no peace!!! His only recourse is to abscond with a batch of super-charged microchips, intent on unleashing a powerful cyber virus capable of destroying the modern world. Hot on his heels are Naomi, a troubled barmaid and aspirant singer-songwriter, who’s convinced Lucas is a holy man with a holy plan, and Nathaniel, his co-worker at the microchip plant, who’s so smitten with Naomi he’ll drive her 1000s of miles to rendez-vous with another guy. Will Lucas manage to destroy modernity before this modern world can tear them even further apart?

May 13th-May 22nd

Constance: A Confession

Tickets $10.50-$126

HERE Mainstage, 145 6th Ave, New York, NY 10013

Developed in EiO’s The Writers’ Room, Constance: A Confession is a comedic journey following one woman’s devotion to the long art of the con. The opera starts with a shocking act of violence in a grad school art class, and continues as Constance finds work as a psychic, becomes a wellness influencer and grows her online empire into a cult—with deadly consequences. Scored for four singers and all-star experimental ensemble Hypercube, this new opera takes a biting look at the power of storytelling in the hands of a charismatic figure.

May 14th-May 30th

Obit.

Tickets $49-$68

East Village Basement, 321 E. 9th Street, New York, NY 10003

When an anxious soon-to-be father returns to his estranged dad’s chaotic New York apartment, he’s pulled into a messy, darkly funny confrontation with family history, forgotten memories, and the unraveling mind of a man he thought he’d already said goodbye to, until an obituary forces him to rewrite what legacy really means. Balancing dark, biting humor with emotional urgency, Obit. explores dementia, generational inheritance, and the fear of becoming one's parents, while asking what, if anything, we leave behind when memory fails.

May 14th-June 30th

SUMMERWORKS

Tickets $75-$135 (Festival Pass)

wild project, 195 E 3rd St, New York, NY 10009

May 15th-May 17th

Two Hysterical Musicals: Gunfight at the Not-So-OK Saloon and Does Not Compute

Tickets $54.22

John Cullum Stage at American Theatre of Actors, 314 W. 54th Street, New York, New York, 10019

Gunfight at the Not-So-OK Saloon is a Gilbert & Sullivan-inspired musical comedy set in the Old Wild West, where frontier drama meets rapid-fire wit in a showdown of song, satire, and stagecoach sass.

Does Not Compute is a heartfelt sci-fi comedy about two overworked robots who rebel against their human owners — and discover love, identity, and unexpected feelings along the way.

May 15th-May 23rd

If You’re a Man at Night…You Gotta Be a Man in the Morning

Tickets $25-$45

The Tank, 312 West 36th Street, New York, NY 10018

The year is 2026, and 2016, and 2020, and we are gathered for a theatrical meditation on Ryan L*chte and the extinction burst of masculinity he represents. An all trans/gender nonconforming cast asks us how we can feel empathy for those whose bodies are so different from our own? What would you do if everything that once made you happy disappeared? How would you avoid hardening after a ritual shaming? Can we, the audience, give Ryan L*chte grace? Is there a way for us to “create the ‘Lympics inside us,” as Ryan says, and fill each others’ wells of loneliness? One way to find out.

through May 16th

HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT ABOUT

Tickets $22.75-$48.75

The Bushwick Starr, 419 Eldert St, Brooklyn, NY 11237

A mad scientist named Michael presents a workshop on "thinking about", a technique for untethering yourself from linear thought and expanding your mind's ideation possibilities. Using notebooks and a whiteboard as a guide, Michael and the audience become co-conspirators in the creation of comedic chaos. Through a series of jokes, crowd games, monologues, creative exercises and real time “thought experiments”, Michael leads the audience down a winding road of absurdist and associative thought that brings us back to what really matters: our connection to ourselves and the people around us.

May 16th-May 24th

EVERYONE HAS A STORY TO TELL, a Free Multilingual Community Play Activating Lower East Side and Chinatown Gardens

Tickets are FREE

M’finda Kalunga Garden, 6th and B Garden, and El Jardín del Paraíso in the Lower East Side, and the Open Door Senior Center in Chinatown

In a time marked by social change and deepened isolation, a new free interactive community play written by Obie Award-winning playwright Carmen Rivera, seeking to bridge divides and foster empathy, healing and understanding in the community through intimate, real-life narratives. Offered free of charge to the public in LES and Chinatown community gardens, with art-making workshops and food justice programming, the events are created in collaboration with seniors, new migrants, and housing-insecure artists in the Lower East Side and Chinatown.

May 16th-Jun 28th

A Night of Chekhov

Tickets $60-$90

Actors Temple Theatre, 339 W 47th St, New York, NY 10036

through May 17th

Love Story

Tickets $28-$53

The Tank, 312 W 36th St., New York, NY 10018

Maria is dead, but she's still on the call sheet. She's trapped inside a play that keeps restarting itself, where scenes from her life are rehearsed and revised by the people who loved her. Conversations loop. Arguments reset. Stage directions are sentient. Maria watches as their memories turn her into a character, a plot device in the stories of the people she loved. As the play slips between rehearsal, recollection, and imagined afterlives, Maria tries to wrest back authorship of her own story. She argues with monologues, questions the rules of the world she’s trapped in, and refuses to become a symbol of loss. Love Story navigates what comes after death, when love refuses to let you step into your light.

through May 17th

The Bad Daters

Tickets $35-$55

Paradise Factory, 64 East 4th Street New York, NY 10003

Liam is looking for someone special, Wendy is looking for anyone but him. What happens when the last thing you’re looking for is exactly what you find?

May 19th-May 31st

Mikey!

