Thinking Theater NYC

FEARfest 2022 Playing with Matches , by Jennifer Downes and John Peña Griswold; dir. John Peña Griswold Hot Blood Sundae , by Aly Kantor; dir. Mia Y. Anderson Fear Floor , by Caitland (Caky) Winsett; dir. Todd Butera Black, White, & Blue , by William Oliver Watkins; dir. Sara Berg The Hand , by Erin Moughon; dir. David Adam Gill Do You Remember? , by Nina Tolstoy; dir. Jonathan Wong Frye The Man in Red , by Mandy Murphy; dir. Mandy Murphy Presented by New Ambassadors Theatre Company at TADA! Theater 15 W 28th Street, 2nd floor, Manhattan, NYC October 26-30, 2022 Mandy Murphy and Raquel Valiente in The Hand . Photo courtesy New Ambassadors Theatre Company The horror and comedy genres often benefit from brevity, making them a good fit for a short play festival such as this year's installment of New Ambassadors Theatre Company's FEARfest, which features hefty doses of both, along with a strong measure of dystopian sci fi. The fears that rear their discomfiting heads in the fe

Space Nunz of the Rescue Mainframe Written by Elizabeth Wong, based on material generated by Hook & Eye Theater Directed by Chad Lindsey Presented by Hook & Eye Theater at The Mark O’Donnell Theater at The Entertainment Community Fund Arts Center 160 Schermerhorn Street, Brooklyn, NYC October 26-November 13, 2022 L to R: Parnia "Nyx" Ayari, Afsheen Misaghi, and June Lienhard. Photo courtesy The PR Social No, Space Nunz of the Rescue Mainframe is not the latest film to be featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000 . Rather, this delightfully titled work is the latest production from Hook & Eye Theater, a sci-fi comedy with a melancholic streak that also incorporates audience choice at selected points, in the manner of a choose-your-own adventure book or video game conversation tree. With Space Nunz , the redoubtable Hook & Eye balances the riotous and the reflective in an entertainingly energetic exploration of outer and inner space. In an opening scene that ma

  Playwright Roger Q. Mason Photo credit: Michael Alvarez Acclaimed Black Filipinx playwright and Kilroys List honoree Roger Q. Mason will receive a developmental reading of their new play The Pink with Primary Stages as part of its Creative Access Grant Reading Series. The reading will take place on Friday, November 4 at 3pm at 59E59 Theaters (59 E 59th St, New York, NY 10022). The event is FREE and open to the public. For more information and to reserve your seat please visit https://primarystages.org/explore/creative-access-grants/readings . The Pink: An Intimacy Ritual is a hook-up performed in real time between two queer people of color seeking intimacy in the age of dating apps and digital sex. As these two humans, Mel and Herman, grasp for “the real” in the bedroom, their conversations, silences, and moments of touch blur the lines between affection, sex, and euphoric romance. “Smart phones, dating apps, and online porn have ruined our connections to touch and tenderness,” Maso

Monstress Book and Lyrics by Emily Kitchens Music by Ben Quinn and Titus Tompkins Directed by Hondo Weiss-Richmond Presented by Hunger & Thirst Theatre at New Ohio Theatre 154 Christopher Street, Manhattan, NYC October 21-November 5, 2022 The Cump'ny of Monstress. Photo by Al Foote III Hunger & Thirst Theatre’s new production, Monstress , may not be the first to reimagine Greek mythology with a feminist slant, but it must be the first to do so as a bluegrass-fueled Southern gathering. Monstress presents a series of song-studded stories, along with some standalone musical interludes, set in periods ranging from the murky beginnings of creation to the present day but all focused on female monsters. In the production's retellings of these classical stories, cultural traditions separated by continents and millennia harmonize as bewitchingly as do the performers' voices. Philip Estrera as Catch with Allison Kelly, Adam Boggs McDonald, and Rheanna Atendido as The Si

