Thinking Theater NYC

The acclaimed multidisciplinary creator, activist, performer, and 2021 La MaMa Artist-in-Residence  John Sims  will be presenting 2020: (Di)Visions of America , a series of workshopped-for-stage multimedia performances of works never before seen in New York City that melds performative letter writing, installation art, film, music, dance, and video gaming. This series, based on the themes of the COVID-19 pandemic, American policing, and  Recoloration Proclamation  – a 20-year project that confronts, and confiscates Confederacy iconography and symbols and spaces of American slavery – is a cry for help, hope and healing. The featured pieces are: AfroDixiesRemixes: La MaMa Listening Session Sound and Flag installation. A NYC premiere This audio-visual event presents a giant red, black and green (colors of Black liberation) Confederate flag, along with the listening session of The AfroDixieRemixes – a collection of 14 tracks of Dixie in the many genres of Black music: spiritual, blues, go

On December 9, 2021, Hotsy Totsy Burlesque will present its 9th annual tribute to The Star Wars Holiday Special . After the past couple of years of craziness, Cherry Pitz has lost the spirit of the season. Handsome Brad and the team are here to help and show her that despite the bad acting, the terrible script, the ill-conceived notions and just the horror that it was ever made, there really is meaning to be found in The Star Wars Holiday Special , travesty that connects everyone who has ever seen it in a single community of people. We might not agree on everything, but we can agree on one thing: this was the most gloriously bad thing ever to appear on TV. As Cherry points out, if you have not seen The Star Wars Holiday Special , then you have not seen special guest star Bea Arthur sing and dance with the space alien bar patrons from the Tatooine Cantina, ( here is a clip ). The Star Wars Holiday Special was quite possibly the worst holiday special ever conceived. It is literally Sta

Vit Horejs and Scrooge puppet. 2020 live performance. Photo by Jonathan Slaff. After the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre's (CAMT) "A Christmas Carol, Oy! Hanukkah, Merry Kwanzaa" was offered virtually last year, with a series of "pretend" out-of-town performances at venues historic and exotic that were created with virtual backgrounds, it returns for live audiences this December, updated to contemporary sensibilities and restaged for this new Theater for the New City production. You can read our 2020 review of a live production of the show here . "A Christmas Carol, Oy! Hanukkah, Merry Kwanzaa," aimed at audiences aged 5 to 105, will run from December 22, 2021 to January 2, 2022. The show is an adaptation of Dickens' classic with Old World accents and New World inclusiveness. Adapted, directed and reinvented by Vit Horejs, it features over 30 puppets by Milos Kasal, including a quartet of Rockettes in Slovak, Moravian, and Ruthenian folk

One Empire, Under God: A Cautionary Tale in Two Acts ,   the new full-length drama by award-winning playwright Anthony J. Piccione ( A Therapy Session with Myself , The Kraine Theater; Unaffordably Unhealthy , The Tank), continues its live debut at the Obie-award-winning performing arts venue The Tank this week. Set in the far distant future, One Empire, Under God is an epic political drama that tells the story of how an emotionally disturbed young man - with the help of virtual media technology - is able to rise to political power by inciting an uprising against America's openly atheist president, and subverting democratic and military rule throughout Western civilization, paving the way for him and his descendants to rule for generations to come. Every step toward a more perfect union is followed by an enormous reactionary backlash. That historical trend remains very much alive in the future, as seen in this provocative critique of nationalism, imperialism, and religious extremi

This weekend, Friday, November 19 and Sunday, November 21, 2021 at 6 pm, Theaterlab will present  MOTHERS MYTHS MONSTERS: Matrophobia , curated by Stefanie Nelson and featuring Maya Orchin, Boris Willis, and Maria Takeuchi (ÉMU).  MOTHERS MYTHS MONSTERS is a female artist-led residency series presenting short works focused on the comforting and sometimes terrifying figure of the Mother, with bodies at once fecund and ferocious; the complex Myths that shape our personal and collective identities; and/or the repulsive yet riveting Monster. This year’s iteration of this series, Matrophobia, will feature three short-form pieces centered around the titular fear of becoming like one’s mother and the space/s we make to accommodate this fear. Curator Stefanie Nelson uses this term (coined by the poet Lynn Sukenick) as a starting point for exploration of questions such as how we position ourselves in opposition or agreement with our own mothers, how we shape our relationship with them, and ho

