Thinking Theater NYC

Vanessa Fleming. Photo courtesy of Zeider’s American Dream Theatre. ...but what if it rains?,  an award-winning, one-woman show written and performed by Vanessa Fleming, will have its NYC premiere at FRIGID New York's Neurotica Fest this September. The show will run September 12th and 13th at UNDER St. Marks, 94 St. Marks Pl, NY, NY 10009. In ...but what if it rains? , the carefree and unburdened Vanessa (Vanessa Fleming), finds herself clumsily stumbling through a different type of coming-of-age experience after the sudden and unexpected new role of becoming a caregiver for her mother, Diane (Vanessa Fleming). As she navigates the world she is now in that throws mammoth-sized curveballs at every turn, challenging her stamina and her wits as it reshapes her sense of self, she tries to meet the moment with humor and understanding, no matter how impossible everything seems. The show has been described as a "moving and well-crafted piece that strikes a ba...

Cerandipity Written by Annabel McConnachie Directed by Helena Jost Presented at Chain Theatre 312 West 36th Street, Floor 3 July 12-30, 2026 Annabel McConnachie and Isabel Vann. Photo by Callee Egan (@calwithcamera). For people of a sufficient age, it can sometimes be tempting to feel nostalgic for our pre-Web 2.0, even pre-home-internet, relationship to celebrity, for days when we didn't know every off-putting opinion of the artists we liked, or even, in the cases of some bands, for example, what said artists looked like. At the same time, however qualitatively different today, the celebrity crush has been a phenomenon for far, far longer than today's information-saturated mediascape has existed. Annabel McConnachie's short two-hander Cerandipity takes an empathetic look at the significance for two contemporary young women of the celebrity crush that they turn out to share, with the play's title as perhaps a playful riff on the 2001 rom-com Serendipity , which takes a...

Photo by Ellie Gravitte. Following a celebrated, sold-out run at the Pier 40 Picnic House in 2025, Stairwell Theater’s The Comedy of Errors returns to New York City by popular demand. Transferring this summer to the Battery Park Showbox Stage, Stairwell's production will run September 17-27, bringing its crowd-pleasing story of twins, mistaken identities, and miraculous reunions featuring a 4-part jazz band and an ensemble cast of 15 performers. Stairwell Theater has been awarded a 2026 Manhattan Arts Grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) in support of the remount. The grant will fund hundreds of FREE tickets for New York audiences. Directed by Sam Gibbs, Founding Artistic Director of Stairwell Theater, the production continues the company's decade-long commitment to creating immersive classical theater in surprising spaces. "One of the greatest joys of site-specific theater is letting the story feed the setting and the setting feed the story," says ...

La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club will present the world premiere of Allegra & the Cello, in Movements , a new opera with story and libretto by Catherine Filloux and music by Julia Schwartz, directed by Elena Araoz. A High Hard Heat/Dominick Balletta production, this new opera runs December 10-20, 2026, at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in New York City. Tickets are on sale at lamama.org. In a canon spanning more than four centuries, no opera has ever placed a woman doctor at its center until now. Allegra, the opera's protagonist, is believed to be the first female physician to serve as the lead character in the history of the art form, a milestone achieved not through an institutional commission but through an act of artistic will. Filloux, an established playwright and librettist whose career spans three decades of work centered on human rights, women's voices, and the capacity of art to bear witness, conceived and developed the opera entirely on her own initiative, o...

benevolent Written by Sophie McIntosh Directed by Nina Goodheart Presented by Good Apples Collective at IATI Theater 64 East 4th Street, Manhattan, NYC August 14-September 5, 2026 Chani Reese, Rachel Ravel, Livvy Marcus, and Mia Fowler. Photo by Nina Goodheart. Forcing unruly women into the custody of institutions such as jails, asylums, workhouses, and laundries has historically been a popular mechanism of (patriarchal, capitalist) social control, and it remains, albeit in more circumscribed form, an available lever of power today (e.g., the continued criminalization of sex workers). benevolent , a new play from Sophie McIntosh, takes audiences inside one such institution, at a time when there were substantially more avenues to confinement within its walls. Directed by Nina Goodheart, co-founder with McIntosh of Good Apples Collective, the perfectly paced and fittingly claustrophobic benevolent unfolds entirely in the basement of the "Inwood Benevolent Home," a fictional c...

We're happy to share that Thinking Theater NYC has been included on Feedspot's list of  50 Best New York Theatre Blogs to Follow in 2026 , a list which includes a mix of review, news, and artist blogs from and about New York theater, conveniently collated in one location.  Feedspot is an RSS Reader that lets you subscribe to blogs, news sites, and any website you want to keep up with. Its aim is to categorize global media outlets and content creators to make them easy to discover, follow, and contact, so there's plenty to discover in and beyond the theater world as well! 

