Thinking Theater NYC

HAVEN Boxing and local dance company Danse Theatre Surreality will present October performances of Shadowboxing in Blue  on Saturday, October 4, 11, 18, and 25th, 2025 at HAVEN Boxing (65 Scholes Street, Brooklyn, NY, 11206). The performance on the 18th will be a Spanish-English bilingual show. Tickets are $10 and are available at https://bit.ly/shadowboxing_october . Lauren Hlubny and Kyra Hauck, Artistic Directors of Danse Theatre Surreality (DTS), active in NYC and Paris, invite audiences to experience the world premiere of Shadowboxing in Blue . This innovative, multidimensional work, conceived and directed by Hlubny, takes place in a boxing gym and merges dance, theater, poetry, and live music with the intensity of combat training to examine the inner struggles we all face, including confronting deep depression and what it takes to keep going and exploring resilience, identity, and emotional growth. Paired with a boxing therapy workshop, Shadowboxing is more than ...

The Goo Written by K. Rose Dallimore Presented by New Relic Theatre at The Chain Theatre 312 W 36th St. 4th floor, Manhattan, NYC September 18-28, 2025 The cast of The Goo . Photo by Noah Simon Jampol Friendships fray and ontology is implicated under the innocuous enough auspices of six friends meeting for an annual Prospect Park picnic-cum-reunion in in K. Rose Dallimore’s brilliant original work The Goo . Inspired by The Importance of Being Earnest , Dallimore’s 90-minute, 2-act play is as much Rod Serling as Oscar Wilde. The Goo is fearless, unrelenting, disquieting, and damn funny. No ideology or identity is given quarter as Dallimore deftly skewers even our most sacred social conventions. There is mastery here, almost a sleight of hand: just when thematics and narrative stability feel most secure, and the audience most self-satisfied, the ground (or the picnic blanket in this case) gives way. No narratological or ideological creature comforts sustain once things get surreal, onc...

The Cherry Orchard Written by Anton Chekhov Adapted/translated by John Christopher Jones Directed by Ryan Czerwonko Presented by Adult Film in association with BKE Productions at Rutgers Presbyterian Church 236 W 73 St., Manhattan, NYC September 18-October 12, 2025 Ryan Czerwonko and Megan Metrikin in The Cherry Orchard . Photo by Joey Damore. Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard is replete with hauntings: the owner of the estate on which the titular orchard sits is reminded of the drowning death of her young son by the return of his tutor and mistakes a white shape in the orchard for her dead mother; the estate, and indeed the nation, are haunted by the memories of their exploited serfs (the play was written just two years before the First Russian Revolution in 1905); and the ghosts of indiscretions and lost youth dog multiple characters. Adult Film+Theatre's fantastic new production of The Cherry Orchard , which makes its debut after a yearlong development process, embraces a...

Blood Orange Written by Abigail Duclos Directed by Vernice Miller Associate directed and choreographed by Amelia Rose Estrada Presented by Et Alia Theater at A.R.T./New York Theatres 502 W 53rd St, Manhattan, NYC September 11-27, 2025 Ana Moioli and Maria Müller. Photo by Delia Dumont.  Adolescence is an arduous time on its own, without its struggles and stresses being compounded by loss, abuse, or poverty, all among the additional pressures faced by the young women in Abigail Duclos's darkly intense new play Blood Orange . In a potent production from Et Alia Theater, a company which " uplifts multicultural, women+ centered storytelling ," Blood Orange examines the sometimes desperate lengths to which its characters will go to in pursuit of the love and agency lacking in their lives. On roughly (though not strictly) alternating days, one of the play's four roles is played by a different actor, and the actor who plays that role in one version of the cast moves to a ...

let's talk about anything else Written by Anthony Anello Directed by Dennis Corsi Presented by TOSOS at The Flea 20 Thomas St., Manhattan, NYC September 7-28, 2025 Posie Lewis and Dylan Lesch. Photo by Mikiodo. If genre media is to be believed, the only proper response to an invitation to spend some time with friends at a cabin, vacation home, or rental property in the woods would be to run the other way. The friend group in Anthony Anello's riveting let's talk about anything else , though, are either unaware of or disregard the folk wisdom of decades of thriller and horror films and decide that their first trip together since a sudden trauma should be a week at an isolated Airbnb in the Berkshires. Amidst the simmering stew of the group's secrets, resentments, and jealousies, and with the appearance of an ambiguously intentioned local, more than the planned healing and hedonism will end up on the week's agenda. Originally developed by Murmuration Theater Company ,...

