Thinking Theater NYC

  Dismantling Prospero Written by Tom Rowan Directed Kevin Ray Choreographed by Ai Toyoshima Produced by Marty Goldin@ TBD Capital, LLC Presented as part of the Dream Up Festival at Theater for the New City 155 First Avenue, Manhattan, NYC August 24-September 7, 2025 Andy Start and Joshua Elijah Lewis. Photo by Kevin Ray. A storm is brewing in the Midwestern University Dance Department in Tom Rowan's timely and trenchant new production, Dismantling Prospero . Set in the years immediately after the COVID-19 pandemic, the play follows veteran dance professor Griffin Bates (Andy Start) as he mounts a new ballet version of The Tempest , putting wild waters into a proper roar. In a bold flourish of ego (and perhaps vaulting ambition) he casts himself as Prospero, transforming the rehearsal process into a battleground over artistry, authority, and the pressures of contemporary campus politics. In an era of bad faith questions, quick answers, and even quicker judgments, Dismantling Prospe...

A Pot of Basil, or, Thank You for Being a Friend Written by Heather Jeanne Violanti Directed by Jannifer Sandella Presented at The Rat NYC 68 Jay Street, Brooklyn, NYC August 23-31, 2025 Isabel (N. Marie Teagno), Marie Antoinette (Mary Lane Townsend), and Cockroach (Lisa Whitten). Photo by Joe Pacifico How any particular New Yorker experienced the COVID lockdown depended not only on personality and living situation but also on location, field of labor, and other socioeconomic factors. Set during the spring and summer of 2020, A Pot of Basil, or, Thank You for Being a Friend acknowledges the importance of this latter category of differences without minimizing the former and while adeptly evoking the widespread feelings of uncertainty, powerlessness, and isolation that cut across demographic lines. Zooming in (pun absolutely intended) on the experience of one woman in the early months of lockdown, A Pot of Basil , from playwright Heather Jeanne Violanti, employs an absurdist approach to...

Kitchen Sink Theatre Company (Katie Royse Ginther, Artistic Director), with producing partners Clara Livingston and Elena Freck, proudly presents a fully staged production of the new play Protect the Protectors , running from September 11th to September 14th. Five years from now, in the Raleigh offices of defense contractor Boykin Dean, Millie and Francine are training computers to do…something. That something is very important for protecting our protectors, our boys (oh, sorry, our ‘people’) abroad who fight for our freedom. Their families are proud. Their security clearance is low. Their supervisor Mrs. Buckley is the girlboss to end all girlbosses. When new coworker Loretta Lee and her direct ties to the military disrupts the peaceful duo, Millie must muddle through ethical questions about the true nature of her work amidst a budding secret romance. Protect the Protectors  is written by Elena Freck ( WalkOver ), directed by Clara Livingston, and stage managed by Gab Cain ( Lippy...

From playwright Dylan Jernet, who also directs and stars alongside Grace del Corral, Mackenzie Bruen, and Adam Leong, comes new play The Dylan & Grace Show.  The Dylan & Grace Show  is a play set in the 1980s about a couple who dream of hosting their own live TV variety show—complete with dance numbers and comedy sketches—drawing inspiration from a vibrant mix of Mexican and American pop culture. But their fantasy begins to unravel when Grace is treated differently by the media, and she uncovers serious abuses of power behind the scenes. Faced with a difficult choice, she must decide whether to speak out—even if it means losing everything they’ve worked so hard to build. The Dylan & Grace Show  opens at the NuBox Theatre (754 9th Ave, Manhattan, NYC) on September 12-14, 2025.  Tickets are available at https://www.dylanandgrace.com/.

