The Brooklyn Rail

Didn’t we just do lists? Year-end ones to honor 2025 theater? We sure did, we all did—so what’s one more?

January is a flush month in New York theater as festivals import or give a leg up to some of the experimental scene’s most curious artists. That’s a superlative right there, and ten more will follow—for the first time, the Brooklyn Rail is celebrating the end of festival season with crowd-sourced honorifics, brought to you by the people, for the people (who experience a subniche of New York live performance). These superlatives uplift specific moments from shows, so it’s about to get very inside baseball, but if you caught some productions, you know. If you didn’t, let this warm bath of wackadoo wash over you, and perhaps entice you to check out such bold performances next season. This year, many were sold out, new venues were anointed, and their subversive communities only got fiercer.

 

Best Diaper at the Disco
Friday Night Rat Catchers, Under the Radar

Lisa Fagan and Lena Engelstein’s Friday Night Rat Catchers isn’t afraid to be all over the place. The choreography in this gleeful piece of dance-theater ranges from John Travolta disco points to a diaper-clad Fagan marching around stage like a toddler. Following a New York Live Arts run in 2025, this version features a revised role for plasticky game show host Marianne Rendón. It has gotten, improbably, even wilder. The creators know, however, that experimentation all too-often comes at the expense of the audience: the show, as fun as it is absurd, always lets us in on the joke.

—Catherine Sawoski

 

Most Booked and Blessed
Pete Simpson in Godbird and Fashion, Exponential Festival

Seasons change, empires fall, but if there’s one thing New York City theatergoers can count on, it’s death, taxes, and protean downtown darling Pete Simpson enlivening an experimental work. This festival season, Simpson featured in two shows almost simultaneously: as a befeathered park dweller in Nurit Chinn’s existential meet-cute Godbird and a regimented swimmer in Amanda Horowitz’s ever-evolving Fashion. Dayenu!

—Ethan Karas

 

Fishiest (Complimentary)
Time Passes (for Ellen Brody) and i’m going to take my pants off now, Exponential Festival

It was a big year for big fish at Exponential Festival. Our two scene-stealers from this category are the oft-Instagrammed inflatable shark from the Goat Exchange’s Time Passes and the very elegant, very demure cod from Ann Marie Dorr’s i’m going to take my pants off now. One can only wonder what will become of these hefty swimmers now that their respective shows have ended. Perhaps they will be sent back to sea.

—Leah Plante-Wiener

 

Most Active Fourth Wall
The Visitors, Under the Radar

In Jane Harrison’s The Visitors, what lies beyond the fourth wall drives the play’s conflict. As a tribal council debates whether to greet or attack newcomers arriving from a foreign shore, sound design signals the colonizers’ presence and actions. Throughout, the tribe looks out at the audience, wondering what newness lingers on the horizon. In the end, when the visitors arrive, the audience, as the fourth wall, becomes the visitors. We are the outsiders watching and judging the locals. When the lights come up and the fourth wall fades, I wrestled with my own role as a “visitor.”

—Carmi Burbridge

 

That’s An Audience Plant???
Julyana Soelistyo in my utopias, Exponential Festival

It can be a hokey or unconvincing device, but when Julyana Soelistyo got up from her seat and bolted for the door toward the end of Jay Stull’s my utopias, it felt pretty real, as did the ensuing conversation out in the hallway between her and Van (Jon Norman Schneider). Soelistyo deftly navigated the line between reality and performance as the play’s sense of what’s real continued to warp, with the character (or the actor?) eventually seeking a different objective and new lines to deliver.

—Alex Hare

 

Most “I Was Sweaty Just Watching” Show I’ve Seen
Try/Step/Trip, Under the Radar

Dahlak Brahwaite’s high-octane, hilarious, and keenly observed examination of the absurdities of the prison industrial complex was set to the rousing rhythms of chair-jumping step dance. There wasn’t one weak link in the cast, but please give stellar vocalist Jasmine T.R. Gatewood her flowers. This show made me ask, “How are y’all doing this twice in one day!?”

—Max Raymond

 

Most Illicit Theater For Two Girls To Kiss In
Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College for Hildegard, Prototype Festival

Hildegard, Sarah Kirkland Snider’s thoroughly modern opera about the twelfth-century patron saint of creativity, possessed not only sapphic undertones but some overtones as well (spoiler: two girls kiss!). Performed in the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at CUNY’s John Jay College, a school founded as a college of “police science”—acronym COPS—the institution made sure to distance itself from the gay agenda with an announcement that came over the loudspeakers just before the show began, declaring its hosting of the show was not an endorsement of any views the show espoused.

—Alexandra Jhamb Burns

 

Best Tour de France Tour de Force
The bicycle in Mami, Under the Radar

Despite NYU Skirball producing both pedaling ponies in this two-horse race—Narcissister’s Voyage into Infinity and Mario Banushi’s Mami—the latter captures the metaphorical Maillot Jaune (Yellow Jersey). One of the beautiful things about cycling stems from its marriage of mechanical efficiency and human effort, and Banushi beautifully deploys this nuptial as an analog for the dreamy systems of cyclical care that drive his wordless meditation on mother-child relationships. As if that weren’t enough, Mami’s moments of bicycle bliss remind audiences of the lightly illicit thrill of seeing a largely outdoor activity done decidedly indoors.

—Patrick Denney

 

Swooniest Pas de Deux
Real Estate, Exponential Festival

This cerebral, absurdist mashup of toxic, tender, and twinky masculinities starts with a wink and ends with a dare: what might we give up to rejoin with our other half, a la Eros and Psyche? Ari Dalbert and Sheldon Donenberg bring sublime precision, and hectares of charm, to their fraternity-bro slash fraternal-twin surreality, underpinned by moving/moving on up, housing acquisition as a placeholder for meaning, and a constant just-miss of that big hug that heals. Isa Spector’s refreshingly genre-agnostic movement escalates deftly to a climax of pathos—with eros well in sight.

—Tiger and Marks

 

Gayest—There, I Said It!
Letters from Tyra, Exponential Festival

Somehow, in 2026, back-to-back shows about cis gay men 1) happened and 2) were good. Derek Smith’s Letters from Tyra followed Real Estate in a double bill. Some audience members left after Real Estate, and this category can’t be gay without some sass: the joke would be on them if Smith didn’t make his performance a joke about himself. How could it not? Smith is addressing the most deranged of forms: solo shows. He dances to a calypso cover of “Cabaret,” regales embarrassing stories about a faraway land (Bushwick), and wields the many pitfalls of one-man shows to simultaneously maximize their vehicle for becoming. A frequent jester in downtown ensemble comedies, Smith now grabs the crown for himself. Long live the king.

—Billy McEntee