Tickets $20-$30

The Tank, 312 West 36th Street, 2nd floor, New York, NY 10018

SOS from the Sistine Chapel! I miss Florence… sure the sodomy police suck…! But what I wouldn’t give to be 16 sneaking around the Medici Palace with Piero again. He’s not Unfortunate! The voice in my head, ANGEL David was RIGHT! The Statue of David came so easily. Now my life is a deranged battle between love and art. How has my life become some crazy battle between love and art? I cannot let Bramante - the bitchy architect, get his way! The Pope is wishy washy, Leonardo is a conspiracy theorist. Thank god Francesco forgave me! They’re my only help… I need to get out of here ASAP! SEND HELP! - Michelangelo, Sculptor, in Rome

May 21st-May 30th

Consuewella: Triptych In Move

Tickets $30-$45

Dixon Place, 161A Chrystie Street, New York, NY 10002

Consuewella: Triptych in MOVE a powerful thought-provoking puppet performance about an African American woman’s journey through MOVE—a radical, mostly African American, back-to-nature activist organization from Philadelphia—the system and the bombing by its own government. In our current moment, when “terrorist” has come to mean anyone standing up to state power, this moving play asks us to consider who the real terrorists are.

through May 23rd

An Ordinary Afternoon in 1974

Tickets $35

Theatre East’s Court Square Theater, 44-02 23rd St, Long Island City, NY 11101

What begins as an ordinary afternoon quickly becomes a story that refuses to stay quiet. Bold, irreverent, and full of joy, the play follows two longtime friends and neighbors, Joan played by Carla Briscoe (Blue Caprice, A Little Help, Breaking the News) and Elizabeth played by Holly Cinnamon (Marvel’s Daredevil, A House of Dynamite, Hocus Pocus 2, Succession) as they revisit their shared past. An Ordinary Afternoon in 1974 is a vibrant celebration of women claiming their space, their voices, and their extraordinary power.

May 28th

OOPS! We Lost a Nuke!

Tickets $18

Brooklyn Art Haus, 24 Marcy Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11211

Oops! We Lost a Nuke is a comedic play set in the 1950s, featuring four characters performed – sometimes simultaneously – by two actors. When an unassuming pacifist abuses his position within the US government in order to hide a nuclear warhead, it becomes clear that his affair with his secretary and his wife's affair with her doctor are the least of their worries.

May 28th-Jun 21st

I Wanttt a Unicorn Frappe!!!

Tickets $28-$53

The Tank, 312 W 36th Street, New York, NY 10018

May 29th-Jun 20th

The Downtown Urban Arts Festival

Tickets $25

Joe’s Pub, 425 Lafayette Street, New York, NY 10003 & La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, 66 E. 4th Street, New York, NY 10003

through May 31st

CLAWS

Performed live via phone call (the audience can call in from anywhere)

through Jun 1st

Rehearsal for Truth International Theater Festival

Tickets are FREE

Bohemian National Hall in New York, 321 E 73rd St, New York, NY 10021

through Jun 14th

Feltman: World's First Hot Dog

Tickets $40

The Chain, 312 W 36th Street, 4th Floor, New York, NY, 10018

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Third Reich of Dreams: an Interview with Playwright Anne Nelson and Director David Skeist by Jody Christopherson

2026-04-16T20:32:00.011-04:00

I've always liked David Skeist, I think, in part, for the same reason that I like the theater (when I do like it): the thrill of confronting + analyzing a cultural truth through the lens of history, while still managing to dream. Another of my favorite artists, Jack MacCarthy once said (and I'm likely paraphrasing this, sorry Jack) "in the theater you can take any world that you want and put it onstage." David's staged worlds don't ignore or look away, but they also do not settle into dismay. And isn't that a lot of what we need? And not just right now, but always, or even just for this weekend (thank you Anne Nelson). . .

I'm going to let the team's synopsis speak for itself:

Three weeks after Hitler seized power, a young Jewish journalist named Charlotte Beradt began collecting dreams. These were the dreams of everyday Berliners, exploring surveillance, arrests, complicity — and resistance. Years later, from her new home in New York, Beradt published a collection of these dreams as an indictment of the encroaching brutality of the regime. Playwright Anne Nelson and director David Skeist are adapting this work for the stage, now presented in a captivating and haunting production in development.

Third Reich of Dreams plays Friday, April 17 at 9:30pm | Saturday, April 18 at 3pm | Sunday, April 19 at 7pm

Creative Team:

David Skeist (Director and Producer), Anne Nelson (Playwright and Producer), Labhaoise Magee (Creative Producer, Fair Play Productions), Produced in association with Caborca, Hao Bai (Sound Design), Jared Wofse (Light Design), Jian Jung (Design Consultant), Lisa Klages (Stage Manager)

Tickets range from $23-$44 and can be purchased here.

Jody Christopherson: After research and thought there’s a moment, for me, when I’m certain as to what my next project will be. When was that moment for you in this process?

David Skeist: These days, I tend to work on multiple projects at the same time, most of which develop over a matter of years. In that sense, the next project is always the one that happens to have the next active phase booked on the calendar because of how schedules, opportunities, and funding line up. But there was in this process for me a moment it became clear we would take, or make, the earliest possible opportunity to put it in front of an audience. It happened over the course of our residency at The Mercury Store, where we were granted a week to explore this material with an extraordinary group of actors and a stage manager from the resident company. It is hard to overstate the creative value of that kind of space. Anne and I had been discussing this material for years as part of an ongoing conversation and collaboration on theatre and democracy, and we believed in the idea enough to apply, but it wasn’t until we got to try staging some of the dreams that the theatrical potency landed for me. Then it became a matter of time, and as the piece is quite timely, time moved quickly.

