In Omar Bakry’s In the Shadow of Her Father, directed by Vincent Scott, Ava Wolski (Inji El Gammal), in her forties, lives a quiet life in rural Ohio with her adoptive father, Walter (Roger Hendricks Simon), in his seventies. Walter is a man haunted by alcoholism and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But when a stranger appears at Ava’s door, he ignites buried secrets and desires. Tackling alcoholism, PTSD, and the immigrant experience, Bakry’s drama is both a meditation on survival and a tender love story.

Playwright Rishi Varma was motivated to write Sulfur Bottom by his concern for environmental justice, defined by the show’s partner organization WE ACT as “ensuring that people of color and/or low-income residents participate meaningfully in the creation of sound and fair environmental health and protection policies and practices.” 

Elizabeth McGovern is spending the dog days of 2025 Off-Broadway in Ava: The Secret Conversations. Known in recent years as the beloved chatelaine of Downton Abbey, McGovern has written herself a role that’s the antithesis of Lady Cora Crawley. Her new play depicts the twilight of Ava Gardner, screen goddess from backwoods North Carolina who married both Mickey Rooney (the “biggest star in the world” when she met him) and mob-adjacent crooner Frank Sinatra.

Anyone searching for a rabbit-out-of-hat show in which a master magician saws a femme fatale in half or makes her disappear should look elsewhere than Jamie Allan’s Amaze. Allan’s show has some dazzling glitter and glitz, but underneath it all there is a moving story that director Jonathan Goodwin has deftly and incrementally integrated with Allan’s sleight-of-hand illusions and interactions with his audience.

In his solo show ta-da!, Josh Sharp draws on his immense charm and deft wit to navigate subjects that are far weightier than his upbeat title implies. They include pedophilia, cancer, gay-bashings of varying intensity, and a near-death experience. He does it while holding a clicker that initially projects everything he says on a screen behind him precisely: “Hi. Hello. What’s up. How are you? Hi. Hello. Hi. Welcome.” His diction is crisp and clear, so there’s really no need for the screen, except as a display of physical stamina and memory, and a source of visual variety. Eventually, though, under Sam Pinkleton’s direction, Sharp’s script and the screen projections diverge amusingly to add a layer of comic counterpoint—a practice that reaches back to Woody Allen’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily? in 1966.