No symbol is more overused in the arts than the human heart. Served cold, golden, or on one’s sleeve, it has been the stuff of countless theatrical metaphors, from the plays of Euripides to Larry Kramer. The Roundabout Theatre Company has, nonetheless, doubled down on the image for its plainly named yet surprisingly complex medical musical, The Heart. Happily, it is a gamble that pays off. Kait Kerrigan’s book mostly avoids sentimentality in favor of scientific facts and hard emotional truths, while the husband and wife team of Ian and Anne Eisendrath deliver a pulsating score, anchored in the realm of electronic dance music.

When there is a generation gap, when communication between children and parents goes awry, it often stems from divergent views, sometimes political, sometimes value-based, and sometimes both. Those parents who struggle to ease their children’s lives by providing them with material comforts that they themselves lacked are often disappointed when their kids reject affluence, and risk their financial or physical security for a greater “cause.” That is the case in playwright David Zax’s Aftermath.

If you missed the avant-garde theater scene in New York City during the 1960s and ’70s, The Kick Inside serves as a time capsule, catapulting its audiences back to the heyday of experimental theater. Directed with a steady hand by Nicolás Noreña, this collection of 12 vignettes by a range of playwrights, from Richard Foreman to Penny Arcade, takes its viewers on a madcap linguistic, visual, and physical journey to that era, with an occasional modern touch to the retro material.

Anthropomorphism is at the center of The Dog Show: Come. Sit. Stay., David Javerbaum’s cleverly conceived work about dogs and their views of the world. Directed by Richard Israel, it’s playing at the Triad, the original home of Celebrity Autobiography. The Dog Show adopts a similar format as that hit: actors reading from scripts, mostly at stands. But it’s no less enjoyable for that: a winning cast of four helps the unflashy production breed satisfaction for its audience.

Though advertised as “a new play,” Matthew Freeman’s The Ask, now at Theater 555, premiered in New York City more than two years ago. In this drama of ideas, two strong-willed strangers clash in a mating dance essential to American charities: the solicitation of wealthy donors by career fund-raisers. Back in 2024, The Ask--expertly directed by Jessi D. Hill--packed the same wallop it does now (and even more, thanks to the superb performance of Betsy Aidem as Greta); but the original run was brief and so far Off-Broadway that it failed to create the splash that might have been expected. Now, in a more prominent venue, again directed by Hill, this substantial intermissionless drama is likely to make waves and, in due course, be seen around the country.

Cicely Hamilton’s Phyl, a 1911 comedy that challenges the constraints imposed on women of the early suffragist era, is receiving its New York premiere from the Mint Theater Company. This rarely seen work by Hamilton—a leading British women’s rights activist—introduces a spirited heroine determined to break free from isolation and convention. Under Britt Berke’s direction, Phyl reveals the quiet radicalism of its heroine’s determination to pursue the life she desires.