Anne Nelson: For me, the project took off when David Skeist made his interest clear. We share so many of the same values and concerns, and our approaches are complementary. The book had been simmering in my mind for two decades, and he was the perfect theatrical interlocutor.

JC: This work seems fundamentally enmeshed in questions of truth and what we subconsciously understand. What’s your approach to staging these concepts?

DS: Truth is hard to look at, especially these days. The scale of the ruptures we are facing is cataclysmic. It’s existential. It’s tragic. It’s absurd and it’s sublime. It is too big and too upsetting to hold in any one little human consciousness, so in order to make life comprehensible, we put it in the subconscious, which is just another way of saying we choose not to think about it too much. When a whole group of people does that at the same time, it becomes the collective unconscious, which is the subject of this play. Theatre is about pointing at truths beneath the surface, subtext, the bombs (both figurative and literal) that drop during our silences. So one way I approach staging is by inviting a lot of silence. The play is a meditation on the collective unconscious of a group of people living under circumstances that mirror, or set a precedent for our own.

AN: As a playwright, a historian, and a classical singer, I'm very text-bound. It's important to me that the script should be an accurate representation of the material, but also that it should "sing" in terms of syllables and rhythms. My hope is to offer David clean and beautiful pages to stage. Then I step back and wonder at his creativity.

JC: As you are working (solo or with collaborators) how do you process taking in this kind of information? Is there a support system you’re finding useful solo and / or as a collective?

DS: That is such a good question. I am wired such that I would rather contemplate or converse about horrific things that feel big than pleasant things that feel small. My good friend Susan once started a conversation with my other good friend Eleanor by saying “I just want you to know I don’t do small talk.” I feel like that a lot of the time. I also get a lot of sensual pleasure out of being alive, so being around art that is sensually gratifying and also about all the big, awful shit that’s hard to think about is in a sort of perverse way my happy place. And clearly I say that as someone for whom art is a matter of vocation and recreation not life and death, but Messiaen composed the Quartet for the End of Time in the bathroom of Stalag VIII-A.

But the other thing I should really say is that although I can be introspective, even self-involved at times, I’m also an extrovert, and I take energy from being in deep, collaborative, intimacy with like-minded and like-hearted people. Every person involved in this project is someone with whom I’ve had a moment of profound, joyful connection, in some cases decades of them—which I am so fortunate to say about many of my collaborations. We are dealing with dark stuff, but every day we are laughing as much as crying in rehearsal, what could be better?

AN: This play couldn't have happened without David. Over the past twenty years I've written three major non-fiction books, two about anti-Nazi resistance movements in Berlin and Paris, and most recently, about the Radical Right and fossil fuel interests in the US. It can be a lonely business -- years of friends asking, "What are you up to?" and answering "The same as last time." So the experience of theatrical collaboration is pure joy, when the right chemistry's in the room, which is the case here.

JC: Are there parallels you’re seeing between Nazi Germany and the US today which you are exploring in this work?

DS: One of the first things I did after the 2016 election was pull a book off my shelf called Red Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler by Anne Nelson. It is, in fact, the only thing I remember doing in the immediate days after the 2016 election. For the last ten years (can you believe it’s been ten years), that book has been a pillar of my worldview.

I’m not going to elucidate all the parallels I see because this isn’t one of my endless soapbox posts on a social media platform I won’t name, but I will mention two. The first is that we have packed thousands of innocent people including children into concentration camps under conditions so inhumane they are deadly and we are building more. The second is that as scared as I am of the violent masses who cultishly follow violent men, and I am fucking terrified of them, I think the real horror story of now as of then is about the people who see these men for who they are, and yet…

AN: Yes. I've been particularly interested in offering a work that looks at the years 1933 to 1939, which are often overlooked by Americans in favor of the war years. It's a period when authoritarian measures gradually tighten like a noose. Third Reich of Dreams discusses the public measures, such as the silencing of critical media and brutal immigration crackdowns. But it goes deeper in the subconscious, depicting the perverse seductive qualities of a dictator, the grief and fear of the persecuted, and the tendency that Timothy Snyder criticizes as "complying in advance." But the audience will find their own meaning in the work.

JC: How are you disrupting fascism?

DS: By reading, watching, and listening to Anne Nelson. Also Black, indigenous, and women’s histories, art, and literature, and generally seeking to learn from perspectives outside my own intersections of privilege.

I’m trying to disrupt fascism by making this play and other works of art that invite, cajole, provoke, or force a confrontation with what’s really happening and what’s at stake. I am part of a theatre company, Caborca, whose work focuses on corruption and colonialism from a largely Puerto Rican perspective, a population repeatedly targeted in this fascistic decade but more broadly in an extractive relationship with the United States for more than a century. We’re currently working on a musical about the critically endangered right whale. I believe art matters. I don’t know that it can tear down fascism alone, but I think it’s hard to do without it.

Outside of art-making, I go to protests (where you and I recently bumped into each other) and I phonebank and canvas when I can. I worked on a local swing-district congressional campaign in 2018 which was a great experience that made me feel more nimble and empowered politically—especially because we won. I believe in talking and I believe in persuasion. I’ll talk to almost anyone about almost anything if we’re talking in good faith. In practice, lately, this has meant having a lot of hard private and public conversations with friends, family, and even strangers about what is happening in the Middle East.

I give what I can to social, political, and artistic causes I believe in, and I live unapologetically in pursuit and celebration of queer joy.

AN: I don't know that I am. But I do feel that I'm doing what I can. My book is one effort: Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. Another is speaking across the country at screenings of Bad Faith, the documentary largely based on my book. My reporting for the Washington Spectator is another. Third Reich of Dreams is a welcome sojourn in the creative space, but part of the same mission.

