Immersive/Interactive

KING

KING

In Ireland’s County Cork there are apparently many ghosts. Nasty ghosts. KING (an acronym for Keep Ignoring Nasty Ghosts) posits that ghosts of the past have a central role in the way we live our present—and future. Fishamble, a Dublin-based theater showcase for new Irish plays, has produced this work, which features a solo performance by Pat Kinevane, a veteran associate of the company. Director Jim Cullerton has shaped it into a powerful but enigmatic and often disturbing reflection on obsession, mental illness, England’s domination of Ireland and its empire, and one man’s attempt to grapple with a litany of wrongs, both past and present.

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The Life and Slimes of Marc Summers

The Life and Slimes of Marc Summers

Marc Summers may not be a name that rings a bell to most people, although he has hosted numerous cable-television shows, most notably Double Dare (1986–88) on the Nickelodeon network. The participants in that game show for kids invariably ended up covered in goop, schmutz, and slime. The title The Life and Slimes of Marc Summers pays tribute to that calling card, but it also reveals the celebrity’s battle with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), a malady that he has had since childhood.

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On Set with Theda Bara

On Set with Theda Bara

On Set with Theda Bara is a single-actor comedy-drama by Joey Merlo that revolves around the suspicious disappearance of a genderqueer teenager. In this pastiche of film noir, Merlo piles mystery upon outlandish mystery, and David Greenspan leads the spectators (limited to 50 a performance) through a 65-minute, mazelike tale that’s at once intriguing and mystifying.

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Our Class

Our Class

On July 10, 1941, as many as 1,600 Jewish men, women, and children were rounded up and packed into a barn in Jedwabne, a small town in northwest Poland. The locked barn was set ablaze, and everyone inside perished. The pogrom is notable (and controversial) because, unlike similar atrocities in Nazi-occupied cities and villages, the massacre was not carried out solely by officers of the Third Reich or by Soviet nationals. The perpetrators were friends, associates, and neighbors of the Jews with whom they had lived peaceably and side-by-side before the occupation. Although not explicitly about Jedwabne, Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Our Class follows the basic outlines of the historical events, and under Igor Golyak’s resourceful and potent direction, the play shows that our most barbarous enemies may indeed dwell among us.

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Mind Mangler: A Night of Tragic Illusion

Mind Mangler: A Night of Tragic Illusion

Mind Mangler: A Night of Tragic Illusion is a new parody from the creators of  The Play That Goes Wrong—this time aimed at magicians. The production is about the relationship between a magician and his stooge, played by Henry Lewis and Jonathan Sayer respectively, who cowrote this show as well as Play That Goes Wrong with Henry Shields. While Mind Mangler easily segues back and forth from a spoof of a magic show to actual sleight of hand to a dramatic story involving the two leads, not all its parts are equally successful.

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Monsieur Chopin

Monsieur Chopin

Hershey Felder, the pianist and actor who has embodied musicians such as George Gershwin and Ludwig van Beethoven in previous shows, is Fryderyk Chopin in his latest stage biography, Monsieur Chopin, directed by Joel Zwick. In the script he has written, Felder climbs into the skin of Chopin, and reveals both the highs and lows of the 19th-century Polish pianist-composer’s life and career.

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Arcadia

Arcadia

Tom Stoppard, whose 1993 comedy Arcadia is being revived by Bedlam, turned 86 last summer and, to the extent discernible from afar, he’s going strong. A year ago Stoppard was in New York for the premiere of Leopoldstadt, an emotionally charged, multigenerational epic. Set in Vienna during the Holocaust, that late-career masterwork proved surprising even for a playwright who’s known to avoid doing anything twice. When it was new, Arcadia was also a surprise. It represents the dramatist in midcareer, his imagination careening among a wild assortment of topics: English landscape gardening, quantum physics, the theory of deterministic chaos, and the peril for researchers of what’s inscrutable in the historical record (as, for example, gaps in the biography of George Gordon, Lord Byron, an important offstage character).

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Food

Food

Geoff Sobelle’s Food at BAM Fisher is performance art of the most engaging kind. It provokes rumination about man’s relationship to nature, to the use of the environment, and to the distance between tilling the earth with dirty hands and the meal that arrives on a plate at home or in a restaurant. If that implies an overly serious purpose, it is brightened by Sobelle’s interactivity with his audience, his deft sleight of hand, and slapstick that veers into carnival sideshow.

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King of the Jews

King of the Jews

“Power corrupts” is a global, historical truism, possibly even more so when conquerors ensnare the vanquished to do their dirty work. Such was the case for Jews in the mid–20th century in Europe’s Nazi-controlled ghettoes. The Nazis often appointed Jewish leaders to decide on the people to be deported—often a death sentence. The Jewish-run panels were called Judenrats. In Leslie Epstein’s King of the Jews, adapted from his novel of the same name, an ethnic German Nazi enforcer in Łódź, Poland, authorizes a group of Jews to select fellow Jews for deportation.

