Thinking Theater NYC

The Wizard of Oz Written by Robert K. Benson Directed by Madeline Wall Presented by NYC Panto at Parkside Lounge 317 E. Houston, Manhattan, NYC November 22-December 20, 2025 Diego Velázquez, Jonathan Nathaniel Dingle-El, Lily Ali-Oshatz, Regan Sims, Matthew Mastromatteo, Rachel McPhee, David Hernandez III, Stephanie Marrow, Blake Williams. Photo by Michael Russell.   With Thanksgiving now in the rearview, we're once again officially in the holiday season, with all of the overcrowded trains, office parties, and throngs of tourists that come with it. Happily, it also brings the return of NYC Panto, an annual spot of unadulterated joy whether you're a seasonal skeptic or Santa superfan. Panto, a British holiday tradition, typically offers a comedic riff on a well-known folktale or fairy tale with stock characters such as the Hero and Villain and call-and-response elements, and NYC Panto follows up last year's hilarious take on "Jack and the Beanstalk" (you can read ...

What If They Ate The Baby? Written, performed, and directed by Natasha Roland and Xhloe Rice Co-Produced by SoHo Playhouse at Soho Playhouse 15 Vandam St., Manhattan, NYC November 19-December 22, 2025 Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland. Photo by Molly White. Serial Edinburgh Fringe Festival First Award winners and current SoHo Playhouse artists in residence Xhloe and Natasha, having won last winter's SoHo Playhouse International Fringe Encore Theater Series Overall Excellence Award for A Letter to Lyndon B. Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First (read our review here ), return to the SoHo's stage as the year draws to a close with What If They Ate The Baby? First performed at Edinburgh Fringe in 2023, What If They Ate The Baby? puts on full display the exhilarating fusion of clowning, physical theater, and the absurd for which the multidisciplinary duo is known. Experimenting with form and absurdism in ways that recall playwrights such Edward Albee and Caryl Churchill, this exc...

Men are Trash and I’m a Raccoon Created and performed by Felipe Luz Presented by My Black Job Productions and The Tank at The Tank 312 W 36th St., Manhattan, NYC November 21-22, 2025 Felipe Luz. Photo by Jason Albuquerque For some of us, certain musical artists play a fundamental role in our self-fashioning and can provide feelings of recognition and belonging even when those feelings are otherwise absent. For multi-hyphenate artist Felipe Luz (he/they)–or at least the version of himself presented in his solo show  Men are Trash and I’m a Raccoon –that musician is singer-songwriter Lana Del Ray. Early in this semi-autobiographical performance (Luz warns the audience that he is an unreliable narrator, even to himself, and that everything they will hear is fiction, but it is all true), he discusses how, when he was growing up in his native Brazil, Del Ray gave him both a picture of the American Dream and someone to relate to in his oft-broken-heartedness. Positioned somewhere betwee...

Blue Seal, Blue Sea (or, gay boy grieves death of gay-hating dad) Written and performed by Dante Fuoco Directed by Clara Wiest Presented at The Makers’ Space 13 Grattan St. #408, Brooklyn, NYC November 6-23, 2025 Dante Fuoco in Blue Seal, Blue Sea . Photo by Dev Hardikar. As understood by Michel Foucault, the archive is defined as the "system of discursivity": it is not a mere collection of documents but the underlying rules and conditions that determine what can be said, thought, and preserved as knowledge within a given historical period. Now add a fortuitous discovery of videotape head cleaner and the death of a deeply complicated, gay-hating father.  Dante Fuoco’s inspired one-man Blue Seal, Blue Sea treats the archive as a living medium, something that shifts and pulses according to who is brave enough to hold (or huff) it. This is brave, bold, important work, and Fuoco soars (and manages one hell of a plié). The action begins when F@gg’aught Flamé (Dante Fuoc...