JC: What are your hopes for the state of journalism and theater in America?

DS: When I was a teenager, I saw my cousin Rick Goldsmith’s documentary Tell the Truth and Run about the journalist and gadfly George Seldes, which I subsequently screened at my high school. It left me with an indelible belief that journalists are heroes.

This subject is definitely Anne’s bailiwick, so not to sound like a broken record, but everyone should read her book Shadow Network and watch the film Bad Faith which is based on it, and listen to her sobering yet riveting interview about the destruction of local journalism among other things on the essential podcast Gaslit Nation(also the subject of Rick’s latest documentary Stripped for Parts).

I think journalists and theatre artists, when they’re doing their jobs right, are doing different versions of the same thing.

AN: I believe that the arts and journalism are public goods, just as important as clean air and water. Citizens can't make good decisions without factual information, and they can't dream and create without the arts. So we should have a government that restores and expands the public funding for journalism -- not just PBS and NPR, but the kind of publicly supported local journalism that's so successful in Scandinavia. And we should massively fund the arts, so Americans can enjoy the same kind of access and opportunities that Western Europeans take for granted. These measures could be easily supported by taxing the top one percent in amounts that would go unnoticed in their portfolios.

JC: What was the last dream you had that you remember?

DS: I’m a student on a college campus and ICE has swarmed in to disappear someone. A group of us including me and my partner are summoned to intervene, and we end up stealing all of their luggage and equipment and spiriting it around the campus in different hiding places. I wake up thinking about signs we can all surreptitiously wear to indicate that these items can be passed among us in an elaborate game of keep-away. I had this dream a few days before we started rehearsal.

AN: I dreamed that I opened a door in my apartment, and saw four fat, snarling rats facing me. I stared at them in horror. Then I looked down and saw a dessicated dead rat at my side, and felt a glimmer of hope.

ANNE NELSON is an award-winning author and playwright whose work explores the dynamics of dictatorship, resistance, and human rights. Her play The Guys has been produced in 50 states and 15 countries, and a film version featuring her screenplay and starring Sigourney Weaver is currently streaming on Amazon Prime. Her book Red Orchestra: The Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler, has been called a “key text for researching internal anti-Nazi resistance.” Her most recent book, Shadow Network, explores the role of the Religious Right and fossil fuel interests in bringing Trump to power. She is the recipient of a Livingston Award for journalism and a Guggenheim Fellowship for Red Orchestra. She has been collaborating with David Skeist for over a decade.

DAVID SKEIST is a multi-hyphenate theatre artist in New York. He directed Susan Hyon's solo show Soo Jin Pretty Nail (and more) and the premiere English readings of Die Illegalen, Gunther Weisenborn's 1946 firsthand dramatic account of the Berlin resistance, translated by Anne Nelson. He is producing director of Caborca, a bilingual experimental ensemble founded in 2009. His many collaborators over more than two decades have included Richard Foreman, Elizabeth Swados, David Gordon, Len Jenkin, Nikolaus Wolcz, Doris Mirescu, Josh Fox, Meiyin Wang, Tom Minter, and most frequently Javier Antonio González. He was assistant to André Gregory on The Master Builder. David is also a composer of new musical theatre and choral work and teaches acting at Barnard College.

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Ria T. DiLullo on Frances Smith’s Our Price to Pay as part of NYC Fringe Festival 2026 at Under St. Marks

2026-04-13T12:08:00.001-04:00

Our Price to Pay. Photo by Rainer DeLalio.

Young queer folks need a safe place to vent.

Is there a safer place than a basement theater in a Fringe festival for a young group of artists to portray a sexy sapphic couple killing their ultra-conservative family-turned-into-zombies from a virus they got because of their political point of view?

No, there isn’t.

So buckle in, because in Our Price to Pay, that’s exactly what you get.

The highlight of the show is the full cast fight sequence set to high-energy music under red lights. Big fight sequences in small spaces under Fringe tech timing restrictions are hard to pull off, but this team did it well. The direction on the zombie physicality is good and the fight choreography is genuinely gripping; I always know where to look and when to look there. The fight moves are varied, including punches, hair pulls, grabs, and slams. The timing works so as to give the family who becomes zombies the ability to slip offstage unnoticed, and re-emerge with their zombie makeup ready to get in the action. Some of the makeup fits the “horror” bill. Some of it is red, and so I didn’t see it under the red light and therefore didn’t notice it until the bows. But it doesn’t really matter—this fight scene rocks.

When that is over, what’s left?

Sweat.

Heavy breathing.

A basement.

This is the position our sapphic lovers Ellie (Avaana Harvey) and Sylvia (Gail Tierney) find themselves in for the last scene.

I was curious to know, what’s left after the immediate threat has been neutralized? What will these two young lesbians talk about in the relative safety of the basement? The answer: not much. But maybe there’s just not much to say when you’ve exerted all your energy fighting to save yourself and your loved one. Maybe there’s not much to say when you’ve fought to come out of the closet only to be driven into the basement. But hey, at least there’s room for two.

The tension of the play was never between Ellie and Sylvia. They are locked into one another; safe and in love when they’re allowed to be in each other’s arms. The tension for them as out young lesbians wanting to build a life together is in the zombie horror trope as a metaphor for society: in this case, the far Right. The theme is “us against the world,” ending with “nowhere to go.” But they’re safe. They’re alive. And they have each other.

