He plays dozens of characters. He bolts around the stage like a dervish, rearranging props, setting up mikes, climbing stairs and changing personas with every move. He works up as much sweat as Jonathan Groff in Just in Time. And he tells a chilling true-crime story in the process, one to leave the observer unsettled as to whether justice was done, and if so, what the price of that justice was.
The Bad Daters, by Ireland-born New Yorker Derek Murphy, arrives Off Broadway with a winning blend of sharp Irish wit and disarming emotional honesty, transforming a premise about romantic misfires into something unexpectedly tender. Under the deft direction of Colin Summers, and buoyed by finely tuned performances from Kate Arrington and Shane McNaughton, this U.S. premiere proves as affecting as it is entertaining—a love story that earns its poignancy without sacrificing its bite.
In Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s Rheology, now at Playwrights Horizons after a spring 2025 run at the Bushwick Starr in Brooklyn, the writer and director creates a form of exposure therapy for his consuming fear of his mother’s death by confronting the prospect directly, in performance, alongside his real-life mother, Bubul Chakraborty. She is not an actor or a theater-maker, but an acclaimed theoretical physicist and professor at Brandeis University in Massachusetts.
In Cumulo, creator Emily Batsford conjures a visually arresting, nonverbal puppetry work that transforms a simple free fall into a poetic meditation on autonomy and self-reclamation. Inspired by Batsford’s recurring nightmares of falling, the piece asks: how does one assert identity under circumstances beyond one’s control, when stability itself feels elusive?
Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine shows surprising vitality after more than a century. Although critic Edmund Wilson disdained the play in 1924 for its “pessimistic heresies” and “effects of ferocious ugliness,” the importance of it did not escape other critics. When Death of a Salesman premiered in 1949, Harold Clurman noted that the theme of Arthur Miller’s play was “not, strictly speaking, new to our stage,” citing Rice’s 1923 work. With Salesman now on Broadway to rehash the shortcomings of capitalism, the New Group deserves kudos for offering a chance to see its precursor.
In Julissa Reynoso’s autobiographical drama Public Charge, co-written by Michael J. Chepiga, one witnesses how Reynoso, played with fierce tenacity by Zabryna Guevara, solved a political impasse as a senior diplomat in the Obama administration. While the play offers an earnest and often compelling meditation on democracy in action, its heavy-handed didacticism ultimately mutes its dramatic impact.
Jazz artist Nancy Harrow is one of the New York music world’s greatest, though woefully underappreciated, treasures. During the Kennedy and Johnson eras, she was a regular on New York City’s cabaret circuit, singing with figures such as Kenny Barron, Bob Brookmeyer, and Jim Hall. Back then, Village Voice critic Nat Hentoff wrote: “Nancy Harrow is not jazz-influenced or jazz-tinged or jazz-pollinated. She is without qualification a jazz singer all the way.”
David Staller, the artistic director of the Gingold Group, has made his mission to celebrate the plays of George Bernard Shaw. To that end, the group offers readings of Shaw plays monthly and hosts discussions about him. One play each year receives a fully staged production. The current offering, Caesar and Cleopatra, is a rarity. Although it’s interesting, it’s less satisfying than, for instance, its low-budget Heartbreak House was last season.
