Drama

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The Whole of Time

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The Whole of Time

Romina Paula’s The Whole of Time chronicles the seismic impact of a seemingly casual visitor on an Argentine family. Written in 2009 and translated for the English-speaking stage by Jean Graham-Jones, the play was first presented in New York in 2024 at Torn Page, a nonprofit theater company in Chelsea. It was nominated for a Drama Desk Award that season. The Torn Page staging, directed by Tony Torn, has now been reassembled at The Brick in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, as a co-production of The Brick and A/Park Productions.

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In the Shadow of Her Father

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In the Shadow of Her Father

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.

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Sulfur Bottom

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Sulfur Bottom

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.” 

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Ava: The Secret Conversations

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Ava: The Secret Conversations

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.

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Amaze

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Amaze

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.

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Well, I’ll Let You Go

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Well, I’ll Let You Go

Well, I’ll Let You Go is written by actor Bubba Weiler, who’s a little over 30, and directed by Jack Serio, still under 30 and seemingly ubiquitous in New York theater. It’s set in a mid-size, midwestern town that has lost its skill-based, manufacturing economy. Weiler’s characters are adjusting, in sundry ways, to coarsening influences, including the regional fulfillment facility of a gargantuan online retailer, which is the town’s sole surefire source of regular employment. Weiler and Serio bring a balance of intellect and feeling to their work, and the result is a fresh, engrossing chronicle of ordinary citizens contending with change for the worse.

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Gene and Gilda

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Gene and Gilda

If only the romance of Gilda Radner and Gene Wilder were as straightforward as two comic icons collaborating on a professional project and eventually falling in love. For Wilder and Radner, it wasn’t nearly that simple. Cary Gitter’s Gene and Gilda provides the backstory of how these talented individuals managed a complex personal magnetism, bolstering each other’s confidence and respective on-screen personas, that morphed into a deep love.

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The Weir

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The Weir

The Irish Rep is currently staging its fourth production since 2013 of Conor McPherson’s 1997 play The Weir, with several of the cast reprising roles. And yet there is nothing stale about this staging—instead, the play is brought to exhilarating life by a marvelous ensemble, under Ciarán O’Reilly’s assured direction. The Weir is essentially a collection of four ghost stories, which arise naturally out of the banter in a rural Irish pub, that ultimately reveal more about the loneliness of the people telling them than anything supernatural.

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Transgression

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Transgression

A multitude of transgressions come to light in Terry Curtis Fox’s Transgression. This melodrama about New York artists consists of 19 scenes toggling back and forth between 2010 and 1970. At irregular intervals, the playwright detonates ugly, morally irksome surprises. The result is a two-hour, slow-motion collision between louche mores in the Warhol era and the subsequent new-millennial sensitivity that augured the eruption of #MeToo.

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Open

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Open

In the revival of Crystal Skillman’s Open, now playing under the deft direction of Jessi D. Hill, Megan Hill delivers a mesmerizing solo performance as the Magician—a woman who attempts to conjure the truth of a personal tragedy through the language of illusion. What unfolds is not merely a magic show, but a deeply felt meditation on love, loss, and the fragile hope that words—and maybe even spells—can undo the past.

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Duke & Roya

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Duke & Roya

It’s impossible to ignore chemistry, whether it’s as basic and essential as two molecules of hydrogen and one of oxygen, or as toxic and unwelcome as a string of PFAs. In Charles Randolph-Wright’s Duke & Roya, the chemistry goes beyond the molecular level, as Jay Ellis and Stephanie Nur demonstrate in the title roles. It’s a powerful component for this play, which by turns is romantic and political and covers a lot of ground without quite bursting at the seams.

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The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

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The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

Jethro Compton’s stage adaptation of the classic short story The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance delivers a taut and compelling drama that both honors and subverts the conventions of the Western. Directed with precision and emotional clarity by Thomas R. Gordon, this new production retains the story’s essential moral conflict—between truth and legend, justice and lawlessness—but deepens its resonance by introducing a new character and themes that can speak powerfully to a modern audience.

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Trophy Boys

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Trophy Boys

In Emmanuelle Mattana’s Trophy Boys, four debaters huddle in an empty schoolroom (nifty scenic design by Matt Saunders), strategizing for the final match of an interscholastic tournament. They’re seniors at Imperium, an elite boys’ prep school; the imminent debate is against a team from a similarly tony girls’ school. This is the swan song of the boys’ high-school extracurricular lives. They’re undefeated and, being fiercely ambitious, terrified of losing this last debate, especially to a female team.

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A Letter to Lyndon B. Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First

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A Letter to Lyndon B. Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First

In A Letter to Lyndon B. Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First, playwright-directors Natasha Roland and Xhloe Rice blur the line between 1960s Boy Scout rituals and the drafting of U.S. soldiers to Vietnam. What emerges is an absurdist meditation on masculinity, obedience, and the perilous passage to manhood.

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Prince Faggot

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Prince Faggot

Jordan Tannahill’s drama Prince Faggot, a love story about a gay heir to the British throne and his boyfriend, is admirably multifaceted: part fantasia, part social and political commentary, part agitprop. At heart, though, Prince Faggot is a bittersweet romance about a royal and a commoner, a sort of Roman Holiday for the 21st century—if Audrey Hepburn’s princess had become a devotee of drug-assisted intercourse and Japanese rope bondage.

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At the Barricades

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At the Barricades

At the Barricades, a play drawn from original sources by James Clements and Sam Hood Adrian, explores the price of freedom and the complexities of political idealism. The play highlights the fight of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a battalion of international volunteers numbering roughly 2,800 Americans who fought on the side of the Republicans (the democratically elected government) during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) against the Nationalists, the rising fascist dictatorship under Generalissimo Francisco Franco.

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A Special Relationship

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A Special Relationship

In political parlance, the term A Special Relationship refers to the longstanding alliance of America and its “closest ally” Britain (the phrase “America’s oldest ally” refers to France). Disparities in language are a prominent feature in Tim Marriott and Jeff Stolzer’s winsome comedy, which is playing as part of the Brits Off Broadway festival. The piece takes as a major theme George Bernard Shaw’s maxim (sometimes attributed to Winston Churchill or Oscar Wilde): “England and America are two countries divided by a common language.”

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Angry Alan

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Angry Alan

John Krasinski first made a splash on the TV series The Office (2005–13), and after that with the creepy horror film A Quiet Place (2018) and its goosebump-laden sequels. He has a long film resume as actor, writer and director, and lately he has boosted his credits as an action star in the Amazon Prime series Jack Ryan. Yet, although Krasinski appeared in the play Dry Powder with Hank Azaria and Claire Danes in 2017, film acting doesn’t necessarily point toward stage prowess. But the confidence with which Krasinski takes the stage in the first moments of Angry Alan gives one hope that he’s an exception, and it only increases as the actor’s masterly performance opens Studio Seaview (formerly 2nd Stage) with a bang.

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Pride & Prejudice

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Pride & Prejudice

In a whirlwind of wit and whimsy, Abigail Pickard Price’s (with Sarah Gobran and Matt Pinches) new stage adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice offers an unexpectedly funny take on the classic, featuring just three actors who embody 18 characters. Directed by Price, this madcap rendition breathes fresh life into Austen’s sharp social satire, as the performers navigate cultural pitfalls of Regency England.

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Point Loma

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Point Loma

In life, people are all haunted by one thing or another. For some, it might be love, loss, or anything in between. For the characters in Tim Mulligan’s latest play, Point Loma, what haunts them are literal ghosts. The play explores the supernatural with an immersive production by the Manhattan Repertory Theatre.

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