Theater has always been a valuable outlet in times of turmoil, political unrest, and societal divide. Sometimes the only thing we can do is play out the fantasy of defeating the suppressors, and violently. Fantasy and violence in the context of pretend are what make horror such an enduring genre. It gives us the chance to come together with like-minded individuals to express our rage and fears and maybe even triumph over it, if only for the duration of the show.

*************************************************

Our Price to Pay

By Frances Smith
Directed by Emmie D'Amico

Cast: Gail Tierney, Avaana Harvey, James Miller, Louis Courage, Eric Berger, Nikki Cannon, Margo Hera, Mitchell Wiley, Corinne Kaleta & u/s Dyoisa Wiggins

Frances Smith & Deepti Aravapalli (Producers), Jack Underwood (Stage Manager), Anna Item (Assistant Director/Intimacy Coordinator), Brian Cecala (Fight Choreographer), Lily Estelle (Make Up Designer), Makenzie Martin (Costume Designer), Hannah Tarr (Set & Props Designer), Michael Roll (Sound Designer)

Performance schedule date and times:

April 2 @ 6:30 PM, April 4 @ 8:40 PM, April 9 @ 9:50 PM (with livestream), & April 15 @ 9:50 PM (with livestream)

$15.00 + $2.50 fee - $25.00 + $2.50 fee

Web Link to tickets:

https://tickets.frigid.nyc/event/6897:1346/

Photo credits:

Rainer DeLailo

Ria T. DiLullo is a native New Yorker, director, playwright, and actor. They are also the founder/artistic director of The Skeleton Rep(resents), a 10+ year old indie theater company with a mission statement to explore modern myth through the development and production of new works. Keep up with Ria and TSR - @dilulloria / @skeletonrep / www.dilulloria.com / www.skeletonrep.org

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Cameron Page on 1 Small Lie as part of the NYC Fringe Festival at the Wild Project

2026-04-13T11:33:00.005-04:00

Martin Dockery in 1 Small Lie. Photo by orangemouse.

In the first few moments of the highly compelling one-man show 1 Small Lie, playing now at The Wild Project as part of the NYC Fringe Festival, Martin Dockery ask us to hum. We each pick a tone at random and produce it from our mouths collectively. It’s a deceptively simply way of binding the group together, a tiny bit of witchcraft that alchemizes us from individuals into an audience. It binds us to each other and to him as a performer for the next 58 and half minutes (he's timed it).

When I hear the phrase “one-man show” I immediately think of a coming-of-age memoir or a political screed. 1 Small Lie couldn’t be further from either of these. This is a show built to entertain, not pontificate or even educate. It is not here to share feelings or process childhood trauma. If there are moments where we might stop to reflect on ethics, morality, friendship, or community, they pass like a shooting star glimpsed from the corner of your eye. Stay focused on the fast-moving tale, the show seems to be saying.

1 Small Lie is a detective noir story combined with a fish-out-water tale, like a pulp novel co-written by Raymond Chandler and Bill Bryson. If that sounds fun, then you will enjoy this play—and even if it doesn’t sound fun, you will probably still have a good time.

The story is set during the height of the COVID pandemic, when Martin was stuck at his godmother’s house in Montauk. He walks past a deer that has been hit by car, and in his hunt for the car that hit the deer, he stumbles into a criminal underworld and is forced to confront a number of morally questionable decisions.

Martin Dockery's likeability is his strongest asset, and he uses it to good effect here. When he shares an ethically questionable choice he makes, he talks us through his thinking in such a persuasive way that the audience immediately gives him the benefit of the doubt. It's easy to watch this show and put yourself in the shoes of the narrator—which is what all great stories should do.

The lighting scheme consists of a number of various-sized table lamps dotted around the stage, which turn different colors depending on the mood of the story. This is an effective technique at times, such as when they all flash white for a strike of lightning. But he controls the lights from his phone, which he has to take out of his pocket every ten minutes, and that interrupts the flow of the action.

Martin Dockery has an incredible ability to win over an audience. He is a born storyteller. If he hasn't performed at The Moth, then they are missing out. Dockery reminds me of Alan Cumming when he played the lead in Cabaret, or the early shows of Taylor Mac, how he could coax an entire room into humming America the Beautiful. Halfway through the hour-long show, however, I found myself thinking “Okay Martin, you’ve won me over…what are you going to do next?” The audience would have followed him on any kind of strange theatrical journey he wanted to take us on. Dockery could have jumped forwards or backwards in time, put on an accent and changed characters, or any number of other theatrical techniques, and the audience would have gone there with him.

There's nothing wrong with a great storyteller telling a great story. But after a while the audience wants a change of pace, some variation in tone, a new narrative voice. Given what a talent Martin Dockery is, I found myself wishing that he had been more ambitious. He drips with charisma, but I wanted to see more of his range, I wanted to know if he could do more than win me over.

1 Small Lie is a gripping, rollicking tale that is well worth an hour of your time. He even offered to meet everyone at a nearby bar after the show! I didn’t get a chance to join him, but I have no doubt that would have been a fun time too.

1 Small Lie

Created, directed, designed, mixed, & performed by Martin Dockery.

The lights are controlled from Dockery’s phone.

Website: https://martindockery.com/1-small-lie

Performance Schedule: April 9 at 9:20 pm, April 10 at 6 pm, April 12 at 7 pm & April 18 at 5:20 pm

Streaming 60 min
Tickets Here: https://tickets.frigid.nyc/event/6897:1344/

Photo credits: orangemouse

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Mieko Gavia on Vanessa Codorniu’s Perra Puta Loca Bruja as part of the NYC Fringe Festival at Chain Theatre

2026-04-09T12:54:00.003-04:00

Vanessa Codorniu in Perra Puta Loca Bruja. Photo by Cody Myers.