Far Away Written by Caryl Churchill Directed by Sam Gibbs Presented by Stairwell Theater at Box of Moonlight 17 Saratoga Ave, Brooklyn, NYC November 6-23, 2025 L to R: Joel Watson, Avalina Ortiz, Maude Mitchell, Rebecca Tyree Gibbs. Photo by Ellie Gravitte. Caryl Churchill's 2000 play Far Away , which marries the haunting and the absurd in evoking the conflict-riven reality that its characters inhabit, has previously received perhaps only one in-person professional production in New York City, receiving its American premiere at the New York Theatre Workshop in 2002. Now, Stairwell Theater has brought Far Away to Brooklyn's Box of Moonlight, a converted warehouse space in Bushwick, giving audiences a chance to see a rarely staged work from an inimitable playwright in an immersive, site-specific staging. Making superb use of this immersiveness, Stairwell's marvelous production delivers a memorable experience of a play that has lost none of its power and prescience over the ...

Laurizarry, an indie working-class Gen Z theatre company founded by Jess Lauricello, Jaixa Irizarry, and Pedro Vierre to create the next generation of weird and subversive theatre on a dime, will present REPLACED!  this December. Written and directed by Jess Lauricello, a NYC-based playwright, theatre director, actor, and tree-hugger who believes in you and aliens, as well as the Co-Artistic Director of Laurizarry, the production will be presented with The Brick at Brick Aux (628 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11211) from Wednesday, December 10th through Saturday, December 13th at 7:00pm. Tickets are $15-$35 and are available for advance purchase at www.bricktheater.com . The performance will run approximately 60 minutes. Sometimes they come back… after a successful run in the New York Theater Festival. Replaced! is a surrealist sci-fi tragicomedy following a young woman identified only as a Daughter who returns to her hometown to find that everyone in it has been rep...

apocaLIPSTICK Written by Seth Barnes Directed by Jennie Hughes Presented by Seth Barnes, Elena Cramer, the Players Theatre Residency Program, and Forager Theatre Company at The Players Theatre 115 MacDougal St., Manhattan, NYC November 6-23, 2025 L to R: Fara Faidzan, Ben Bogdan, Kathleen Salazar, Jordan Jackson, Clayton Matthews, Elena Cramer, Michela Richards. Photo by Samori Etienne. Anyone who frequents metal or punk shows knows that when someone falls in the pit, you pick that person up. That communal etiquette does not, however, extend to zombies, as we see in the opening scene of apocaLIPSTICK , a new play from Seth Barnes set in a United States reshaped by the zombie apocalypse. Following two members of a punk band called The Dammit Janets on their cross-country search for their friend and third member, with whom they had lost contact, apocaLIPSTICK integrates live music and zombie-attack action into a narrative that, similarly to Forager's December 2024 production of Th...

The Game to Play , a new solo play by Iryna Scarola, will have a performance on Wednesday, November 19, 2025, at 7pm as part of this year's United Solo Festival at Theatre Row . In The Game to Play , a mother steps into a night where memory, spirit and loss collide – and discovers the life she thought ended is still unfolding. The Game to Play is an intimate thirty-minute solo piece that pulls the audience into a mother’s private night of reckoning. What begins as ordinary remembering becomes an unflinching look at love, meaning, and the stories we build to survive loss. This piece asks a single, disarming question: what changes when you look at your life from one step higher? The result is quiet, clear, and unexpectedly grounding. Scarola, a NYC-based actor, playwright, and filmmaker, says of The Game to Play , “This play doesn’t resolve anything. It simply holds a small space where the beauty and the ache of being human can exist together.” Her earlier version of this piece wo...

Connoly Written by Stefan Diethelm Directed by Delaney “Lanes” May Presented by Theater for the New City , Executive Director, Crystal Field 155 1st Ave, Manhattan, NYC November 6–23, 2025 Nikki Neuberger and Abby Messina. Photo by Frank Rodriguez. Set in an inpatient mental health facility, Connoly tells the story of a teenage girl recovering, or struggling to recover, from a suicide attempt. The world around her is small but charged. Dingo, her older sister, arrives with love that keeps slipping into worry. Natalya, the nurse who manages the ward with firm precision and quiet warmth, becomes an unlikely anchor. And Georgie, a companion who hovers between memory, invention, and apparition, shadows every step Connoly takes. Their collective presence forms a shifting constellation through which Connoly must learn how to move again, one uncertain, halting half choice at a time. Together they build a livable routine, then watch it buckle under the weight of panic, longing, and the imposs...

