After checking bags and checking in with their bespectacled guide, audiences of just a dozen or two toured various rooms of the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. Visitors can do that whenever they please (“You don’t need a dollar to walk through it,” the guide later narrated), but this special visit toured at lunch—and danced. Welcome to  Lunch Dances.

On April 10 and 11, 2026, Ballroom Marfa presented Federico García Lorca’s La Casa de Bernarda Alba, remounting the New York City Players’ (and its Incoming Theater Division’s) 2024 production. Concerned with repressive gender roles in rural Spain, Bernarda Alba follows a draconian widow who subjects her five daughters to eight years of grieving after their father dies. Supercharged atoms, the daughters ricochet off of each other’s dramas while cut off from the outside world—and its bachelors.

Created and performed by American Sing-Song (musical duo Jake Brasch and Nadja Leonhard-Hooper) and presented as a work-in-progress for one night only, HOMO ERECTUS is set in 2131 but looked like readings have for eons.

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. 

A musical pageant written by Patrick Lazour, Daniel Lazour, and Mark Sonnenblick, Nativity performed December 13 and 14 at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery. Or maybe it’s The Nativity: that article appears on the program but not the social media graphic. What writer likes titling their work?

Plotless but vibey, What to Wear revolves around themes of consumerism, vanity, and the metaphorical temptation of a well-cooked duck.

If Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation arrived at the dawning of the Obama administration, a moment of mainstream political “Hope,” Nazareth Hassan’s Practice debuts at its antithesis. If acting exercises are used as a vehicle to manifest self-esteem and connection in Baker’s play, they are wielded as tools for manipulation and exploitation in Hassan’s.

Dambudzo arrives at a time of increased hunger for experiences that gather humans in unique ways when streaming services’ unlimited options have increased isolation. Screens can dampen imagination—a computer is at your fingertips—but chipaumire’s work champions curiosity.

Now running on opposite sides of the East River, David Cale’s Blue Cowboy (at The Bushwick Starr) and Jen Tullock’s Nothing Can Take You From the Hand of God (co-written with Frank Winters at Playwrights Horizons) are both solo shows, but even that similarity is harder to detect in productions that take wonderfully distinct approaches to single-actor staging.

There is a lived honesty to Bubba Weiler’s writing, which settles cozily into its regional setting like sitting back on the family couch.

Created by Times Square Arts Public-Artist-In-Residence Maia Chao and choreographed by Lena Engelstein, American Idle performed three times on July 9 in Duffy Square, feet from the fire hydrant-red TKTS steps.

A new arts series at Williamsburg’s Domino Square curated and creative-produced by Public Assembly and Ellpetha Tsivicos, Sugar, Sugar! offers free performances each Wednesday and Thursday in June. No-cost, public, and outdoor summer series are vital—and in being no-cost, public, and outdoors, they tend to feature recognizable programming to catch a larger audience. Leaning experimental, Sugar, Sugar! brings multidisciplinary fare normally reserved for specific venues (or basements) into the open air.

The women of A(U)NTS!, too, are workers, childless, and unsure of the dizzying, dazzling land just beyond their own.

Donald Barthelme Humors You, devised and directed by Olivia Facini ran at Theaterlab April 10 through 13, and Letter of Intent, written, directed, and designed by John Jesurun, ran April 2 through 13 in a new venue, Apartment 1, a ground floor residence in a West Village brownstone.

In Raja Feather Kelly’s BUNNY BUNNY, which ran at The Invisible Dog Art Center March 13–15, the direction is urgent, the choreography dynamic, and the text saltless. Where Kelly offered a maximalist meal, Joshua William Gelb’s [Untitled Miniature] addressed surveillance in a more distilled form.

Sayings don’t translate cleanly across languages. From Mongolian, an expression for love translates to “their heart is as white as milk and their hands as intricate as a key.”

Broadway scenic design has become increasingly reliant on digitally rendered backdrops. That trend makes sense. A minimal physical set can be less expensive, and a digital design can feel appealingly contemporary. How the physical and digital elements work together, however, can prove tricky.

Amando Houser is starring as and in DeliaDelia! The Flat-Chested Witch!, their solo show intimately at home at the Brick Theater through December 14..

In We Are Your Robots, creator and performer Ethan Lipton, performing as a robot who looks and sounds a whole lot like creator and performer Ethan Lipton, shares, from his digitized well of encyclopedic knowledge, that his favorite word is mencolek.

There’s an increasingly antiquated term for gay people who don’t have sex: a non-practicing homosexual. Increased LGBTQ+ acceptance has made the term something of a relic, however its spirit endures in the career of openly gay star Jim Parsons. The characters Parsons has played, on stage and screen, reflect larger questions about which ones audiences can expect to have sex—and, sometimes, how fully human they are allowed to be.

Ian Reid’s charming, gently-pitched comedy, Heaven is a place in the sky, which completed its week-long run directed by Jake Beckhard at The Tank on September 8, is not the first play to dig into how the economics of caregiving impact the minutiae of relationships.