The Climate Fables: The Clouds Written and directed by Padraig Bond Presented by  FRIGID New York at UNDER St. Marks 94 St. Marks Place, Manhattan, NYC August 21-23, 2025 Since the most recent staging, in January, of one of the plays of Padraig Bond's cycle The Climate Fables , the United States government has moved from not doing nearly enough to address humanity's effect on the climate to actively fighting anything that might mitigate climate disaster. Closing out a literally fiery summer, The Climate Fables returned to UNDER St. Marks with a (very) staged reading of a new installment of the cycle from FRIGID resident playwright Bond: The Clouds . The Clouds closes the multi-play, millennium-spanning arc of the witchy Miranda and the burden that she bears of struggling to reconcile humanity and a world ecology devastated by anthropocentric climate change and ever less able to support life. Alongside Miranda, a cast of new characters, including one from a skybound society...

Destination Undefined Written by Changshuo Liu Directed by Yibin Wang Presented by Cellunova at Theatre 154 154 Christopher St. #1E, Manhattan, NYC August 22-September 7, 2025 L to R: Tom Shane, Lyra Lys, Victor Gao, Jueun Kang, Chisom Awachie. Photo by Ziru Wang The stage has acted as a site to think about the personhood and treatment of artificial beings at least since Karel Čapek's 1920 play R.U.R. , in which he coined the word "robot," and such considerations have only gained in contemporary urgency as, for instance, corporate CEOs envision AI agents replacing not only human workers, including therapists and teachers, but also friends and romantic partners. Destination Undefined , a world premiere sci-fi play from Cellunova, " a multidisciplinary theater company led by first-generation immigrant and BIPOC artists, creating socially engaged work that fuses bold storytelling with new technologies ," takes an engrossing, retrospective look at a not-too-distan...

Road Kills Written by Sophie McIntosh Directed by Nina Goodheart Presented by Good Apples Collective and ryan duncan-ayala at Paradise Factory 64 E 4th St., Manhattan, NYC August 15-September 6, 2025 Mia Sinclair Jenness and D.B. Milliken. Photo by Nina Goodheart Last summer's production of cunnicularii , from playwright Sophie McIntosh and director Nina Goodheart, used a rabbit to explore birth and parenthood; in this summer's production of new work Road Kills , the creative pair of McIntosh and Goodheart return with a play in which all of the non-human animals we see are dead and the parents remain offstage. Family legacies and expectations nonetheless loom large for the play's central duo, who come to know one another more and more intimately, if haltingly and sometimes unwillingly, as they clean up roadkill in rural Wisconsin, one voluntarily and the other as a condition of community service. Another in a line of memorable shows by Good Apples Collective, Road Kills ...

Anti-Gone Created by Sivan Raz Presented by Needs More Work Productions at FRIGID New York 's 5th Annual Little Shakespeare Festival at UNDER St Marks 94 St Marks Pl, Manhattan, NYC August 14-17, 2025 L to R: Elizabeth Fox, Emily Phelps, and Penelope Rose Deen, and Photo by Noah Simon Jampol Anti-Gone , created by Needs More Work Productions, is something like a reimagining of Sophocles’ Antigone , one of the most enduring tragedies of the Greek stage. Rather than retell the story in straightforward fashion, the company makes the audience a collaborator, placing us inside the questions of justice, memory, and communal responsibility that have haunted this text for centuries. Staged in the intimate confines of UNDER St. Marks as part of the Little Shakespeare Festival, the production opens with a bag at center stage, the body of Polynices within; players come and go; there is a bit of very fine crowd work, and the sound of a cello plucking and bowing. From the first moment, we are ...

Retrospective Written by T.J. Elliott Directed by Gifford Elliott Presented by Knowledge Workings Theater at AMT Theater 354 W 45th St., Manhattan, NYC August 13-16, 2025 Clint consoling Rory.  L to R: Jeremiah Alexander, Mark Thomas McKenna, Adara Totino, Jasmine Dorothy Haefner. Photo by Marjorie Phillips Elliott Thinking about the afterlife of art is not so unusual, but Retrospective , written and directed by father and son team T.J. Elliott and Gifford Elliott, respectively, instead focuses on the afterlife of the artist. For the play's Rory McGrory ( Mark Thomas McKenna ), the titular retrospective involves taking a new look at his relationship not only to his work as a painter but also to significant others (in both senses of the term) from his past and to his sense of self–and ultimately, to reconsider what really matters. Retrospective is making its New York debut along with four new musicals and seven other original plays as part of Broadway Bound Theatre Festival's...

