Thinking Theater NYC

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...

In Their Footsteps Written and directed by Ash Singer Based on oral histories with Ann Kelsey, Judy Jenkins Gaudino, Jeanne "Sam" Christie, Lily Adams, and Doris "Lucki" Allen Presented by Infinite Variety Productions in partnership with Bronx Music Heritage Center at Bronx Music Hall 438 E 163rd St., Bronx, NYC October 16-26, 2025 L to R: Becca Jimenez, Esther Ayomide Akinsanya, Vianca Pérez, Amanda Corbett, and Eunji Lim. Photo by Natalia Arai  Whatever progress has been made, the organized mass murder and ecological devastation of war continues to be recognized as a valid political exercise, and women continue to be insufficiently recognized in the historical record. It is precisely at the intersection of war and women's experience that documentary theater piece In Their Footsteps delves into the individual histories of a quintet of women who served, in military and civilian roles, during the Vietnam War. In Their Footsteps comes to us from Infinite Vari...

The Maenads Written by Stephen Foglia Directed by Phillip Christian Smith Presented by Harborcoat Productions and The Tank at The Tank 312 W 36th St., 1st Fl., Manhattan, NYC September 18-October 12, 2025 L to R: Alex Stene, Keith Michael Pinault, DJ Davis, Charles Manning, and Thaddeus Daniels. Photo by Lyle Dickie. In their book Why Does Patriarchy Persist? (Polity, 2018), Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider observe that patriarchy associates "masculinity with pseudo-independence (and the shielding of relational desires and sensitivities)," leading to "a loss of relationship: a loss of intimacy and connection" (22). It is in response to just such lack that the quintet of men in Phillip Christian Smith's hilarious and incisive play The Maenads find themselves on a mountain together, experimenting with an ancient–and female–identity. As they try to model themselves on the eponymous maenads, female followers of Dionysus in ancient Greek cultural narratives, audien...

The Glitch Written by Kipp Koenig Directed by Mark Koenig Presented by AEI Theatricals at The Jerry Orbach Theater at The Theater Center 210 W 50th St., Manhattan, NYC September 24-November 2, 2025 L to R: Danielle Augustine, Hannah Doherty (front), Jacquie Bonnet, Sunny Makwana. Photo by Shawn Salley What if you could preview your potential child the same way that you can use AR to preview how a piece of furniture would fit in your space before you click buy? That's the service offered by the startup in Kipp Koenig's sci-fi play The Glitch : the chance for prospective parents to meet a holographic AI version of the child they might have. Set in the near future, The Glitch engagingly blends humor and poignancy in its exploration of the rippling ramifications of one client's use of the service, touching on secrecy, guilt, generational trauma, and even metaphysical boundaries.  Jacquie Bonnet and Sunny Makwana. Photo by Shawn Salley The client in question, d...