HardLove Adapted by Esin İleri and Miray Beşli from the original Turkish play by Anıl Can Beydilli Directed by Jee Duman Presented by Rue De Pera Films and Sonder Project at SoHo Playhouse 15 Vandam St, Manhattan, NYC November 6-December 12, 2025 Miray Beşli and Chandler Stephenson. Photo by Arron West What we refer to as sexual "chemistry" between two people points to an elusive, intangible, and dauntingly complex web of the mental, physical, and emotional. Turkish playwright Anıl Can Beydilli's HardLove , adapted by Esin İleri and Miray Beşli for a Turkish and American co-production that has returned to SoHo playhouse following a successful run at the 2025 Edinburgh Fringe, immerses audiences deep in the messy hammering out of the boundaries and contours of desire between two characters seeking that "click" during one amorous night together. In this encounter, HardLove offers a boldly probing and thoroughly–sometimes darkly–funny look at a pair of compelling,...

Señor Babyhead Written and performed by Analisa Raya-Flores Presented by FRIGID New York at UNDER St. Marks 94 St Marks Pl, Manhattan. NYC October 24 and November 1, 2025 The history of immigration in the United States boasts no shortage of governmental racism and inhumanity, with our current moment, however extraordinary in certain aspects, part of a recurring pattern. The solo show Señor Babyhead , written and performed by Analisa Raya-Flores, who is also responsible for its make-up, costumes, and props, including a full-head papier-mâché mask for one memorable sequence, approaches this dark topic with a clowning sensibility, a sharply honed sense of absurdity, and a refusal to cede to the audience the comfortable distance of passivity. With its recent performances part of FRIGID New York's fourth annual Days of the Dead Festival, a celebration of life and death inspired by the Día de Muertos, Señor Babyhead expertly embeds trenchant critiques in hilarious set pieces that showc...

2nd Murderer Written by Kanika Asavari Vaish Directed by Frankie DiCiaccio Presented by SoHo Shakespeare Company  at The Flea Theater 20 Thomas Street, Manhattan, NYC October 9-November 1, 2025 Txai Frota and Ahmad Maher. Photo by Travis Emery Hackett. Questions of morality, performativity, and adaptation are all in play from the moment the audience steps into the theater, welcomed into by Black Sheep’s “The Choice is Yours (Revisited)” and MF Doom’s “Coco Mango.” The lights drop; a body hits the floor; and then, in murky darkness, a shriek – and a man with a knife who decides to rewind the night. This decision to “wind it all back” amidst the darkness sets the tone for Kanika Vaish’s fantastic 2nd Murderer , a play as funny as it is unnerving, where the dramatological dream of “making it real” collides with the ethics of what performers are asked to endure for the sake of ego and entertainment. Directed with precision and aplomb by Frankie DiCiaccio and presented by SoHo Shakespea...

The Truth About Transylvania Written by Patricia Lynn Directed by Jacob Titus Presented at A.R.T./New York Theatres 502 West 53rd St., Manhattan, NYC October 24-November 1, 2025 Miles Purinton as The Concierge, Patricia Lynn as Millie, and Mark Weatherup Jr. as John. Photo by Al Foote III. The characters in Bram Stoker's novel Dracula spend a great deal of their time assembling and documenting proof of their encounters with the supernatural, collecting letters, diaries, and the fin de siècle stand-in for a podcast, a journal recorded on wax cylinders, as evidence of “a history almost at variance with the possibilities of later-day belief” (Stoker 1897). Patricia Lynn's The Truth About Transylvania , making its world premiere at A.R.T./New York Theatres in the run-up to Halloween, takes up this thread from the novel and presents a contemporary couple livestreaming their ex post facto testimony–and a paltry amount of physical evidence–in an attempt to set the record straight ab...