Packed Written and directed by Elise Wilkes Don't Push the Red Button Written and co-directed by Zachary Mailhot Directed by Chris Cavazza Presented by RJ Theatre Co. in partnership with The Actor Launchpad at AMT Theater 354 W 45th St., Manhattan, NYC August 30-October 19, 2025 Two women in an apartment. Two men in a bunker. Two short plays that peer through a lens of unusual circumstances at relationships, loneliness, and the search for connection, even if it means becoming friends with a potato. Presented as a double bill titled Close Encounters , Packed and Don't Push the Red Button are both part of the 2025 Circle Theatre Festival , which aims to highlight experimentation and urgent storytelling over Broadway-style gloss and is dedicated this year to playwright Edward Allan Barker (1950-2021). Opening the double bill is writer and director Elise Wilkes's Packed , in which two women, Gail (Katie Gilhooley) and Dina ( Wynn McClenahan ), meet for the first time as they...

Breaking the Trust Written by Bill Rogers Directed by Gerald vanHeerden Presented by Theater for the New City's Dream Up Festival, Crystal Field, Executive Director, at  Theater for the New City 155 First Avenue, Manhattan, NYC September 2-7, 2025 Jane Seaman, Wynne Anders, Shauna Bloom It’s a truism that death can bring out the worst in people, but it is no less true that death can bring out the worst about people as well. While Breaking the Trust , a play by Bill Rogers having its NYC premiere as part of the Dream Up Festival 2025 at Theater for the New City, initially seems to be an illustration of the former, by the end of this very funny play, the family has moved beyond their anger over inheritance to anger over and then reconciliation with their pasts. Siblings Norah (Wynne Anders), the eldest; Martha (Jane Seaman), the wealthiest; and Lorna (Shauna Bloom), the youngest; and their sister Donna (Deborah Unger), who stayed nearer to their childhood home than her sisters, are t...

La MaMa will present the world premiere listening party of the scripted podcast Give Me A Wildfire produced by Non Sans Content, an independent film and new media production company dedicated to artistic integrity, human curation, and slow content creation. Emceed by 24 Hour Plays Artistic Director Mark Armstrong, the evening will include a Q & A with writer Daniel Duren, director C.C. Kellogg, actor-producer Sigrid Sutter, sound designers Michelle Deniesse Lugo, Alexandra Alvarez Pilonieta, and members of the cast (TBD). This is a strictly limited engagement. Featuring on-location, immersive sound captures of the Boundary Waters wilderness, the story follows David as he tracks his wife Jesse, an eco-journalist who’s gone missing while on assignment in Northern Minnesota. An intimate thriller, the story asks, “How far would you go to protect something you love?” The cast includes Ken Barnett, Tina Benko, Reed Birney, Steven Epp, Chris Ghaffari, Timothy Hull, Carol Jacobanis, Chris...

Archive of My Own Written by Annabel McConnachie Directed by Zoé Zifer Presented at the Hudson Guild Theatre 441 W 26th St., Manhattan, NYC July 24-27, 2025 L to R: Isabel Vann, Isabel Criado, Nicole Lado, and  Annabel McConnachie. Photo courtesy of  Eloise Martin-Jones Philosopher and cultural critic Michel Foucault posited that the "archive" is a distinctly modern concept, a claim that aligns well, if perhaps unexpectedly, with Annabel McConnachie's fan-fiction-focused play Archive of My Own . Archive of My Own 's title alludes to the online fan-fiction repository Archive of Our Own ( AO3 for short), and while fan-fiction (fan-written narratives that center on characters and worlds from commercial works in any variety of media) certainly existed before the internet did, digital connectivity has supercharged what might otherwise have remained a niche practice. This amplification correspondingly magnifies fan-fiction's effects, which occupy a spectrum from posi...