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.
A one-man theatrical hurricane, Ned Van Zandt barrels onto the stage in Lost in Del Valle, a genre-bending dark comedy that transforms the Huron Room at SoHo Playhouse into a fever dream of excess, ruin, and hard-won redemption. Directed with razor-sharp precision by Amir Arison, and accompanied on stage by guitarist Mike Moore, this U.S. premiere is as unflinching as it is mesmerizing—an unforgettable descent into the chaos of a life lived on the edge.
There are, a variety of sources have it, no legitimate rhymes for “orange.” But get a load of: “Yes, I know it feels foreign/ Just to suck a week-old Mandarin orange.” In About Time, the new revue at the Marjorie S. Deane, Richard Maltby Jr. does it. And he’s 88.
Poor J.M. Barrie hasn’t had an easy time of it in the 21st century, with the notable exception of revivals of one-acts at the Mint Theater. The 2015 musical Finding Neverland, based on a film, focused on the dramatist’s struggle to find success after failure and the triumphant creation of Peter Pan, his classic 1904 play about the boy who won’t grow up—a play that, by the way, most of Finding Neverland’s audience had probably never seen, since nobody actually stages it. It’s known primarily through the musicalized version from the 1950s that starred Mary Martin, although the Royal National Theatre’s 1997 production, with Peter played by Daniel Evans, now artistic director of the Chichester Festival, and Ian McKellen as Captain Hook, showed the original is still a viable and glorious work.