The How and the Why Written by Sarah Treem Directed by Austin Pendleton Presented by Good Egg at The Sheen Center for Thought & Culture 18 Bleecker Street, Manhattan, NYC October 20-November 6, 2022 L-R: Karen Leiner and Arielle Goldman in the Good Egg production of The How and the Why , written by Sarah Treem and directed by Austin Pendleton. Photo by Carol Rosegg The title of Sarah Treem's 2011 play The How and the Why refers to the contention that any biological issue can be understood in terms of both mechanism–how it operates–and function–to what end the operation occurs. These dual perspectives simultaneously map onto the personal and professional lives of the two women on whom the play centers. Under the direction of the acclaimed Austin Pendleton, the new revival of The How and the Why by Good Egg–a theater company that focuses on plays by and about women, with an emphasis on characters fifty and older–presents a magnificent production of this intellectually and emot

Richarda Abrams as Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune. Photo by Lia Chang. Richarda Abrams's new play, Bethune: Our Black Velvet Rose , celebrates the life of world-renowned educator and civil rights activist Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune. It is currently in the final week of tis world premiere at NYC's Theaterlab. Born in 1875 to former slaves, Bethune was denied the right to read as a young girl in the segregated Jim Crow South, but she persevered and became a world-renowned educator and a champion of civil rights and racial and gender equality. During her life, she acted as an advisor to several American Presidents, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) and Harry S. Truman; was a successful businesswoman; and founded one of the first Historically Black Universities, Bethune-Cookman College in Florida. Recently, Bethune’s statue was unveiled in the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall, replacing a Confederate statue. What begins as a school class visit to Washington D.C. to the U.S. Capitol’s Sta

Fuente Ovejuna Written by Lope de Vega Adapted and directed by Mariano de Paco Serrano Presented by Teatro Círculo at the Chain Theatre 312 W. 36th Street, 3rd Floor, Manhattan, NYC October 7-23, 2022 María Fontanals and Juan Luis Acevedo. Photo by Michael Palma Mir The exceedingly prolific Lope de Vega (1562-1635) was one of the most important writers of the Spanish Golden Age, a flowering in the arts in Spain that took place from roughly 1492 to 1659. Teatro Círculo, a bilingual Latinx theater company that stages Golden Age and contemporary works in Spanish alongside a modern dance series, begins its 2022-2023 season , taking place at midtown's Chain Theatre while Teatro Círculo's East Village home undergoes renovation, with de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna (?1612-1614; published 1619). Set in 1476 and based on historical events, Fuente Ovejuna is named for the village in which it takes place, the citizens of which must decide how to respond to the tyrannical abuses visited

Measure for Measure Written by William Shakespeare Directed by Beth Ann Hopkins and Raquel Chavez Presented by Smith Street Stage at The Mark O’Donnell Theater at The Entertainment Community Fund Arts Center 160 Schermerhorn Street, Brooklyn, NYC September 28-October 15, 2022 Mahayla Laurence & cast. Photo: Bjorn Bolinder, Find the Light Photography The resonances between Smith Street Stage's new production of William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and the ongoing protests in Iran are unmissable. The flashpoint for these massive protests was the death of a young woman named Mahsa Amini, arrested for improperly wearing her hijab, in the custody of Iran's morality police, and Smith Street rousingly frames Shakespeare's play through mass resistance by women to patriarchal policing of their bodies in a Vienna in which a government crackdown on morality means, for instance, that having a child while engaged is punishable by execution. Such is the case for Claudio (T

Complicity Written by Diane Davis Directed by Illana Stein Presented by Eden Theater Company at The New Ohio Theatre 154 Christopher St., Manhattan, NYC September 30-October 15, 2022 Nadia Sepsenwol, Katie Broad, and Christian Paxton. Photo credit: Ashley Garrett By end of Complicity , set in a Hollywood colliding with #MeToo and Time's Up, it was hard not to think of Audre Lorde's admonition that the "master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." Diane Davis's play, making its world premiere at The New Ohio, offers neither uncomplicated heroes nor easy fixes in its look at a film and television industry that remains endemically, perhaps irremediably patriarchal–and in this, a reflection of the culture in which it is embedded. What Complicity does offer is an unflinching exploration of accountability, particularly among women, through multidimensional characters who compellingly embody the tensions among models of change, between pragmatism and