Amoeba Productions , a new performing arts nonprofit in New York City, is excited to announce  The Tempest - this time RIDICULOUS! The Tempest will take place on Friday, August 28th at 6pm and Saturday, August 29th at 2pm & 6pm at Denny Farrell Riverbank State Park’s Mainstage area, featuring an incredible lineup of artists. Amoeba’s The Tempest is a reimagining of Shakespeare's classic play — A magician says goodbye and has one last wacky, zany, shenanigan-filled adventure. BUT, before he goes out with a bang, he learns to forgive others and himself. Inspired by Charles Ludlam’s campy theatre of the ridiculous, this production seeks to fill-in the cultural gaps of the Shakespeare in the Park legacy. This non-union, outdoor developmental production is directed by Steven San Luis. The show's production staff includes: Steven San Luis as Director, Francie Brewster as Assistant Director, Morgan Haney as Dramaturg, Louisa Nickel as Costume Designer & Technical Director, A...

Matthew Sanders in This May Sting Everyone's favorite TV professionals, doctors and lawyers, step onto the live stage, or actually two of them, for This May Sting and Make Them All Pay , set to run simultaneously on the 3rd and 4th floor of The Chain Theatre in midtown beginning September 22nd. As if the doctors and lawyers are forced to share the same office building, audiences can take the elevator trip to see both plays on the same night, or come back at different times over the run. Tickets are available at www.thirdwing.info . This May Sting  (the doctors): Loud snoring is harming an Ohio woman's marriage (okay, so maybe it wasn't so great to begin with). But after she seeks care from her local otolaryngologist, her chronic nosebleeds begin. As they worsen and worsen, no one can figure out what went wrong. Sitting “in the doctor's office” with the characters on stage, can you decide who's to blame? Make Them All Pay  (the lawyers): A broke law firm finally get...

(l to r) David Dowlett, David Michael Kirby, N. Marie Teagno. Photo by Joe Pacifico. Heather Violanti’s Short Noir Play Dark Orchid will make its world premiere as part of Block 8 at the Gene Frankel Theatre Festival, taking place from August 2-15, 2026 In 1944 Hollywood, dead dreams are a dime a dozen. After a famous novelist tries to steal one of her ideas, failed screenwriter Myrtle finally finds the courage to make her dreams come true…on her own terms. The show is directed by Jennifer Sandella and features N. Marie Teagno, David Michael Kirby, David Dowlett, and Mona Bruno. Dark Orchid plays at the Gene Frankel Theatre Festival Block 8 in Manhattan (24 Bond St., New York, NY 10012) on August 2 at 5 pm, August 8 at 7:30 pm, and August 15 at 2:30 pm. Says Violanti, “This play was inspired by the sass and style of film noir, the stream-of-consciousness writing of William Faulkner, and the long-standing discrimination experienced by women within the entertainment industry. It’s a ce...

 Twenty Somethings Productions and Riot Act will present Dirty Bird , written & directed by Whit Flint, adapted from Anthon Chekhov, at ErF Gallery from September 4-20, 2026. Tickets are available for purchase here . “Do what you love, or die trying.” Summer. A family gathers. And for no good reason, destroys one another. A forensic examination of the transcendence and violence of desire, the insatiable need to discover new forms of human expression and the brutal aches that shape us… a traverse to endure amongst the moments of neon lightening and jagged wounds. Dirty Bird is a radical new adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull by writer / director Whit Flint, with a score built around artists like Bowie, the Pixies, and the Zombies. Flint is the Artistic Director of Riot Act founded in East London in 2015. With over thirty productions directed and four decades as a professional actor, based in Los Angeles, Flint received his MFA from East 15 in the UK and studied at the...

After a two-week sold-out run in January for the Exponential Festival, Real Estate returns to the Brick Theater (Williamsburg) next month, August 6 through 15 at 8 pm.  Written by Isa Spector and featuring Ari Dalbert and Sheldon Donenberg, the play follows two men through a highly physical and lowly written journey of love. David and Robert are constantly moving; moving houses, moving bodies and moving against their desires. Their push and pull dynamic spins out through dance, turning their awkward dialogue into a romantic ballet, a club dance and a cartoon chase. As the duo continues to find themselves in the wrong place, they draw closer to a fantasy beyond language, gesture and time. Playwright Isa Spector is an artist and performer based in New York. Spector creates performance between theater and dance, spinning stories of contemporary life through “genre-agnostic movement” ( Brooklyn Rai l) and “witty wordplay puzzles full of choreographic twists” ( New York  Times ). ...

piss.jpg (Working Title) Written and performed by Justin Jager and Michael Gardiner Directed by Daniel Yaiullo Presented by Diamond Mesh Inc. at the Paradise Factory 64 E 4th St., Manhattan, NYC July 16-August 9, 2026 Justin Jager and Michael Gardiner. Photo courtesy of Strange Garden Productions Two brothers, one kitchen, and seventy minutes of absurdism taken to hilariously absurd lengths: the endlessly unpredictable piss.jpg (Working Title) showcases a pair of writer-performers firing on all comedic cylinders. Written by Justin Jager and Michael Gardiner and directed by Daniel Yaiullo, multi-hyphenate theater artists all, the eye-catchingly titled production is making its New York City premiere as a flagship production of Diamond Mesh Inc.'s new summer festival, The Manifestival , running from July 16th to August 9th at the Paradise Factory Theater. piss.jpg (Working Title) plucks fragments from the sort of plots and dialogue that might be found in midcentury drama, adds the...

