Thinking Theater NYC

From May 18th through May 21st, Theater for the New City Executive Director Crystal Field will present Stop Kiss , by Diana Son, a powerful and heart-wrenching love story that will take you on a journey of laughter, tears, and, ultimately, hope. This non-linear narrative follows the story of Sara and Callie, two women who meet in New York City and form an unlikely bond that quickly blossoms into a beautiful romance. But their happiness is soon shattered by a violent hate crime. With sharp, witty dialogue and deeply moving moments,  Stop Kiss  explores themes of love, identity, and the devastating impact of intolerance. This queer love story promises to tug at your heartstrings and leave you with a renewed sense of the power of love in the face of adversity. The production, directed by Suzanne DiDonna and performed by Luísa Galatti, Pamela Torres, Christina Loper, Sam McCarthy, Antoni Danieluk, and Mamadou Jalloh, aims to captivate and inspire audiences of all backgrounds. When: May 18

On May 6th at 4pm (doors open at 3:30 pm) at the  Jersey City Theater Center , located right off the Grove Street PATH station Beim-ish Productions will be present an in-person script reading of cataclysm.begins , an LGBTQIA+ dystopian YA web series, with opening words by Justine Evyn Saliski of Garden State Equality. The reading will be followed by a Q&A moderated by George Carrillo of the Don’t Think About It podcast! This event is being held in collaboration with Hudson Pride Center , Bergen County LGBTQ+ Alliance , and Garden State Equality . Tickets can be purchased at  http://seetickets.us/event/cataclysmbegins-season-1-script-reading/544343  (use the discount code LGBTQ10 at checkout for a discounted ticket).

A Séance with Mom Written by Nancy Redman Directed by Austin Pendleton Presented at Chain Studio Theatre 312 W. 36th St., Manhattan, NYC April 20-23, 2023 [Update 5/1/23: shows added May 24-June 4, 2023 (no performance May 29)] Nancy Redman Nancy Redman appears onstage, a simple table in front of her, a walker off to the side. Within seconds, we are immersed in a séance involving two then three then four characters—all emerging from only Redman. Redman plays Nadine, a woman who has something urgent to address with her dead mother, Gussy. Redman manages multi-faceted character work, each character in conversation with the other, complete with different gestures, accents, and mannerisms. The effect is riveting and, ultimately, deeply cathartic. The heart of the show comprises Nadine’s mission to reach her mother through a séance in order to talk. An unwitting rabbi plays the bumbling gatekeeper to the spirits in the séance, while Nadine’s something—actually several somethings—to tell her

The Devil and the Playwright Written by Steven J. Harris Directed by Bradly Valenzuela Presented at Theater for the New City 155 First Ave, Manhattan, NYC April 26-30, 2023 Tori Jewell and Fé Torres. Photo by Ai Toyoshima   In The Devil and the Playwright , from Swiss playwright and actor Steven J. Harris, titular playwright Jordy (Tori Jewell) joins the rolls of those artists, fictional and non-fictional, who have (or in the latter case, are said to have) offered their souls to the Devil in exchange for success. The distinction between fictional and non-fictional all but melts away in the aftermath of Jordy's own Faustian bargain, as The Devil and the Playwright whisks her along a Stoppard-adjacent, quasi-picaresque, and extremely meta journey. Jordy's travails treat the audience to a sharp-witted and uproariously funny show that explores the nexus of page, stage, life, and love.  Ellis Charles Hoffmeister and  Flo Maier. Photo by Ai Toyoshima In a preview of what is to come

The In Scena! Italian Theater Festival, which begins on May 1 , will collaborate with the Hystrio Award - Scritture di Scena, one of the most prestigious theater awards in Italy. Since 2020, In Scena! has awarded an Italian playwright, who then travels to New York to work with a local playwright and a translator on the English adaptation of their play. During the 2023 edition of In Scena!, the festival will welcome two playwrights, winners of the special mention in the 2020 and the 2021 edition. The award-winning writers will be mentored by Italian-American playwrights as part of the combined project of Kairos Italy theater and Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimo’ to give more visibility to Italian-American playwrights. Thanks to the international partnership between the Hystrio Award and In Scena!, playwrights Giulia Trivero, with her play Edera and Giorgio BR Franchi, with his play Amazon Crime , are the respective winners of the 2021 and 2022 Hystrio Award - Scritture di Scena, special me

Grownup Written and performed by Emily Stout Directed by Mary Rose Branick Presented by The Associates Theater Ensemble at MITU580 580 Sackett St., Unit A – Ground Fl, Brooklyn, NYC April 21-30, 2023 Emily Stout. Photo by Eileen Meny. If someone asked you to identify the moment when you became a grownup, what would your answer be? That imagined boundary–and its crossing–is one of the concerns of Grownup , a superb new solo show from Emily Stout, one of the founding members of The Associates Theater Ensemble. Stout reveals early on that even though she currently may not be good at many areas of being an adult (a lack of mastery to which, no doubt, many of us can relate), she dreamed of being grown up, which she associated with hardship, since she was a young child. While she fantasizes some such hardships as a child, some are also very real, such as a persistent insomnia that takes hold in elementary school (but also, in a nuance characteristic of the show, later, if somewhat inadverte

  The cast of The Country Play A peaceful retirement is turned upside down by two unexpected house guests in Richard Ploetz’s The Country Play . The production will have its World Premiere at Theater for the New City (TNC), with opening night scheduled for April 27. The play runs until May 14 and is directed by Job Ethan Christenson. The Country Play was inspired and loosely drawn from events from Ploetz’s 20+ years in his country house in Northwestern Connecticut. Born in Metuchen, NJ, Ploetz grew up outside of Albany and has lived in the same East Village walk-up apartment (on Saint Marks Place) since 1975. A lifelong New Yorker, Ploetz escapes to the country whenever he can. His first play, written in a cabin in Northern Vermont in 1969, led to his studying playwriting at the Yale Drama School. Crystal Field, Founder and Executive Director of Theater for the New City, shared her thoughts on the production: "I'm thrilled to be producing The Country Play by Richard Ploetz in