Overlap Written by Erin Proctor Directed by Dante Piro Presented by Rogue Theater Festival  at The Siggy at The Flea Theatre in association with Abingdon Theatre Company 20 Thomas St, Manhattan, NYC August 7, 2025 Julia Fink. Photo courtesy of Alton PR It is all a matter of understanding after a crash in Overlap , the excellent new play by Erin Proctor, directed by Dante Piro. Presented as part of the 2025 Rogue Theatre Festival (August 4–10) at The Flea NYC and streaming on CUR8, the production blends heartbreak and humor, tragedy and rom com in equal measure. It is a romance, a ghost story, and a meditation on both finishing the staging of a play and sustaining a relationship. The play opens in familiar enough territory: Maya (Julia Fink), a twenty-six-year-old playwright/barista, and Daniel (Ryan Pangracs), a twenty-five-year-old dramaturg/shift manager, meet while working the same Starbucks shift. Their banter turns into creative partnership, and their early romance moves ...

UNSEX'd Written by Jay Whitehead and Daniel Judes Directed by Josh Bradley Presented by JB Theatricals at UNDER St. Marks 94 St. Marks Place, Manhattan, NYC August 10-17, 2025 The playful use of bardcore covers of contemporary songs in scene transitions encapsulates both the era-bending sense of humor in Jay Whitehead and Daniel Judes's Renaissance-set UNSEX'd and the continuities in the issues that the play raises between the early modern period and our own. In commercial theater in Shakespearean England, public self-exhibition onstage was frowned upon for women, so female roles were played by boys or young men, and UNSEX'd , with psychological acuity and enough bawdy humor to make the Bard proud, irresistibly draws us into the friendship and rivalry between two such specialists in female characters in Shakespeare's own company. In its run at UNDER St. Marks, UNSEX'd is making its U.S. premiere as part of the FRIGID New York 's 5th annual Little Shakespe...

The Mousetrap, or Prince Hamlet wrote a dumb play and now we have to do it… Written by Margaret Rose Caterisano Directed by Jackson Paul Walker Presented by Broomstick Theatre Co. at UNDER St. Marks 94 St. Marks Place, Manhattan, NYC August 2-14, 2025 If in William Shakespeare's England, plays were required to be approved by the Master of the Revels and playwrights would take care not to openly criticize the current monarchy, in today's United States, a major network has curried favor for a merger by canceling a show critical of the government, while the government itself takes time out to attack episodes of South Park that satirize its officials. In this environment of governmental attacks on the arts, The Mousetrap, or Prince Hamlet wrote a dumb play and now we have to do it… , from playwright and professor Margaret Rose Caterisano, takes up the question of the place of art in calling out those in power through a return to Hamlet and its play-within-a-play that dramatizes t...

As You Will Created by Conor Mullen, David Brummer, and George Hider August 3-16, 2025 As You Wish It...or The Bride Princess....or What You Will Written by Michael Hagins Directed by Kat Santomoreno and Michael Hagins Presented by Fork the Odds Productions July 31-August 9, 2025 Part of the Little Shakespeare Festival 2025 presented by FRIGID New York at Under St. Marks, 94 St Marks Place, Manhattan, NYC, July 31-August 17, 2025 For most American high school students, their experience with Shakespeare is with the tragedies, and surely this contributes to the sense of Shakespeare as the Bard, writer of elevated, high culture entertainment. Of course, in reality, in his own time, Shakespeare was anything but, which is beautifully captured in this year’s Little Shakespeare Festival, “Not Your English Teacher’s Shakespeare.” The unscripted, improvisational As You Will and the Shakespearean  Princess Bride  parody  As You Wish It are both poignant reminders that Shakespeare ...