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Review: Lessons in Truth and Consequences in “The Totality of All Things”

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The Totality of All Things Written by Erik Gernand Directed by Shannon Patterson Presented by UP Theatre Company at Theater 154 154 Christopher St, Manhattan, NYC May 7-17, 2026 Joseph Dean Anderson, DeAnna Lenhart, Colleen Clinton, and Logan Floyd. Photo by Mikiodo. At the start of UP Theater Company’s production of Erik Gernand’s The Totality of All Things , directed by Shannon Patterson, the word “TRUTH” waits on a classroom board before the play has begun in earnest. The lights are already up as the audience enters, giving us time to inhabit this journalism classroom: buzzing fluorescents overhead, chrome-and-plastic chairs, awards crowding the walls behind the teacher’s desk, institutional paint fading at the edges. The room feels immediately recognizable and intensely specific, every classroom and this classroom at once, a wholly transformed 154 Christopher Street Theatre space. That specificity matters. Gernand’s play, set in Lewiston, Indiana in the fall of 2015, begins with ...
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Review: "Tale of a Potato" Presents a Great Reckoning through a Little Tuber

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Tale of a Potato Written and directed by Angelo Trofa Presented by Batisfera Teatro May 5, 2026, at Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò at NYU , 24 W 12 St., Manhattan, NYC May 9-10, 2026, at Culture Lab LIC , 5-25 46th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens, NYC Protagonist (center) and some coworkers in Tale of a Potato. Photo courtesy of Batisfera Teatro. The potato is often described as humble. Lowly. A staple, but also a side dish. It can even, in the idiom couch potato, serve as an insult. Obviously, then, it's the perfect avatar for a dramatic everyman, or so one would be forced to conclude after Tale of a Potato , a new tabletop play from Valentina Fadda and Angelo Trofa's Batisfera Teatro, a contemporary theater company based in Cagliari, Italy. At the 2023 In Scena! Italian Theater Festival, Batisfera created a sweeping story with tiny candy protagonists in The Gummy Bears' Great War ( La grande guerra degli Orsetti Gommosi ; you can read our review here ), and Tale of a Pota...
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Review: "Closed for the Holiday" Opens the Imagination

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Closed for the Holiday ( Chiuso per Festa ) Written and performed by Matteo Porru Stage advisor: Marleen Scholten Presented by 369gradi   May 6, 2026, at Casa Italian a Zerilli-Marimò at NYU , 24 W 12 St., Manhattan, NYC May 8, 2026, at Culture Lab LIC , 5-25 46th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens, NYC  Matteo Porru. Photo by  Azzurra Primavera. Typically, storytelling involves channeling other voices, and that becomes not more true but certainly more literal when theater is the mode of storytelling. In Closed for the Holiday ( Chiuso per Festa ), a solo show from Matteo Porru – a novelist, playwright, and winner of the prestigious Campiello Giovani Award – a writer puts on and off various identities, creating for the audience simultaneously a series of short character-driven narratives and an image of the creative process. Closed for the Holiday , presented in Italian with English supertitles by Francesca Triolo and Arianna Intra, represents Porru's (extremely imp...
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Review: The Ensemble Takes Flight in “Stupid Fucking Bird”

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Stupid Fucking Bird Written by Aaron Posner Directed by Jorden Charley-Whatley Presented by City Gate Productions at The Secret Theatre 10-10 44th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens, NYC  May 1-10. 2026 The ensemble. Courtesy of City Gate Productions. Before a line is spoken in City Gate Productions’ urgent staging of Aaron Posner’s Stupid Fucking Bird , directed by Jorden Charley-Whatley at The Secret Theatre, the audience is already inside the play’s unstable cosmos. Smoke hangs not only over the stage but through the entryway itself, a low sonic thud pulses through the theatre, and actors drift through the space before the performance has officially begun. When the audience is finally instructed to yell “start the fucking play,” the moment lands with both comic force and uncanny uncertainty. The evening does not begin for us so much as with us. That porous membrane between audience and performance becomes the governing logic of Charley-Whatley’s production. Posner’s “sort...
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News: In Scena! Italian Theater Festival Celebrates Dario Fo’s 100th Birthday with the US Premiere of "Dario Fo: The Last Mistero Buffo"

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Dario Fo © Archivio Fondazione Fo Rame Kairos Italy Theater along with Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò at NYU and the Italy-based KIT Italia will present the United States premiere of the documentary Dario Fo: The Last Mistero Buffo (90 minutes, Clipper Media, 2022) as part of their In Scena! Italian Theater Festival with exclusive screenings at Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimo’ at NYU (24 W 12th St, New York, NY 10011) on Tuesday, May 5th at 6:30pm and Wednesday, May 13th at 8pm. The film will be presented in Italian with English Subtitles. The film centers on the final staging of Mistero Buffo in Rome—the farewell to the stage of its author and performer, Nobel Prize winner Dario Fo, who passed away just two months later. It tells the story of a journey that begins in Dario Fo’s dressing room, with his most famous show, and unfolds into a kaleidoscopic voyage that takes us from Turkey to Argentina—places where his works, with their powerful and critical dramaturgy, still challenge the stat...
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Review: Anti-Fascism Requires a Chorus of Voices in "Cable Street"

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Cable Street Music and lyrics by Tim Gilvin Book by Alex Kanefsky Directed by Adam Lenson Presented by 10 to 4 Productions at 59E59 Theaters 59 E 59 St., Manhattan, NYC April 26-May 24, 2026 The company of Cable Street . Photo by Carol Rosegg. Deep into new musical Cable Street , a trio of mothers sing about how the violence, connected to fascism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and war, that has scarred their lives in the past is, as the song's title says, "Happening Again." These characters are singing to us from 1936 London, but the parallels of their fear and anxiety with those of the current moment are affecting and inescapable. Cable Street , from Tim Gilvin and Alex Kanefsky, zooms in on the eponymous East London street during the lead-up to, occurrence, and aftermath of what has come to be called the Battle of Cable Street, when a coalition of anti-fascist protestors including Jews, Irish, and Communists clashed with the British Union of Fascists (BUF) and the police s...
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Review: In "Dreamcats!," the Fur Flies…into Space

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Dreamcats! Written and directed by Charlotte Lily Gaspard Music by Nebraska ( FKA Jessie Davis ), Sabrina Chap , Zera Bloom , Doc Frost, and Malik Work Presented by Midnight Radio Show at The Gene Frankel Theatre 24 Bond Street, Manhattan, NYC April 23-May 3, 2026 Puppeteer Laurynn Starkey. Photo by Richard Termine. Cats, as anyone who lives with them knows, spend a lot of time sleeping. But what if all that shuteye were not merely relaxation but research? In Dreamcats! , the family-friendly world-premiere puppet musical from Brooklyn-based science-fiction fairy-tale theater company Midnight Radio Show, the eponymous Dream Cats are an ancient race who live cloistered from the rest of "the fantastical galaxy" on the planet Dicee One-I, where they collect and study dreams in pursuit (or purr-suit?) of "understanding all the riddles of existence." Written and directed by Midnight Radio Show creative director Charlotte Lily Gaspard, Dreamcats! fuses live action, diffe...
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