Thinking Theater NYC

The GynoKid Written and performed by Claire Ayoub Presented by Try Anyway Productions at The Kraine Theater 85 E 4th St, Manhattan, NYC February 19-March 5, 2023 Who among us has never thought at some stage of our youth that our parents were embarrassing? Now just imagine if your parents also regularly saw parts of your friends' mothers–and your coaches, teachers, and eventually your friends–that society normally deems "private." Being a "GynoKid," the child of an OB-GYN father and nurse midwife mother, adds some extra wrinkles to growing up for Claire Ayoub, whose autobiographical solo show is currently part of the 17th annual FRIGID Fringe festival . In The GynoKid , Ayoub reflects on growing up Catholic in small-town Connecticut in a household with two experts on reproductive health, using the same blend of humor and honesty that she describes having made her parents popular with decades' worth of patients. Ayoub absorbingly leads us through her developme

Pretty Beast Written and performed by Kazu Kusano Presented by FRIGID New York at The Kraine Theater 85 E 4th St, Manhattan, NYC February 18-March 1, 2023 Kazu Kusano. Photo by Matt Misisco The contrast suggested by the title of comedian Kazu Kusano's solo show Pretty Beast , currently part of the 17th annual FRIGID Fringe festival, gestures towards the resistance that she encounters as a woman pursuing a career viewed as insufficiently feminine, especially in her native Japan. When she is younger and a class clown (and also likes, unconventionally, to play sports with the boys), her classmates call her " Otoko-Onna " ("boy-girl"); and when she becomes a party girl at the end of high school, her atypicality frightens away the opposite sex. Her acting teacher tries to force her into his own traditional mold, and recommendations to settle down and behave appropriately for a woman comes from even closer and more hurtful quarters. When Kusano, now based in Los Ange

Seis Written by Federico Roca Directed by Pablo Andrade Presented by Teatro Círculo at the Chain Theatre 312 W 36th St., 3rd floor, Manhattan, NYC February 16-26, 2023 Photo courtesy of Teatro Círculo Seis , from award-winning playwright Federico Roca, is named for six trans women who were murdered in Roca's native Uruguay between 2012 and 2013. The violence propagated against these women, as Seis powerfully reminds us, represents a mere fraction of the global violence against trans and other queer people–rising, where queerness is not in fact legally punishable by death, to a kind of unofficial death penalty, as the play puts it–as well as one extreme on the spectrum of ostracization, pathologization, and discrimination faced by LGBTQIA+ individuals. Presented, in Spanish with English overtitles, as part of Teatro Círculo's CALLBACKseries2023, Seis shines a sometimes funny, frequently poignant spotlight on the persistence of homo- and transphobia while not neglecting instanc

How to Be an Ethical Slut Written and performed by Brooke McCarthy Presented by FRIGID New York at UNDER St. Marks 94 St. Marks Place, Manhattan, NYC February 18-27, 2023 Brooke McCarthy. Photo credit: Michael Rosas Whatever our advances in how we conceive of gender and sexuality, heteronormativity stubbornly refuses to relinquish its patriarchal grip on our culture - appropriately, perhaps, for an ownership-based model of relationships. But other, better alternatives have at least gained a bit of mainstream ground in recent years, and How to Be an Ethical Slut charts its course through these sometimes choppy but ultimately liberatory waters. Written and performed by Brooke McCarthy and presented as part of the 17th annual FRIGID Fringe festival , the award-winning How to Be an Ethical Slut offers a guided tour through stages of slutdom leading to its ethical incarnation. An honest, often hilarious mix of solo show and cabaret, How to Be an Ethical Slut includes a few surprising rev

(beyond) Doomsday Scrolling Collectively created by the members of AnomalousCo Directed by Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva with Jeremy Goren and Diana Zhdanova Presented by AnomalousCo at HERE 145 6th Ave, Manhattan, NYC February 16-26, 2023 Photo by Jarrett Robertson The war in Ukraine, which will have stretched on for a year as of late next week, looms large in (beyond) Doomsday Scrolling , a formidable new devised theater piece from feminist performance collective AnomalousCo, but the full scope of the show's consideration of women in wartime is much more capacious. (beyond) Doomsday Scrolling imagines women from different eras and locations coming together to shelter in a theater, a space which has historically played various important roles during times of conflict. The result is what AnomalousCo founding Co-Artistic Director Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva characterized to Thinking Theater NYC as "one part theatre, one part protest," with naturalistic scenes "ruptured b

@make_us_scream Written and directed by Elisabeth Yancey, Courtney Stennett, and Kasey Connolly Presented by 3ofCups Productions at The Kraine Theater 85 E 4th St, Manhattan, NYC February 15-March 4, 2023 Courtney Stennett, Elisabeth Yancey, and Kasey Connolly. Photo credit: Dallas Riley The culture of live-streaming is by now well-established as a focus in horror film, with movies such as Cam (2018), Dashcam (2021), and Deadstream (2022) providing just a few recent, high-profile examples. With @make_us_scream , presented as part of the 17th annual FRIGID Fringe festival, Brooklyn theater and film collective 3ofCups transposes this subgenre to the stage in a satisfyingly sinister (yet not afraid to get silly) play about a live-streaming audition that ends up having some unforeseen complications. The play's title refers to a social media channel run by Cora (Kasey Connolly), Bree (Courtney Stennett), and–boasting a classic androgynous Final Girl name–Sam (Elisabeth Yancey). The

Proud Written by Judd Lear Silverman Directed by Eric Parness Co-presented by the 14Y Theater and Rising Sun Performance Company at the Theater at the 14th Street Y 344 E 14th St, Manhattan, NYC February 10-26, 2023 L to R: Rick Benson, Elliot Colby, and Duane Chivon Ferguson. Photo by David Anthony Wayne Anderson. A band of peacocks parading down a Philadelphia expressway presents, on the one hand, a comic juxtaposition, but on the other hand, these birds on blacktop also evoke the ruinous conflict between human practices and non-human nature that is a central concern of Rising Sun Performance Company's world premiere play Proud . Running in repertory with Rising Sun's Untitled Calamity Jane Play and based on an actual 2018 incident, Proud follows a quartet of peacocks who escape the Philadelphia Zoo and spend part of their several days of freedom walking along the interstate. This journey, imagined as a secret mission, has personal implications for each bird at the same

Photo: Jarrett Robertson Beginning next week,  AnomalousCo , a predominantly queer woman-led, nearly all immigrant, feminist, transdisciplinary performance collective, will present  (beyond) Doomsday Scrolling  from February 16th to 26th at Manhattan's HERE Arts Center . The show is set in an imagined theater in which women from different periods and places come together for shelter from war. By means of this setting,  (beyond) Doomsday Scrolling  centers women in its consideration of war, displacement, and resistance. Described as a dramatic cabaret, the production is multilingual and multigenerational, performed by twelve women and one man. The cast members hail from Ukraine, Poland, Iceland, Georgia, Moldova, Russia, Scotland, Italy, Cuba, and the United States, and the show's live band is headed by Ukrainian musician and anti-war activist Lesya Verba. (beyond) Doomsday Scrolling incorporates songs from different cultures, eras, and genres, as well as text from the long trad