Theater
For the past three years, casting director Charlie Hano and performer/producer Max Raymond have co-produced a one-of-a-kind annual variety show. Let’s Hear It For the Boys: A Transmasc Cabaret features an all-transmasculine team of creatives, musicians, and performers who showcase new work by transmasculine writers alongside songs from the existing musical theater canon.
In the tight confines of a basement in Ridgewood, ten acting students swirled around each other, muttering lines from the plays of Tennessee Williams.
In her play coming to Greenpoint in June, Karley Wasaff builds a world that blends contemporary dance, immersive theater, and game logic into something playful and physically present. What unfolds feels less like watching a performance and more like being inside a shared experiment in attention, trust, and cooperation.
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.
In Smith’s latest play, Dad Don’t Read This, four Ohio teens plead, act out, and create in glorious (and often futile) attempts to express what they may not fully understand how to say.
The Irish playwright Derek Murphy isn’t looking to reinvent the wheel with The Bad Daters, which is having its US premiere at Paradise Factory, but the energy he saves from not overhauling the romantic two-hander genre, he splurges on genuine heart.
“Come for the tamales—stay for the chisme!” That’s the tagline of Canciones, an immersive, site-specific theatrical experience coming to a private home in Flatbush in May. Created by Rebecca Martínez, Julián Mesri, Beto O’Byrne, Sara Ornelas, and Meropi Peponides, the show unfolds around multiple generations of a Mexican American family. And what fills up any good home? Food, music, and the chaotic affairs of the relatives we can’t escape.
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.
Writer/director James Clements's play Beauty Freak, which focuses on the pivotal years from 1935 to 1939, and runs April 23 to May 17 at the cell in Manhattan, is produced by his and Sam Hood Adrain’s company What Will the Neighbors Say? and directed by Danilo Gambini.
We all know the ghost in Hamlet—the murdered King of Denmark whose specter sets the tragic events of the play in motion. But actor Hiran Abeysekera and director Robert Hastie had more to contend with than just the old king’s ghost with their production of Shakespeare’s tragedy, which arrives at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on April 19.
Sometimes a work in progress is exactly where it needs to be to enthall an audience member. Spaces like Rough Draft Festival, Center for Performance Research, and Ars Nova are especially beneficial for theatermakers whose work bends genres and challenges conventional ideas of live theater.
Target Margin Theater’s This Is Real counts among its influences the Declaration of Independence, “Home on the Range,” the Aeneid, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions, and the writings of Jean Genet.
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.
A forty-plus-year mass geopolitical conflict waged through ideology, pop culture, and an arms race is unwieldy fodder for a musical; yet, Lauren Yee’s Mother Russia, playing at Signature Theatre, and Ro Reddick’s Cold War Choir Practice at MCC Theater are both historical comedies exploring the impact of the Cold War, capitalism, and global politics on young people.
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.
Witnessing how much New York City has changed for artists brings an angering sadness. Heavens: Mars Bar is a TD Bank. Tompkins Square Park is filled with wealthy young people in blandly-hued sportswear. (The whole city is.) Artists are being shut out of being able to create, and survive, here.
When I told people I was going to see a staged adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the frequent response was a sharp eyebrow raise and a: “that should be interesting.” This is a 783-page novel of much-hyped obscurity that people don’t say they are “reading” but rather “wresting with.”
In a well-worn SoHo loft, the dancer and filmmaker Michelle Uranowitz has spent the last year and change building something special. Through her consistent yet casual movement classes, Uranowitz and her students (myself included) have formed a community to practice a little-known technique called Allan Wayne Work.
The future of risky multidisciplinary work is HERE. But for the theater’s new leadership, that future is far from a foregone conclusion. The co-directors spoke with the Rail about collaborative decision making, budget woes, reassessing the HERE Artist Residency Program (HARP), and what it means to “make a splash.”
Plotless but vibey, What to Wear revolves around themes of consumerism, vanity, and the metaphorical temptation of a well-cooked duck.
On the morning of December 7, I had Nurit Chinn and Bailey Williams come to my apartment in Carroll Gardens. Over croissants and grapes, we chatted about their new leadership roles as co-directors of the Exponential Festival.
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?
A short play by Oscar K.
The open enrollment period for health coverage in 2026 began on November 1 for plans sold through the Affordable Care Act Marketplace. Jim Bracchitta spoke to Peter Newell, director of the Health Insurance Project for the United Hospital Fund, about what theater workers and other entertainment professionals need to know about health coverage this year.
Travis Amiel and Cosimo Pori are premiering their third evening-length work, Das Rauschgift, under their moniker, Das Besties, and they persist as community leaders in how artists in the Brooklyn scene can operate in a post-post-post world. I had the opportunity to chat process with Amiel and Pori amidst their final week of rehearsals.
Vulnerability. Respect. Honesty. Rigor. Curiosity. These are the characters’ community agreements that set the tone in Practice, a new dark comedy by Nazareth Hassan, directed by Keenan Tyler Oliphant. The play, now showing at Playwrights Horizons through December 7, follows a company of ambitious actors starring in the latest work by the buzzy Asa Leon (Ronald Peet)— a hotshot theater director.
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.
This fall offers two working-class plays, a revival of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s 2003 work, The Brothers Size, and a revival production of Martyna Majok’s Queens. Both break free of classical play structures and highlight underserved and infrequently represented communities.
Dave Osmundsen explores and manifests Autistic narratives in various genres. Ahead of his New York City professional debut, Osmundsen and members of the cast and creative team of his new play, BUM BUM (or, This Farce has Autism), sat down together to discuss the need for more Neurodiverse narratives.
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.
This fall, Alexandra Neuman will team up with co-directors Raychel Ceciro and Logan gabrielle Schulman for the third installment of The Collective Womb, their participatory cosmology performed on a mound of compost. Preparing for the work, Neuman spoke with her spiritual mentor, ambient music pioneer Laraaji.
Naomi Wallace writes plays about bodies in jeopardy, under duress, and facing mortal danger, most viscerally in her 1996 play Slaughter City, which takes place in a meatpacking plant in Kentucky. Thanks to the ambitious Small Boat Productions, the play is about to receive its long-overdue New York premiere.