Millie, the cheeky British teenage expatriate at the center of Youth in Flames, begins the play drifting contentedly through life. In playwright-performer Mimi Martin’s engaging and deeply affecting solo drama, directed by Jessica Wiley, that carefree detachment is challenged by the turmoil of the 2019 Hong Kong protests, leading to a journey of self-discovery and moral reckoning.
Eric Bentley’s 1972 play Are You Now or Have You Ever Been revisits the House Un-American Activities Committee’s (HUAC) investigation into Communist influence in the entertainment industry during the mid-20th century. The dialogue is drawn directly from the hearing’s transcripts, making this revival as much a documentary as a drama. Directed by Anna D. Shapiro, the production captures the grind of a political investigation in all its tedious forms.
The pub in Irish dramas is a center not just of drinking, but also of telling tall tales. In J.M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, a new arrival, Christy Mahon, boasts of killing his father. In Conor McPherson’s The Weir, the regulars exchange ghost stories. But the atmosphere of Catch of the Day, by Megan Jenkins and the Red Fox Theatre company, is different. There’s music already happening on stage when one enters, and the gregarious cast may be engaging the audience in conversation or offering potato chips up and down the aisle or sniping at one another. The slapdash mix of music and comedy is more goulash than ghoulish, yet the lack of structure turns out to be one of the show’s charms.
At the newly revitalized Delacorte Theater, Saheem Ali’s stirring production of Romeo and Juliet reimagines Shakespeare’s Verona as a divided community along the U.S.-Mexico border, bringing fresh urgency to the tale of the star-crossed lovers. By allowing Romeo and Juliet to speak to one another in Spanish amid a world of conflict, Ali illuminates both the intimacy of their bond and the forces determined to keep them apart.
Angsty-girl plays have been flourishing on New York stages, and in several of these ensemble dramas, the characters use music to let out their frustrations—see, for example, the group dance breaks in John Proctor Is the Villain, All Nighter and the just-extendedDad Don’t Read This. For the title characters of Eisa Davis’ disarming ||:Girls:|| ||:Chance:|| ||:Music:||, though, music represents more than a release. It’s their way of communicating, of making sense of their world, of discovering just what they’re capable of and what (and who) they truly care about.
Millie, the cheeky British teenage expatriate at the center of Youth in Flames, begins the play drifting contentedly through life. In playwright-performer Mimi Martin’s engaging and deeply affecting solo drama, directed by Jessica Wiley, that carefree detachment is challenged by the turmoil of the 2019 Hong Kong protests, leading to a journey of self-discovery and moral reckoning.
At the newly revitalized Delacorte Theater, Saheem Ali’s stirring production of Romeo and Juliet reimagines Shakespeare’s Verona as a divided community along the U.S.-Mexico border, bringing fresh urgency to the tale of the star-crossed lovers. By allowing Romeo and Juliet to speak to one another in Spanish amid a world of conflict, Ali illuminates both the intimacy of their bond and the forces determined to keep them apart.
Few things are as ripe for satire as the modern wedding industry, and Catherine Weingarten’s I Wanttt a Unicorn Frappe!!! gleefully plunges its horn into the target. This clever world premiere transforms one woman’s engagement anxiety into a satire about desire, denial, and the pressures placed on women to pursue happily-ever-after at any cost.
In A Night of Chekhov, director Sanio Kurtesevic ambitiously compresses three lesser-known Anton Chekhov works into a brisk evening of comic despair and emotional misfire. While flashes of Chekhov’s wit emerge throughout Swan Song, The Proposal, and The Bear, the ensemble has not yet fully settled into the rhythms of the material, resulting in performances that often feel tentative and uneven.
Before the age of global pop stardom, there was Harry Lauder—a kilted powerhouse of British music hall and vaudeville whose songs and irrepressible personality made him one of the most beloved entertainers of the early 20th century. In Lauder: Scotland’s Kilted King of Broadway, Jamie MacDougall brings this larger-than-life figure back to the stage with infectious warmth and musical flair that turns biography into jubilant theatrical celebration.