The Dark Outside Written by Bernard Kops Directed by Jack Serio Presented at Theater for the New City 155 First Avenue (between 9th and 10th Streets), Manhattan, NYC November 6-28, 2021 Austin Pendleton in The Dark Outside , by Bernard Kops, directed by Jack Serio, presented by Theater for the New City. Photo by Emilio Madrid. A father's birthday brings a family together, literally and otherwise, in the world premiere of The Dark Outside by celebrated playwright Bernard Kops, who will himself turn 95 on the final day of the show's run. Since his career began in the 1950s, London-born Kops has written more than 40 plays, in addition to a pair of autobiographies and numerous novels, books of poetry, and radio plays, and he is the first Jewish recipient of a Civil List pension, awarded by the Queen, for his services to literature. In the intimate, lyrical The Dark Outside , encounters with the darkness of the title need not mean capitulation. Set in England, The Dark Outside unfo

No Pants in Tucson Devised by The Anthropologists Director/Writer: Melissa Moschitto Lead Deviser: Mariah Freda Presented by The Anthropologists at A.R.T./New York Theatres 502 W 53rd Street, Manhattan, NYC November 5-14, 2021 Mariah Freda, Kian J. Johnson, April J. Barber, Marissa Joyce Stamps. Photo by Jody Christopherson A divided country replete with attempts to legislatively prescribe and regulate people's gender expression: the United States in the 1860s or the United States in 2021? The answer is both, as No Pants in Tucson makes resoundingly clear. Making its world premiere, this comedy from The Anthropologists, who are dedicated to research-based theater that inspires action, focuses primarily on "masquerade" laws, ordinances that, for example, prohibited the wearing of 'men's' clothes by whom the state considered women, and that underwent an explosive proliferation in 19th-century America. No Pants in Tucson takes a playful, kinetic, intersectional

The Antelope Party Written by Eric John Meyer Directed by Jess Chayes Presented by Dutch Kills Theater at the  wild project 195 E. 3rd Street, Manhattan, NYC November 4-21, 2021 [Update 11/19/21: Extended through December 4, 2021] Quinn Franzen, Anna Ishida, Will Dagger, Edward Mawere & Caitlin Morris. Photo by Bjorn Bolinder I remember loving playing with my sister’s My Little Ponies as a child. We would stage battles between my Legos and her ponies—GI Joe wasn’t my thing. But I had forgotten about them in adulthood until a few years ago when, during the holidays, I saw my niece and nephews playing with the same ponies that my mother still keeps around her house for when the kids visit. Seeing the now-faded plastic toys brought up few emotions for me, but evidently, for some in my generation, those ponies are at the center of their social lives. Awareness of Brony culture entered the mainstream with the 2014 documentary A Brony Tale , which follows the adult men who are fans of My

  On February 10, 2022 New York City’s Obie Award-winning The Fire This Time Festival will release an anthology entitled 25 Plays from The Fire This Time Festival: A Decade of Recognition, Resistance, Resilience, Rebirth and Black Theatre . The book, published by Methuen Drama , an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, contains 25 10-minute plays originally produced by the eponymous festival, which has become the destination for emerging and early career playwrights from the African diaspora. While the past decade proved to be some of the most tumultuous times in modern US history, the resilience and will of the Black community has continually pushed forward by opening up dialogues and sustaining advocacy. Nowhere has this been more apparent than at the Obie Award-winning The Fire This Time Festival in New York City. From inequality in education and healthcare, skewed and negative images of Black people in mainstream media, racism in policing, widespread gentrification and its effects on m

  The newly-minted Spokehouse Productions has announced announce its premiere production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet  (co-produced by Marissa Ferrara and Joey Nasta), opening in early November at the Upper East Side’s House of the Redeemer. Hamlet  is helmed by director Amanda Whiteley, Spokehouse’s founder and Artistic Director, who marks her return to the House of the Redeemer after staging Romeo and Juliet  in its courtyard this past summer. Spokehouse Productions is a new theater company, associated with the House of the Redeemer, that is dedicated to site-specific theatre that reimagines and revitalizes new and classic works. Spokehouse reimagines Hamlet as a two-hour, site-specific piece presented in the library of the House of the Redeemer and featuring a gender-inclusive cast. Set against the backdrop of the Cold War, this production's Hamlet grapples with purpose, appearances, and secrecy as he contemplates his duty as a son and heir. Performances run November 5, 6, 12 and 13