Thinking Theater NYC

I Need a Hero Written and performed by Kayla Engeman Presented by Manhattan Theatre Source and FRIGID New York in collaboration with Arts on Site and 721 Decatur Community Garden at UNDER St. Marks 94 St. Marks Place, Manhattan, NYC (and via livestreaming) March 23-25, 2023 Kayla Engeman I Need a Hero makes it clear from the outset, as actor and comedian Kayla Engeman dances in parallel with herself as she appears in a 1998 home movie, that this solo show is firmly a multimedia affair. Aside from the humor in this temporal palimpsest, the juxtaposition of media such as this with more contemporary images, text messages, and video suggests how much our relationships to our own pasts have changed over the past couple of decades–no one today, for example, would even think to call a video taken on their phone a home movie. In I Need a Hero , Engeman takes a (mostly) humorous look at her own personal past in order to reach some conclusions about her present (including the very well taken...

Furious Written and performed by Emily Fury Daly Presented by Manhattan Theatre Source and FRIGID New York in collaboration with Arts on Site and 721 Decatur Community Garden at UNDER St. Marks 94 St. Marks Place, Manhattan, NYC (and via livestreaming) March 23-24, 2023 Emily Fury Daly. Photo by Kat Soriano Furious , the hilarious solo show from actor and comedian Emily Fury Daly, includes no shortage of meta moments that underscore its iconoclastic humor–from Daly's pre-show dancing in a pink reflective vest, sunglasses, and headphones to artists such as Fiona Apple and Dolly Parton (a public private display that could be said to characterize many solo shows), to her incorporating the usual pre-show announcements (along with some others) into the show itself, to her consistently drawing attention to the genre commonplaces of the show's structure. Furious is currently part of the EstroGenius Festival, themed Ban(ned) Together in its twenty-second year of spotlighting "...

This God Damn House Written by Matthew McLachlan Directed by Ella Jane New; Assistant Director: David Zayas Jr. Presented by the Chain Theatre 312 W. 36th Street, 3rd Floor, Manhattan, NYC March 15-April 8, 2023 Sachi Parker (Angie), Kirk Gostkowski (Jacob), and Gabriel Rysdahl (Danny). Photo by David Zayas Jr. In playwright Matthew McLachlan's marvelous This God Damn House , making its world premiere at The Chain Theatre, the dwelling in question belongs to Florida resident and longtime teacher Angie (Sachi Parker). Angie is a hoarder; but if her house is messy, her relationship with her family is messier. And if the former can be seen to symbolize aspects of the latter, the ties that bind her family are both more important than her material accumulation and less easily separated into keep and discard piles. As past traumas meet a present crisis, This God Damn House turns a sensitive but unblinking gaze upon Angie and her sons as they grapple with who they have been and will be t...

The Unseen World  Created by Ira Marlowe Episodes released January-March 2023 Available at the Unseen World Musical website Get Ready to Cry When I finally reached the ninth episode of The Unseen World , in which the cast belts out the titular final song, I was in tears. Good, deep, soul-sourced tears. But I was also loading the dishwasher. My partner entered the kitchen about this time and asked if I was crying. Indeed, yes, I was. He asked what was wrong, and I gulped out the words, “It’s so good!” I had been listening to the new podcast musical by Ira Marlowe over the past couple days during runs, commutes, and other daily activities like doing dishes. It certainly had the feeling of something I had done many times during the pandemic—elevate routine daily tasks with a bit of wonder and hope. In fact, the musical’s move to podcast was necessitated by the pandemic. Originally, The Unseen World was meant to be performed in Marlowe’s small performance space in Berkeley, CA, but th...

It’s William Shakespeare’s birthday next month, and Brooklyn’s Irondale Ensemble Project is planning a free birthday celebration fit for a (literary) king! An open mic sonnet marathon will take place on Saturday, April 1st at Cuyler Gore Park, one of the city’s oldest parks, inviting passersby to stop and read one of his 154 sonnets live from 2pm-5pm. Joined by members of the Irondale Ensemble, now celebrating forty years of artistically ambitious, cutting-edge theater, and members of the Irondale Young Company, this free event will continue through the evening, inviting the community into the ensemble’s Fort Greene theater for Shakespeare trivia, games, and improv from 6:00-9:00pm. The company held its first Shakespeare Sonnet Marathon over zoom on April 23, 2020. The 8-hour event welcomed over 100 participants from ages 9 to 90, including Academy Award nominee Ralph Fiennes; Grammy nominee Rufus Wainwright; comedian, actress and jazz singer Lea DeLaria; Tony winner Cady Huffman; Ton...

Tennessee Rising: The Dawn of Tennessee Williams Written and performed by Jacob Storms Directed by Alan Cumming Presented at AMT Theater 354 West 45th St., Manhattan, NYC February 19-April 2, 2023 Jacob Storms. Photo by Max Ruby The first thing that Jacob Storms does as the title character in his solo show Tennessee Rising: The Dawn of Tennessee Williams is to pour himself a drink, a gesture that points both to what would increasingly become a coping mechanism over the course of the playwright's lifetime and to the intimate relation to Williams in which the show positions the spectators. Storms, directed by the illustrious Alan Cumming, himself no stranger to solo theater, delivers his performance as though to an audience of confidantes, even as the show skips deftly forward through time. Anchored by no more than a couple of chairs and a table, Storms enthrallingly whisks the audience from coast to coast and year to year, from Williams having recently submitted work to a playwriti...

Death of a Salesman: A New Play Written by Austen Halpern-Graser Directed by Caroline Burkhart Presented by FRIGID New York at UNDER St. Marks 94 St. Marks Place, Manhattan, NYC February 17-March 4, 2023 Ethan Graham-Horowitz and Austen Halpern-Graser. Photo courtesy of Emily Owens PR If the version of the American Dream in 1949, when Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman made its debut, was the familiar one of a suburban house and family, then today, that dream, or at least one permutation of it, has metamorphosed into getting in on the ground floor of the next billion-dollar start-up. In this imagining of the American Dream, Mark Zukerberg has replaced the comfortably middle-class patriarch as its aspirational figure, and playwright Austen Halpern-Graser's Death of a Salesman: A New Play , currently part of the 17th annual FRIGID Fringe festival, uses one pair of such dreamers to hilariously skewer bro-laden entrepreneurial culture. Ethan Graham-Horowitz & Austen Halpern-...

Othello Written by William Shakespeare Directed by Makenna Masenheimer Presented by the New Place Players  at Casa Clara 218 E. 25 th St, Manhattan, NYC February 4-March 25, 2023 Alanah Allen and Eliott Johnson. Photo by Carol Rosegg New Place Players’ production of Othello feels both historically sensitive and modern at the same time. The proximity of actors to audience as a result of the small, intimate Casa Clara space; minimal set; lavish costumes; and well-integrated musicians reinforce much of what we teach students about the public theater of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. On the other hand, many of the production’s choices, particularly around the characters of Othello and, surprisingly, Bianca, make it even more compelling for a modern audience. As the director’s program notes detail, the production did not seek to soften the racism that explicitly or implicitly fuels the major characters’ behavior. Instead, it seems, in the production’s q...