Some plays tell stories; 73 Seconds excavates silences. In this haunting and ambitious solo work, writer and performer Jared Mezzocchi traces his mother Rosemary’s hidden connection to NASA to explore the fragile constellations of family memory, loss, and unrealized possibility. Sensitively staged by director Aya Ogawa inside the 64-seat planetarium at the Lower Eastside Girls Club, Mezzocchi’s autobiographical narrative is structured in three movements.
Bedlam’s stripped-to-the-bone staging of Othello proves that less can indeed be electrifyingly more, as four actors conjure a harrowing world with precision and nerve. Under the incisive direction of Eric Tucker, this revival foregrounds the play’s racial tensions with clarity, inviting audiences to lean in—and reckon—with every word.
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 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?
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.
Bent Through Glass, written and performed by Alex Koltchak, transforms unimaginable loss into a work of emotional clarity, as a grieving father traces the aftershocks of his daughter’s suicide with unflinching honesty. Under the sensitive direction of Michael Sladek, this deeply personal solo piece becomes not only a testament to anguish, but a quietly radiant affirmation of love’s endurance, shaped by Koltchak’s willingness to bare his soul.
In Nicole Travolta Is Doing Alright, a one-woman play by performer Nicole Travolta (cowritten with Paula Christensen), the star delivers a dazzling, deeply felt turn that fuses stand-up, confessional storytelling, and incisive character work into an evening of theatrical vitality, fluidly staged by directors Margarett Perry and Paula Christensen. With razor-sharp wit, Travolta transforms her trials of credit card debt and compulsive shopping into a bold, laugh-out-loud meditation on identity, resilience, and reinvention.
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.
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.
Dust of Egypt: The Story of Sojourner Truth dramatizes a little-known chapter in the famed abolitionist’s life when, as a young mother, she fought to rescue her 5-year-old son after he was illegally sold down South. Karin Abarbanel’s play turns this legal battle—the first time a Black woman successfully sued a white slave owner—into a stirring portrait of maternal courage and moral defiance.
In Hate Radio, Swiss writer-director Milo Rau turns the stage into a time capsule of terror, reconstructing the Rwandan radio station RTLM (Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines), whose jovial hate-fueled broadcasts paved the road to genocide. Listening through headsets as slurs curdle into directives, the audience is left to reckon not only with history’s horrors but with unnerving echoes in today’s media-saturated America.
Hold On to Your Butts, directed by Kristin McCarthy Parker, proves that epic spectacle can be conjured from little more than bodies, sound effects, and boundless imagination, as two actors and a sound-effects artist recreate Jurassic Park shot for shot, live onstage. The result is an exuberant collision of physical comedy, sound, and affectionate parody—a love letter to both movies and theater.
In Edward, written, performed, and directed by Ed Schmidt, a small box of 27 mundane artifacts becomes a form of domestic archaeology, each item revealing a fragment of a life once lived. Gathered around a table in independent bookstores across New York City, audiences help reconstruct—night by night—a portrait of the late Edward O’Connell, a former high school English teacher whose faith in literature echoes through the stories and the spaces where they are told.
Bob Marley: How Reggae Changed the World is a soulful solo journey that traces reggae’s roots and its global reverberations through the life and legacy of its most iconic figure. Written, performed, and directed by Duane Forrest, the show blends acoustic music, personal storytelling, and audience connection, allowing one to glimpse how Bob Marley’s message reshaped not only a genre, but lives.
Molière’s Tartuffe is robustly reimagined by Lucas Hnath in a randy new version directed by Sarah Benson, turning the classic comedy of hypocrisy into a breathless, contemporary satire. With choreography by Raja Feather Kelly and a fearless cast led by Matthew Broderick and David Cross, the production unleashes ferocious wit and gleeful buffoonery.
