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.
On the tiny stage of Irish Rep’s basement Studio Theatre, two women sit at a cafe table catching up on their lives. The Approach has a cast of three, and the pairing of women changes for each scene. This Dublin-set play centered solely on women talking with one another is written and directed by men (Mark O’Rowe and Conor Bagley, respectively)—and, alas, for a good portion of its 70-minute run time, it fails the Bechdel test.
In 1881, Ibsen’s Ghosts was considered shocking for its critique of conventional morality and its unabashed treatment of venereal disease and religious hypocrisy, among other topics. While the specifics of the social issues that the characters grapple with are not pressing today—syphilis is a curable disease, a woman trying to leave an unhappy marriage is not unthinkable, nor is the idea that a person of high social rank might be a degenerate—moral hypocrisy, patriarchy, class resentment, and generational trauma are always ripe for the stage. The gripping, finely acted production of Ghosts now playing at Lincoln Center, directed by Jack O’Brien and adapted by Mark O’Rowe, threads this needle: it retains the historical setting (though with a framing device) and yet makes the moral debates feel like more than artifacts from another era.