atticwife Written by Laura Clare Browne Directed by Rebecca Wilson Presented by RnL Productions at 59E59 Theaters 59 East 59th Street, Manhattan, NYC July 22-26, 2026 Jen Clark and Laura Clare Browne. Photo by Lutriz Studios. The most famous wife-locked-in-an-attic is probably Jane Eyre 's Bertha Mason, whose fatal leap from the roof after setting her husband's house on fire conveniently clears the way for her successor. Even when given a sympathetic reimagining by Jean Rhys over a century later, it's hard to see her as an aspirational figure. However, in atticwife , the debut play from actor and comedian Laura Clare Browne, the titular wife has not only been locked in an attic by her husband but assures her social media followers that this is what she wants. Currently playing as part of 59E59's 2026 East to Edinburgh Festival , which showcases New York shows headed to Edinburgh Fringe in August, atticwife furnishes a sharply observed, darkly comedic lampoon of the int...

3600 Written by Molly McQuillan Directed by AMT / Anna Marie Tobin (AMT) Presented at Chain Theatre 312 W. 36th St., 4th fl., Manhattan, NYC July 11-30, 2026 Ashley M. Cowles. Photo courtesy of Molly McQuillan. Most of us are familiar with the concept, even if it is usually metaphorical, of locking two antagonistic parties in a room together until they settle their differences. With the tautly gripping two-hander 3600 , Chicago-born, Brooklyn-based theater artist Molly McQuillan both renders such a situation very literal and gives it the highest stakes possible. The play brings us inside a featureless room where its trapped characters will die when a timer reaches zero. As the clock implacably counts down and the contours of the pair's conflict come into focus, questions of right and wrong, guilt and absolution, and responsibility and consequences become as inescapable as the room itself. Currently part of Chain Theatre's Summer One-Act Festival, running from July 9th through...

Laurizarry will present Replaced!, written and directed by Jess Lauricello, as part of the 2026 LimeFest at The Tank (312 W 36th St, New York, NY 10018) on Wednesday, August 12 at 9:30pm. The Tank’s LimeFest invites new works by emerging artists and creative teams who identify as women, nonbinary or gender non-conforming to make way for more gender parity in the performing arts. Tickets are $20-$30 and are available for advance purchase at thetanknyc.org . The performance will run approximately 60 minutes. A surrealist sci-fi tragicomedy following a young woman identified only as a Daughter (played  by Zoe Mintz) who returns to her hometown to find that everyone in it has been replaced by  aliens. Hailed as “ an invigoratingly surreal body-snatching narrative ” by Thinking Theater and  “a smart and earnest piece” with “a lot of fun physical absurdity” by Hi! Drama , Replaced! is  back for one night only at The Tank on August 12th. Come out and join ...

Woyzeck Written by Georg Büchner Translated by John Christopher Jones Directed by Seth Bockley Assistant director: Debbie Saivetz Presented by Adult Film at Modern Sweater 4-78 Onderdonk Ave, Ridgewood, Queens, NYC July 15-August 15, 2026 Front: Madeline Bernhard and Ryan Czerwonko. Photo by Geve Penn.  In the introduction to his 1971 edition of Georg Büchner's (1813-37) surviving plays, Victor Price calls Woyzeck , composed from late 1836 into early 1837 and left incomplete when the playwright died from typhus at age 23, "the first working class tragedy" (xviii). While the extant plays by Büchner– Danton's Death , comedy Leonce and Lena , and Woyzeck , with Pietro Aretino having been lost–share a sort of existentialism avant la lettre among their primary characters, Woyzeck represents an outlier among this small group in terms of its style. If Woyzeck is unfinished (though Price argues, in the Appendix to his edition, that it was quite close to its final form), ...

Syringe Written and directed by Francis Bogan Assistant Directors: Lauren Presley and Gabby Laurendine Producer: Eliza Spinna Presented at Chain Theatre 312 W. 36th St., 4th fl., Manhattan, NYC July 11-30, 2026 Art by Ryan Prehara. IG: @seminalspider  While most horror media ends with the survival–or not–of its protagonist(s), some, such as parts of the Scream franchise or Grady Hendrix's 2021 novel The Final Girl Support Group , considers what happens after that moment of survival. The one-act Syringe , from Brooklyn-based playwright Francis Bogan, joins this less typical strand of horror narrative with its darkly comic look at a group of friends who undergo a Saw -style ordeal. Deftly satirizing our era of true-crime proliferation and internet-driven self-commodification while asking what friendship should look like, Syringe is currently making its premiere at Chain Theatre's Summer One-Act Festival, running from July 9th through August 1st. Syringe is part of Block 18 in ...