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.
In My Joy Is Heavy, a raw yet warmly disarming musical memoir, musician-actors Abigail and Shaun Bengson open the doors of their family life and loss to the audience. Under the sensitive direction of Rachel Chavkin, the production blurs the boundary between stage and house, transforming private grief into a communal—and unexpectedly joyful—theatrical encounter.
Lights Out: Nat “King” Cole is a fanciful fever dream of the final taping of The Nat King Cole Show on NBC in December of 1957. This musical hits some high notes with Dulé Hill and Daniel J. Watts’ excellent acting but is hamstrung by a disjointed book by Colman Domingo and Patricia McGregor, who also directs.
Jonathan Larson, author and composer of Rent, died of an aortic aneurism on Jan.25, 1996, the night before his magnum opus, an innovative rock opera inspired by Puccini’s La Bohème, was to play its first public performance in New York. At 35, Larson had been writing Rent for seven years and would soon be honored posthumously with a Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony Awards for best musical, lyrics, and original score of the 1995–96 theater season.