Tushrik Fredricks and Shamel Pitts in TOUCH OF RED at MCA Chicago, April 2023. © Jeremy Lawson Photography, courtesy of MCA Chicago Beginning April 27th, New York Live Arts (Live Arts) will present the New York premiere of Touch of RED , a new work by the award-winning movement artist Shamel Pitts, co-created and performed by his Brooklyn-based arts collective TRIBE. Drawing inspiration from two distinct arts requiring rapid-fire footwork – boxing and the African-American jazz dance style Lindy Hop – this ten-round duet is performed by Pitts and Tushrik Fredericks, who debuted with the Afrofuturistic collective in the critically-acclaimed 2022 show BLACK HOLE: Trilogy and Triathlon . Set in a stylized ring designed by the 2015 McArthur Fellow Mimi Lien and featuring cinematic video mapping by Lucca Del Carlo, lighting by the veteran Australian designer Rus Snelling, original music by Sivan Jacobovitz, and costumes by the acclaimed experimental fashion star Dion Lee, Touch of RED exam

La caída de Rafael Trujillo ( The Downfall of Rafael Trujillo ) Written by Carmen Rivera Directed by Cándido Tirado Presented by Teatro Círculo at the Chain Theatre 312 W. 36th Street, 3rd Floor, Manhattan, NYC April 14-30, 2023 José Cheo Oliveras. Photo by Israel Franco Müller In case anyone is unfamiliar with what sort of leader the title character of playwright Carmen Rivera's historical drama La caída de Rafael Trujillo ( The Downfall of Rafael Trujillo ) was, the production begins with some implied torture, followed shortly by Trujillo (José Cheo Oliveras) ordering the extrajudicial killing of a man who had written critically of Trujillo and his regime. Beginning in 1930, Trujillo ruled the Dominican Republic for just over three decades, both directly and through puppet presidents, and Rivera's play, presented by Teatro Círculo in Spanish with English overtitles, zeroes in on the final five, deftly compressing them into an engrossing view from within the dictator's in

Henry Temple, Zuzu, and Devin Romero. Photo by mikiodo Northern Manhattan’s UP Theater Company , who staged last spring's terrific  A Barn Play (read our review here ), is celebrating its 13th Season with their first production featuring live music: the world premiere of The Best Punk Band in Conway, Missouri: An Oral History of Presley Cox and The Fallout Five , by Kirby Fields. This semi-musical flashback focuses on members of a regionally infamous 1988 punk band who dive into their past to regain control of their own troubled story. Directed by Rachael Murray, the show runs from May 3-20, 2023 at Fort Washington Collegiate Church in Inwood.  In The Best Punk Band in Conway, Missouri , Presley Cox and her former band members replay their hard-knocked, youthful history of forming a punk band to escape their small-town lives. With a cast of eight playing nearly fifty roles, this new play with original songs asks the question, “Can you create your own culture to escape your own roo

Little Funerals . Courtesy 369gradi. The New York City-based Kairos Italy Theater, in association with the Italy-based KIT Italia and Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò at NYU, will present the 10th anniversary season of the In Scena! Italian Theater Festival NY, a festival of Italian theater taking place in all five boroughs of NYC, from May 1st through 16th.  The festival’s first edition was part of the 2013 Year of Italian Culture in the United States, and it was supported by the Embassy of Italy in DC and Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò at NYU, which subsequently became one of the organizers. The festival has since become an annual event, and this year, the festival will also return to Boston, while going for the very first time to Los Angeles, Detroit, and San Diego. Admission to all shows and events in the festival will be free, and all shows will be performed in Italian with English subtitles. For more information, visit www.inscenany.com , and visit Thinking Theater NYC for extensive c

Television Written and directed by Cameron Darwin Bossert Presented by Thirdwing at the wild project 195 E. 3rd Street, Manhattan, NYC April 6-22, 2023 Aprella Godfrey Barule in Television. Photo by Valerie Terranova. Mass media, for better and worse, helps to create what scholar Benedict Anderson termed imagined communities, which foster the perspective of belonging to a group, such as a nation, that includes many people one doesn't know and will never actually meet. Television , the new play from the reliably compelling Cameron Darwin Bossert, imagines what happens when the televisual media consumed by a community is produced by that same, actual community. Television is presented by Thirdwing, a hybrid theater and streaming company founded by Bossert with a subscription model offering new content every month, either online, in-person, or both, and tickets to the show are available on an individual basis or as part of a monthly subscription or a yearly subscription or non-subscr

World-renowned celebrity portrait photographer Mark Mann will celebrate the release of his new coffee table book Movement at the Still Point: An Ode to Dance with a one-night-only star-studded evening of dance at the Joyce Theater, Monday, April 10, 2023. Celebrating the power of expression, in movement and stillness, Movement at the Still Point: An Evening of Dance offers a multi-disciplinary and multi-generational program of ballet, modern, tap, hip hop, contemporary, tango, and musical theater with stars from New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, Broadway, Martha Graham Dance Company and more. This eclectic bill of world premieres and fan favorites capture the dynamism and the energy of mediums of both dance and photography. Mann, who originally hails from the sun-soaked streets of Glasgow, Scotland, has photographed countless famous faces, from President Barack Obama, President Bill Clinton, Iggy Pop, to Rihanna, Martin Scorcese, and Eartha Kitt, to name only a few. His e