It is difficult to capture the essence of Perra Puta Loca Bruja in a tidy bow. At times Vanessa Codorniu’s solo show feels like a joyful hybrid of a stand up, an extended monologue, an ancestral ritual, and a TED Talk. At times it felt too full for the confines of the Chain Theatre’s small black box and the piece’s allotted 60 minute time slot. It’s no easy feat to attempt to cover both the breadth of Argentine history and the depth of the artist’s love for her Perra Puta Loca Bruja ancestors while dancing, wrangling props and dresses, and deconstructing and reconstructing misused female archetypes.

As a bit of a PPLB myself, I was more than game to catch this as part of the New York City Fringe Festival (formerly Frigid). The theater was packed, with patrons tiptoeing around a row of electric candles downstage. These candles later set the scene for a welcoming ritual. Codorniu, also known as the Biz Bruja, wears white and cleanses the space while drumming to the four Cardinal Directions. She dances with scarves and colorful stage lights and invokes the ancestors of what we call the Americas, making sure to acknowledge the Indigenous and African people who lived, worked, sang, and bled to nurture her grandparents’ home of Argentina. I found myself wanting more specificity on whose practices we were witnessing and whose ancestors we were acknowledging—it felt a bit vague to this No Sabo kid. But not all rituals need or welcome extensive ethnographic breakdown, so I let myself drift into odes to Yemayá, through the short slideshow on Afro-Argentine history and blanqueamiento, and past a slightly staccato slam poem about Eve (of Eden) and misogyny.

These topics alone could have filled an hour time slot, but the true meat and muscle of this piece was the costumed snapshots of her time with female ancestors—those who were said to embody Perra (bitch), Puta (whore), Loca (crazy), or Bruja (witch) archetypes. Here Codorniu’s tone shifts from passionate teacher to friend and confidante as she flips between her younger self and the women (and men) who influenced her life. She tells funny, tender, heartstring-pulling anecdotes about her grandmothers, her mother, and her spiritual advisor, and despite some clunky transitions, her love for these women is palpable.

It was, however, difficult to draw close association between these women and the PPLB archetypes. If Codorniu’s goal was to show how her loved ones’ lives led them to be stereotyped, it was half-accomplished. Each ancestor defied cultural expectations in their own way, but aside from the Bruja being…an actual Bruja, the labels were somewhat interchangeable. Perhaps these connections would’ve been reinforced had the show run to completion. Unfortunately the show ran long—and with a tight festival schedule looming, Codorniu had to jump to a hurried conclusion about reframing these negative stereotypes into empowering archetypes, a few parting thoughts, and a sales pitch for her upcoming oracle deck. Out of respect for the next artist’s time slot I dashed from the theater—unwittingly into a camera lens and someone asking for a soundbite on behalf of the artist. Disoriented in the light of the lobby, I stuttered out some thoughts and continued on my way. I hadn’t connected enough to my Perra archetype to refuse.

Perra Puta Loca Bruja

By Playwright Vanessa Codorniu

Starring Vanessa Codorniu

Performance schedule date and times: https://tickets.frigid.nyc/event/6897:1383/

April 4th at 7:15 pm; April 7th at 6:15 pm; April 8th at 7:55 pm; April 18th and 19th at 5:35 pm (in person and livestream)

Tickets available here: https://tickets.frigid.nyc/event/6897:1383/

Photo credits SLICE OF LIME PHOTO, EMIL RODRIGUEZ-POWELL

https://perraputalocabruja.com/

MIEKO GAVIA (she/they) is a writer, actor, audiobook narrator, and producer. Her acting credits include Canary in the award-winning film Canary Trap, Joan of Arc in La Pucelle, Lou Salome in Lou at the Paradise Factory, the webseries Quarter Century (Imani), Afterswarm at JACK (Gigi), Gardener of Stars at Detroit’s Light Box (Gardener), The Reenactors at Abrams Arts Center (Actress 2), and Creative Time’s installations: Private Moment (Alice) and The Privilege of Escape (Dr. Crenshaw). Her audiobook work includes From the World of Percy Jackson: The Court of the Dead: A Nico di Angelo Adventure, and the AUDIE nominated Devil Reached Toward the Sky, Their play Dog has been performed at the Gene Frankel Theatre, Afterswarm (co-written with Heather Harvey) has been performed at JACK, Ophelia: A Prism has been performed at Oberlin College and Mai House, and her non-theatrical writing has been featured in Bustle, Buzzfeed, Oxygen, Efniks, and on Netflix’s Youtube channel. Mieko is also a producing ensemble member for Black Revolutionary Theater Workshop, a Brooklyn based, social justice focused theater company. https://www.miekogavia.org/

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Ria T. DiLullo on Heather Seltzer’s Portia and Ellen as part of NYC Fringe Festival 2026 at Under St. Marks

2026-04-08T17:33:00.003-04:00

Heather Seltzer as Portia and Sarah Hartley as Ellen in "Portia and Ellen". Photo by Kathryn Cooper for By Hart.

For a 50 minute show, Portia and Ellen does some theatrical heavy-hitting while keeping the laughs rolling.

Stand-out lines that nail the show’s themes include:

“Are you getting cancelled—again?” (Portia)

“I want to rebrand—as no brand.” (Ellen)

“There was only so long you were going to be allowed to be America’s sweetheart.” (Portia)

“If I’m not moving I’ll die.” (Ellen)

And Ellen is certainly on the move. Sarah Hartley’s Ellen is a spot-on impersonation, complete with her iconic opening-of-show dancing, which goes further into the audience as each new taping segment occurs. If you’re lucky, she might ask for a high-five, groove with you, or climb over you.

