Drama

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The Emporium

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The Emporium

After Pulitzer Prize–winning plays in 1938 (Our Town) and 1942 (The Skin of Our Teeth), Thornton Wilder, in his remaining 33 years of life, didn’t write another full-length, original play. Our Town, likely the most produced American play of all time, still burns brightly, undimmed by the passing decades. It is, then, no mystery why the allure of The Emporium, an unfinished Wilder play that exists in 360 handwritten pages at Yale’s Beinecke Library, called, Siren-like, to playwright Kirk Lynn, who has undertaken the task of assembling, interpreting, and finishing it. The result is a road full of cracks and bumps, but one that leads somewhere impossible to forget.

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Cable Street

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Cable Street

British fascism may have preceded Hitler and Mussolini, but those dictators inspired homegrown demagogues who reveled in mass rallies and mobilized Blackshirts to harass and terrorize impoverished immigrants. Tim Gilvin’s and Alex Kanefsky’s musical Cable Street recounts, in scenes alternating between the modern day and 1936, how British fascism turned out differently, as residents of London’s multicultural East End united to deter a right-wing rally on their turf.

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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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Specimen

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Specimen

Randall Sharp has been writing and directing plays for her Axis Theatre Company for more than 30 years. Radiating from the basement of One Sheridan Square, the sacred and profane locale that once housed Café Society, then Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company, Sharp’s jabby storytelling is never without its quirks. Her latest work, a space oddity called Specimen, is no exception.

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The Receptionist

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The Receptionist

Adam Bock’s The Receptionist is a slippery workplace comedy that starts with a seemingly innocuous monologue by an unidentified male about his love of fishing, and then shifts to the workers in an office, where a Mr. Raymond (Nael Nacer, the monologuist) is unexpectedly late. Amid exchanges of personal gossip, the receptionist Beverly (Katie Finneran) and a supervisor, Lorraine (Mallori Johnson), receive a visitor from the “home office,” Martin Dart (Will Pullen), as they await Mr. Raymond’s return. Director Sarah Benson’s revival of Bock’s masterly piece sustains a sense of inconsequentiality, even as discordant notes pop up, until the play reveals itself as a chilling paradigm of what Hannah Arendt, in covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1963, called “the banality of evil.”

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American, Italian

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American, Italian

Family relationships are universally difficult for teens, and with unpredictable outcomes. American, Italian is Anthony P. Pennino’s touching, emotionally wrenching, and sometimes humorous exploration of family dynamics in two multigenerational Italian families.

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Othello

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Othello

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.

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Hamlet

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Hamlet

Director Robert Hastie brings his bold and inventive production of Hamlet for the National Theatre of Great Britain to the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), a fitting first outing in the new partnership between these venerable institutions—BAM first performed Hamlet in 1861, and it was the National’s inaugural production in 1963. Hiran Abeysekera portrays the moody Danish prince as sweet, neurotic, and impish, drawing out the comedy in the play without sacrificing its complexity and tragic weight. Hastie and Abeysekera seize on Hamlet’s theatricality and theatrical self-awareness, taking it to a new and provocative level.

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Beauty Freak

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Beauty Freak

Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s master propagandist and serial womanizer, almost always had his way with women. Nevertheless, when he challenges filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl it’s a classic case of “the unstoppable force meets the immovable object.” It’s unclear from James Clements’ Beauty Freak whether Riefenstahl is the unstoppable force or the immovable object, but regardless, she emerges the winner—or so one is led to think.

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Kenrex

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Kenrex

He plays dozens of characters. He bolts around the stage like a dervish, rearranging props, setting up mikes, climbing stairs and changing personas with every move. He works up as much sweat as Jonathan Groff in Just in Time. And he tells a chilling true-crime story in the process, one to leave the observer unsettled as to whether justice was done, and if so, what the price of that justice was.

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The Bad Daters

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The Bad Daters

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.

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Rheology

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Rheology

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.

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The Adding Machine

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The Adding Machine

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.

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The Approach

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The Approach

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. 

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Scorched Earth

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Scorched Earth

Scorched Earth, a dance theater piece created, directed and choreographed by Luke Murphy, asks, “What does it take to be of a place?” At the center of the play is the tension between William Dean (Will Thompson), a confident new arrival in a rural Irish community, and John McKay (Luke Murphy), a local tenant who lives on land that is up for auction. The work digs into territorialism and the violence that can occur over land disputes.

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Titus Andronicus

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Titus Andronicus

Though apparently popular in its own time, Titus Andronicus (ca. 1592), Shakespeare’s first tragedy, and his bloodiest, hasn’t enjoyed much esteem since. One 17th-century playwright declared it a “heap of rubbish”; T.S. Eliot thought it “one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written.” Others conveniently decided that something so barbarous could not have been written by Shakespeare (although it likely contains some material by the dramatist George Peele, there is no doubt of Shakespeare’s authorship of the bulk of the play). It’s a good thing, then, that Red Bull Theater, led by Jesse Berger, was undeterred: Berger directs a harrowing, and funny, production of the play, featuring a ferocious Patrick Page in the title role.

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The Pushover

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The Pushover

Just what is John Patrick Shanley, a major playwright and screenwriter, doing at the Chain Theatre, a black box on the third floor of a dowdy Garment District office building? Premiering a lesser work, that’s what. Much lesser. The Pushover, his frenetic new drama, might generously be described as an exploration of good vs. evil, a character study of troubled individuals struggling to wriggle free of the personas they’ve created for themselves, or a noirish crime caper. Mostly, what’s on the small Chain stage is three romantically entangled women, arguing, acting out, and pulling power plays on one another. It’s very loud, even without miking, and while there are intimate moments and the occasional arresting snatch of Shanley dialogue, the tone seldom varies from harsh and antagonistic.

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Heartbreak Hotel

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Heartbreak Hotel

Titling her play Heartbreak Hotel is a major bit of misdirection from New Zealand dramatist Karin McCracken. Elvis’s recording of his classic 1956 single (by Mae Boren Axton and Tommy Durden) is barely mentioned, and its bouncy blues are a far cry from McCracken’s gloomier deep dive into the nature of heartbreak. Directed by Eleanor Bishop, the play reaches beyond McCracken’s personal drama to examine unexpected, more clinical aspects of a breakup, such as psychological, biological, and physiological symptoms. Interspersed with those sequences are musical interludes—she took up the synthesizer to occupy herself after the end of a six-year relationship, and she has learned six “powerful” chords.

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Public Charge

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Public Charge

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.

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Ivanov

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Ivanov

A few playgoers in fin de siècle Moscow may have spotted flecks of genius in Ivanov, Anton Chekhov’s early mix of farce, melodrama, and slapdash tragedy. Initially unsuccessful, this play is now revived from time to time, often in adaptations by contemporary playwrights with high name recognition, such as Tom Stoppard. It’s unlikely anyone in 1887, when the play premiered, imagined that the country physician who wrote Ivanov might cap his career, 16 years later, with a work—The Cherry Orchard, of course—so compassionate and original that it would be a benchmark for dramatic storytelling over the next century.

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