Thinking Theater NYC

Image Quilt Dance Theater has announced upcoming performances of Sketches from the Edge of Flamenco , a theatrical work written and directed by Omonike Akinyemi, two-time New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow. The production premiered in December 2025 and continues its monthly run through March 24, 2026, with the next performance on Sunday, January 20, 2026 at 16 Cowries Space at Rodney’s, 1118 First Avenue, New York, NY. Blending live performance, flamenco, theater, film, and surreal humor, Sketches from the Edge of Flamenco unfolds through a series of emotionally charged vignettes exploring identity, power, desire, and cultural dissonance. Flamenco is treated not as tradition alone, but as a volatile, contemporary language. Food and drinks are available for purchase at the bar, creating an intimate, cabaret-style experience. The January 20, 2026 performance features live, on-stage performances by Omonike Akinyemi, Khalid Gambino, and Alexandre Lumbala. The sketches include: Rumba ...

Doing a Bradbury Written by Annabel McConnachie Directed by Zoé Zifer Presented at The Tank 312 West 36th Street, Manhattan, NYC November 14, 2025  Annabel McConnachie. Photo by Callee Egan (@calwithcamera) It's just a statistical fact that most athletes who compete in the Olympic Games will be losers, setting up a tension between the achievement of making it to such an elite level and what could be seen as the failure of not medaling. A similar situation exists in any sports championship, but the personal investment demanded of many Olympic athletes (NBA players aren't generally working day jobs and spending their own money on training to get to the finals) and the lack of tangible rewards even for most of the winners, including the underdogs that audiences profess to love, can only intensify any such tension. A fascinating embodiment of this collision among different varieties of success and failure, Australian speedskater Steven Bradbury provides the subject of Doing a Brad...

Replaced! Written and directed by Jess Lauricello Presented by The Brick in association with Laurizzary at Brick Aux 628 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn, NYC December 10-13, 2025 Nearly everyone, at some point, feels the absolute difference of the Other–perhaps because we can only ever know a fraction of another's self, perhaps because someone's worldview diverges so radically from our own that it seems impossible to comprehend. But whatever the reason, other people can sometimes seem like aliens, especially when so many of them spend so much of their time in the closed-off thrall of one screen or another. Sometimes, one may even feel like an unknowable stranger to oneself. A new production of Replaced! , the first play that Laurizzary Co-Artistic Director Jess Lauricello ever wrote, literalizes–albeit, to an extent, ambiguously–such feelings with an invigoratingly surreal body-snatching narrative that centers one young woman's fraught relationships with herself, her media-...

Actionplay has announced its upcoming performance, Actionplay Voices Choir Holiday Gala (Winter Spectacular!) & Cha-Chingle Jingle Mingle! , taking place on Thursday, December 11 at 7 p.m. at Judson Memorial Church in the East Village. The celebrated neurodiverse Actionplay Choir, featuring singers ages 15 to 61, will present a full concert of festive holiday songs. This gala performance will raise funds for the Voices Choir, Actionplay's new disability-inclusive choir, who recently performed at Night of Too Many Stars. Guest performers include Anita Hollander, an acclaimed actress, singer, and composer whose 50-year career spans Carnegie Hall and Off-Broadway. She is the creator of the award-winning musical Still Standing and serves as the National Chair of the SAG-AFTRA Performers with Disabilities Committee. The guest lineup also includes Lisa Stephen Friday, a dynamic musician, composer, and writer known for her acclaimed one-woman musical Trans Am (Keegan Theatre, Joe’s ...

Everything is Here Written by Peggy Stafford Directed by Meghan Finn Choreography by Lisa Fagan Presented by The Tank in collaboration with New Georges at  59E59 59 E 59 St., Manhattan, NYC December 3-20, 2025 L to R: Petronia Paley, Jan Leslie Harding, Mia Katigbak. Photo by Mari Eimas-Dietrich.  Early in Everything is Here , from Brooklyn-based playwright, screenwriter, and educator Peggy Stafford, one woman says to another of the latter's potential age-gap romance that age is just a number. The fact that the speaker here is a resident in an assisted-living facility talking with her nurse, though, raises the question of the limits of this maxim. Focused on a trio of the facility's residents, alongside a couple of its staff, Everything is Here contemplates the realities of aging, including through its own characters rehearsing scenes from A Streetcar Named Desire , with laugh-out-loud humor, a well-earned pathos tinged with melancholy, and a few fitting dashes of absurdity...

Interstate Written by Amina Henry Directed by Cat Miller Presented by Dixon Place and That OId Hillside at Dixon Place 161A Chrystie Street, Manhattan, NYC December 4-20, 2025 Marvelyn Ramirez, Amy Hargreaves and Willow Wilhelm. Photo by Taryn Kamauu. Being a parent can be hard. So can being an adolescent. The collision of these truths propels Amina Henry's tightly constructed new play, Interstate , which pays equally multifaceted attention to both a mother and her children as they wrestle with finding happiness, each other, and themselves during a cross-country road trip to see America (a nation that proactively works to make being a parent more difficult). The journey that Interstate takes the audience on is deeply funny as often as it's incontestably poignant, all of which is only intensified by small irruptions of strangeness along the way. Flight attendant Red (Amy Hargreaves), the mother of our protagonist family, touches on a different meaning of strangeness in the p...

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...