Portia, by contrast, is still. Still in the bath with Pinter’s Betrayal. Still doing yoga with Chekov’s Three Sisters. “An actor must prepare,” she says. Heather Seltzer’s impersonation of Portia is also precise, remarkable for both its humor and groundedness, without ever straying from the source material as we think we know her.

The only time Ellen is truly still is when she’s on hold, waiting for God to talk to her. The only time Portia is on the move is an original Fosse-style song and dance number about her life and how she needs more light (figuratively and actually).

As Seltzer and Hartley bill it, Portia and Ellen is a “fictional imagining of the final days of Ellen's daytime talk show. A theatrical fever dream about marriage, cancel culture, and the limits of personal growth.” The show has a clear structure; Ellen does a taping of her talk show featuring different famous canceled people who have made comebacks (all excellently played by Seltzer), Ellen interrupts Portia’s actor preparation at home with her own concerns, and something of the fever-dream variety follows. Between each segment, we get Hartley & Seltzer as Ellen & Portia in filmed reenactments/imaginings from their shows (both separately and together), famous photographs or video footage of them, and real headlines. The pace of all these elements are on point throughout the performance, always long enough to get the joke or settle into what we’ve just seen before we’re brought back into their world live on stage.

Now, I want to take a moment here to say that I don’t go to Fringe shows expecting a high production value (or indie theater in general), so I was genuinely surprised by the quality of the production for Portia and Ellen. From the pre-taped segments/projections to the original music and a particularly delightful cartoon-ish bathtub, all the design elements felt perfectly placed and well considered, always serving the story without outshining it. It’s not that they’re doing too much, it’s that they’re doing exactly the right thing, one at a time, and knocking them down like dominos.

I would not call this show, in the strictest sense, a “play.” There is not a question that gets answered by the end. But it is theatrical. It is dramatic. (I personally want my theater to be both theatrical and dramatic.) Portia and Ellen does have a clear structure, an emotive arc, and makes great use of what live theater has to offer.

You will laugh during this show. Many times. You’ll be tickled into thinking about their stated themes—marriage, cancel culture, and the limits of personal growth—without being told what to think. You’ll leave glad you came.

P.S. If you can, go with a friend. It’s always nice to hear your friends laugh too.

Portia and Ellen

By Heather Seltzer
Directed by Amanda Xeller

Cast: Heather Seltzer and Sarah Hartley

Designers: Daniel Hoyos (Producer), Michael Bolgar (Choreographer), Seann Cantatore (Composer), Brian Chase (Technical Crew Lead), Francine Zerfas (Vocal Coach), Jennifer Moon (Portia Quick Change Artist & Crew)

Creative and Design Producing Partner - By Hart (including Danielle Franceschi, Adam Ball, Mike Mitchell, Guatami Hazra, Christian Swinehart, Kathryn Cooper, Lucia Racekova, Aubreigh Brunschwig, Erin Smith, Nichelle Tesone, Kristin Ingram, David Ibarra, and Jenna Weissman)

Performance schedule date and times:
April 8, April 9, & April 15 @ 8:10pm

Tickets are available here: https://tickets.frigid.nyc/event/6897:1349/

Photo credits: Kathryn Cooper for By Hart

https://portiaandellen.com/

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Kodi Lynn Milburn on Kona Morris’ & Padriac Lillis’ How to Poop in an Outhouse at -72°F as presented by New York Fringe Festival at Under St. Marks

2026-04-04T22:37:00.001-04:00

photo by Joshua Wachs

Fringe is a platform for staging productions that work well in unconventional spaces and with intimate, up close audiences. I have a special place in my heart for the beauty of fringe. I find that stripping back a show's ability to hide behind spectacle, allows for out of the box thinking and creative problem solving. Fringe allows the story and storyteller to take center stage. This simplicity often makes room for stories to reach audiences that may not have otherwise been heard. That being said this show hit the mark in some ways and missed in others.

This solo show follows the writer/performer, Kona Morris’ personal experience living in Alaska immersed in an indigenous community, marrying a native man, and giving birth to a mixed indigenous child. Ultimately, Kona returns to the lower states, but the majority of the story takes place in the village of Gwichyaa Zheh (also known by its colonial name, Fort Yukon). Morris does a beautiful job of being present with the audience.

The story touches upon the struggles of deciding to become a parent — that balancing act of wanting youth and freedom vs. community and roots. Speaking as a cis woman who is able to have children (but having none myself), I found the conversation surrounding abortion and reproductive health care in America compelling. Morris’ comments about the struggles to find access to healthcare or abortion for birthing people in such a remote location highlighted a point of intersectionality that is rarely spoken about. I appreciated the raw and open approach to their experience and the, by no means simple, journey to deciding to have the child. The show explored the very real fear of bringing a baby into the world given the political climate of the early 2000s. Horrifyingly, those fears resonated firmly with issues today.

Speaking as a designer, I enjoyed the use of color during a lovely description of the northern lights. Designer Matthew Hallock’s use of moving lights and gobos gave great texture and, when used, helped immerse us further into the plot. The use of voice over, voiced by Kaihinjik Alexander, was a hilarious and nice change of pace, though used sparingly. Adding more voice over could have given the team an opportunity to bring in more collaborators from the community they’re speaking on, giving them a seat at the creative table. There were also a few climactic moments in the piece that could have been supported with sound design to help root the stakes of the moment in tandem with the acting. Riding in a bush plane and canoeing down a river are great canvases for more design elements.