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Emergence

Emergence

Things are not as they seem,” intones Patrick Olson, the creator and driving force behind Emergence, an uncanny conceptual performance that merges art, science, music, and monologue and may well be the most original Off-Broadway show this season. Accompanied by an ensemble of four singers, three dancers, and a rock band, Olson invites theatergoers on a transformative journey that tears off the veil from familiar things and explores the deepest aspects of the human experience.

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Bioadapted

Bioadapted

Bioadapted, a new theater piece created and directed by Tjaša Ferme, and written by James Yu and Alexis Roblan, is a hybrid play drawn from sources as disparate as a 2020 article in Britain’s Guardian newspaper that was written by ChatGPT; transcripts of panels of scientists discussing the subject; and scientists interacting with artificial intelligence (AI). Turning transcripts into drama has been around a long while—from Emily Mann’s Execution of Justice and Moisés Kaufman’s Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde to the recent Is This a Room, which took dialogue verbatim from FBI interviews with Reality Winner.

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A Eulogy for Roman

A Eulogy for Roman

Going to a solo show that is set up as a memorial service might not sound like a particularly inviting theatrical experience during the dog days of summer. But A Eulogy for Roman, written and performed by the beguiling Brendan George, proves that saying farewell to a childhood friend doesn’t have to be an occasion for tears but can be a time for making new promises.

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The Half-God of Rainfall

The Half-God of Rainfall

Inua Ellams’s The Half-God of Rainfall is an epic revenge fantasy about a basketball superstar who was born as a consequence of Zeus’s raping of a mortal woman. This multilayered piece uses poetry, music, and a mix of Greek and Yoruba mythology for a lyrical meditation on power, patriarchy, and the black feminist response to the #MeToo movement. 

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One Woman Show

One Woman Show

“I guess I’m just relatable,” says Liz Kingsman with a shrug in One Woman Show, her sharp, absurdist parody of the British TV series Fleabag and the wave of women’s solo confessionals that followed it. Kingsman plays a hyped-up version of herself in her play, a jobbing actor who is recording her self-penned solo show, Wildfowl, so that she can market it in the hope of becoming a major TV series.

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Malvolio

Malvolio

Betty Shamieh’s Malvolio, a joyous sequel to Twelfth Night, investigates the life of Malvolio after the events in Shakespeare’s wintry dark comedy. In the Classical Theatre of Harlem’s production, 20 years have passed since Olivia’s much-abused steward (Allen Gilmore) threatened revenge on his tormentors. Back then, Malvolio was tricked into believing the Countess Olivia, his mistress, had written a love letter to him and insisting he don yellow, cross-gartered stockings to please her. Swallowing the bait, Malvolio did as the letter requested—and swiftly was incarcerated in Illyria as a lunatic. 

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Richard III

Richard III

New York Classical Theatre (NYCT) is a small troupe presenting distinguished plays, mostly tried and true, with occasional novelties in public spaces around New York City. Stephen Burdman, the company’s founder, espouses a performance style he calls “panoramic theater,” which involves spectators following actors as they perform scenes in multiple spots.

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In Corpo

In Corpo

Ben Beckley and Nate Weida’s In Corpo is a new sci-fi musical about human connection that will make some theatergoers smile and others wince. Directed by Jess Chayes, it draws on Franz Kafka’s unfinished novels The Castle and The Trial, Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby the Scrivener,” and the artists’ own experiences navigating the corporate world. The piece grapples with corporate overreach, invasive technologies, and unresponsive bureaucracies to satirize how working in the corporate world can stymie one’s heart and soul. Its principals’ names, “K” and “Bartleby” (played by Austin Owens Kelly), are borrowed directly from Kafka (K. is the hero of The Castle; Josef K. of The Trial) and Melville’s 1853 short story.

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Cassie and the Lights

Cassie and the Lights

A foster-care placement, no matter where or when, can be a difficult, even traumatic transition for all parties involved. Much can go awry, especially when children expect that their parent or parents will return for them. Alex Howarth, writer and director of Cassie and the Lights, draws the audience almost vicariously into the fantasy-filled and emotion-and-guilt-fraught world of three sisters in foster care in northern England. Their strongest, and possibly only, tool for survival is their bond with one another.

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This Land Was Made

This Land Was Made

Tori Sampson’s This Land Was Made is a steamy gumbo of history, humor, and imagination. Directed by Taylor Reynolds, it serves up a fictive account of the origins of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, Calif., in 1966. Although the play has some structural flaws, it invites one to ponder the issues that animated this revolutionary social organization—racist police brutality and economic injustice—and to consider how they still resonate today.

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Waiting in the Wings

Waiting in the Wings

Waiting in the Wings is the sort of show that materializes every June with a gay-themed subject to celebrate Pride Month intentionally or obliquely. This adaptation of a 2014 movie, in which Sally Struthers, Christopher Atkins and Shirley Jones appeared, stars Jeffrey A. Johns, who wrote the screenplay and reprises his writing and acting roles for the stage.

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