Speaking from an indigenous perspective myself (Tsalagi, Eastern Band, Wolf Clan, & Czech), I personally had some issues with the piece. We’re not a monolith, so other natives may not have taken issue, but I found myself uncomfortable when the main character spoke in a fake native accent. I also found myself wondering why there were traditional seal skin gloves and beadwork on the wall as, at best, decoration with no acknowledgment of their cultural significance and without using them at all. I felt some of the descriptions of the performer’s experiences teetered between eroticism and genuine curiosity, wonder, or respect. There were many moments when real issues facing First Nations could have been discussed but were skimmed over. For example, the title: the crux of the joke was about having to use an outhouse because there was no running water or indoor plumbing, but WHY does this community lack these resources? Not having basic needs in remote areas or on reservations is a huge issue and not delving deeper into the causes makes natives’ lack of access the butt of the joke (pun intended). It’s not for lack of innovation; it’s because of the manufactured poverty and subjugation of native populations by the American government — this should be named. Additionally, the performer mentioned working at a grocery store, but ignored that one of the biggest issues facing Native Alaskans is the price of food and how big companies exploit the lack of options by price gouging. There was talk of fishing and traditional practices, but no acknowledgement of climate impact, overfishing by corporations, or laws against traditional practices being enforced as late as the 70s.

Natives are masterful comedians and can take a joke, often using humor as a coping mechanism, but without cultural, historical, or political context, we become the joke. Using native stories with little context to the why, or without a call to action, feels like a performative land acknowledgment.

There were two moments that I felt were done well, culturally speaking. The first was a comment regarding how a lot of young girls in the tribe would become pregnant and then drop out of school. When it is first mentioned, the tone is purposely judgemental. Later, Kona acknowledges the lack of reproductive care and that people in the tribe were bringing babies into a beautiful and thriving environment, rich with community. The second moment involves the beautiful name of their child being the first name in their native tongue on a birth certificate in 30 years. The erasure of language is a huge issue, and what the story lacked was the WHY. Is it because native languages are banned from use or systematically destroyed in residential schools? I think if you’re going to tell native stories as a non-native person, it’s a fine line between appreciation and using native stories as an interesting prop. I’m sure that wasn’t the intention, but in 2026 we need to go beyond intention and consider impact. I think the show had some beautiful notes of growth. I appreciated the effort to include language while speaking on the warm and welcoming community. I wish there was a native director or consultant on the team.

I understand too that we cannot touch on all the issues, that some moments in life aren’t that serious, that this is Morris’ story from Morris’ perspective, but representation in the arts for indigenous people is so scarce and often our stories are told without us there.

Produced by Joshua Wachs, Pickles and Cheese Productions, New York Fringe Festival, and Under St. Marks present

"How to Poop in an Outhouse at -72°F"
Written and Performed by Kona Morris
Directed by Padraic Lillis
Lighting Design by Matthew Hallock
Voice Over by Kaihinjik Alexander

Performance Dates & Times

Thursday, April 2, 2026 @ 9:50pm
Friday, April 3, 2026 @ 6:30pm
Sunday, April 5, 2026 @ 5:20pm
Saturday, April 11, 2026 @ 12:20pm
Friday, April 17, 2026 @ 8:10pm

Link to tickets:
https://tickets.frigid.nyc/event/6897:1327/

Kodi Lynn Milburn, dubbed as the "Swiss Army Knife of Theater," embodies a fusion of creativity and activism. As a mixed indigenous neurodivergent queer, Kodi’s artistry resonates with a commitment to justice, harmony with nature, amplifying lost voices, and reflecting contemporary issues, echoing the ethos of the Jester's Privilege. Kodi’s work has been described as “inspired” (Alix Cohen, Women Around Town), “amazing” (Travelanche), “sound designer, Kodi Lynn Milburn deserve(s) much credit for the show’s aesthetic” (David Shengold, Opera News), “lush compositions and evocative soundscapes…a fantastic collaborator: creative, proactive, generous, organized, versatile, and indispensable” (Nathan Davis, Drama Desk Nominated Sound Designer) Cross-discipline credits include: Sylvia Milo’s The Other Mozart (Hong Kong, Edinburgh Fringe, NYC, U.S. Tour, Canadian Tour), Treaty (The Foundry, Middlebury Town Hall Theater), Funny Guy (59e59, London, Edinburgh Fringe), Manon (Irondale Theater), Talking With Angels (TheaterLab), Faust (Baruch Performing Arts), Salome (Irondale Theater), Orgy & Bess (Judson Church), AMP (HERE), Tussaud/Antoinette (IRT), Big Wave (TaDa!, The Tank), Enjoy your Meal (Edinburgh Fringe), Tiffany Caputo (Edinburgh Fringe), Anime-Zing Gameshow! (Edinburgh Fringe), Empty NeXt (TheaterLab), Vice & Virtue (NYTF), My Onliness (The New Ohio), Chess (American Theater for Actors), Bananas (The Rat), Uta Hagen Centennial Salon (Lincoln Center), Heart Strings (Atlantic Theater Co), 7 Magdalenes (Baryshnikov Arts Center, TheaterLab, HERE), Sparkle Spa (BMI), Ewalt & Walker (54 Below), Good Samaritans (The Tank), Ghost Shower (The Tank), Halalish (The Tank), Mary & Max (Bobby Cronin & Crystal Skillman), Voyage en Chanson (National Sawdust), L’autre Mozart (Fringe North, Halifax Fringe), Rhinoceros (Atlantic Acting School) and more. Kodi is a New York Foundation for the Arts Music Fellow. Kodi’s fine art has been featured in partnership with Arts Gowanus and Red Hook Art Project.
Kodi has an album available on all streaming platforms under Kodi the Composer called "Sound the Alarm"! kodilynnmilburn.com IG @heythereitskodi