Thinking Theater NYC

CUMULO Created by Emily Batsford Presented by Emily Batsford and Concrete Temple Theatre at MITU580 580 Sackett St Unit A - Ground Fl, Brooklyn, NYC April 15-May 3, 2026 Photo by Ken Pao Studio If the image of a woman riding a candy-studded cloud like a bucking bronco as she freefalls from some unimaginable height sounds like your cup of creatively inspired, visually spectacular tea, CUMULO brews up a perfect storm of such moments. A world premiere from Brooklyn-based theater artist and access consultant Emily Batsford, CUMULO is a wordless puppet play that drops its protagonist into an unpredictable–and often vertical–journey through a preternatural world of candy floss clouds. CUMULO 's consistently inventive set mechanics and an expressive score by composer David Leon flawlessly complement exquisite work by puppeteers Emily Batsford, Camille Cooper , Gaby FeBland , Takemi Kitamura , and Justin Otaki Perkins for a captivating and enchantingly unique experience. Photo by Ken...

  Hamlet/The Furies Adapted from William Shakespeare and Aeschylus Directed by Jim Niesen Presented by  Irondale Ensemble Project  at The Space at Irondale 85 S. Oxford Street, Brooklyn, NYC April 10-May 16, 2026 As is well-attested, the problem with seeking revenge is that, no matter how justified it might be, it almost always perpetuates seemingly never-ending cycles of violence. In pairing two classic plays centered on revenge, Shakespeare’s  Hamlet  and the final play of Aeschylus’s trilogy  The Oresteia ,  The Eumenides  or  The Furies , the Irondale Ensemble presents a fresh take on the bleakness and tragedy of revenge and the promise of renewal that may follow. Staged in the unique Space at Irondale, formerly the Sunday school for the adjacent Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church, this production brings the audience into their creative process, underscoring that breaking generational cycles involves all of us. The somewhat slimmed-down...

Crushed Velvet Written by Andrew Trimmer Directed by Sam Perwin Presented at wild project April 5-18, 2026 Kate Delacruz. Photo courtesy of Austin Ruffer. Tonight at wild project, everything is semi-homemade. The food gleams under studio lights, pristine and untouchable; the kitchen is immaculate but weightless; the life on display is both carefully constructed and rather unraveling. In Andrew Trimmer’s Crushed Velvet , presented as part of the 2026 New York City Fringe Festival , the question is not simply how to stage Sandra Lee, but how to stage the system that made, sustained, and ultimately consumed her. What emerges is less a biography than a kind of hagiography, Aunt Sandy rendered with ambition and real relish. The production’s central instinct is a deeply compelling one. Rather than settling into a single mode, Crushed Velvet effortlessly moves across genres, backstage naturalism, media parody, documentary reconstruction, and sketch-inflected interludes, as if no one form can...

How I Learned (NOT) to Drive Written and performed by Jesse Bradley-Amore Directed by Padraic Lillis Presented at UNDER St. Marks 94 St. Marks Place, Manhattan, NYC April 10-18, 2026 Jesse Bradley-Amore. Courtesy of Emily Owens PR Living in most parts of New York City makes it easy to forget how difficult it is to live in the vast majority of places in the United States without a car. In solo show How I Learned (NOT) to Drive , playwright and performer Jesse Bradley-Amore not only lacks his own car at 40 years old but could not drive it if he had one, since he never got his driver's license during the nearly quarter century after he got his learner's permit. This lack, as he discusses, caused him various problems, some quite a bit larger than others. But this particular lack also indexically signals other lacks, other issues, stretching back to childhood. Bradley-Amore's autobiographical storytelling play, his first solo show, steers into self-examination with humor and hon...

Playwright Marco Di Stefano In Scena! Italian Theater Festival NY, New York City’s premiere festival of Italian theater happening in all five boroughs, has announced Via Crucis by playwright Marco Di Stefano as the winner of their 2026 In Scena! Playwright Award (formally the Mario Fratti Award). The play, translated by Caterina Nonis, will receive a reading as part of the closing ceremony of the 2026 In Scena! Italian Theater Festival NY on Tuesday, May 19 at 6pm at the Italian Cultural Institute of NY (686 Park Ave, New York, NY 10065). Admission to the awards ceremony and reading is FREE.   Via Crucis is a solo show in free verse structured in 14 scenes. The speaking character is a 30-year-old man living on the margins. Arrested for drug possession, he is subjected to torture and violence by the police until he dies from it. The text unfolds over the course of a single day—from 5am until midnight—and is set in various locations: the street where the young man is taken, the pol...

Waiting for Gadot Written by Annabel McConnachie Directed by Hannah Marie Pederson Presented at Chain Theatre 312 West 36 Street, Floor 3, Manhattan, NYC February 6-21, 2026 L to R: Ellie Lauther, Gabi Schwartz, Nicole Lado, Kaia Parnell, Spencer Hazen, Isabel Criado. Photo by Callee Egan. Most of us have at some point in our lives done something in imitation of a celebrity whom we admire. Maybe that was taking up an instrument. Maybe it was purchasing something (makeup? clothing? cryptocurrency?) because of an endorsement. Maybe, as in Waiting for Gadot , it was eating oily muffins out of a trash bag. Who can say? The characters in Waiting for Gadot , which made its debut at the Chain Theatre's Winter One-Act Festival this February, are focused on the anticipated arrival not of the ambiguous figure of the Samuel Beckett play on which it riffs but the quite specific, real-life actor Gal Gadot. With Waiting for Gadot , playwright Annabel McConnachie–whose Archive of My Own and...

did you charge your phone for the end of the world? Written and directed by Fletcher Michael Presented by Infinite Monkey Theater Company  at wild project 195 E. 3rd Street, Manhattan, NYC April 4-19, 2026 L to R: Collin Dennis, Fletcher Michael, Lucy Boisvert. Photo by Nicholas Barris & editing by Lucy Boisvert. Tonight at wild project, the phone rings long before it connects. In Fletcher Michael’s did you charge your phone for the end of the world? , presented by Infinite Monkey Theater Company as part of the 2026  New York City Fringe Festival , catastrophe is a matter not of if or when, but of messaging. An asteroid is on its way to Brooklyn, and the public will not be told until a boutique advertising agency can find the right tone; the end of the world, here, must be properly branded before it can be properly known. Give me schtick or give me death. Three creatives, Del Morgan (Fletcher Michael), Nico Deluca-Graham (Lucy Boisvert), and Lorimer Clancy (Collin De...

Playwright Francesca Becchetti In Scena! Italian Theater Festival, New York City’s premiere festival of Italian theater happening in all five boroughs, and Hystrio-Scritture di Scena, one of the most prestigious theater awards in Italy, will present their 6th Annual Translation and Adaption Mentorship, a program which mentors an Italian playwright on the English translation and adaptation of their play. The Hystrio Scritture di Scena Award is a prestigious Italian dramaturgy competition for playwrights under 35, organized by the Milano-based Hystrio – Associazione per la diffusione della cultura teatrale. It promotes original Italian theater pieces, offering winning scripts, mentorship, staging at Hystrio Festival, and publication.   Playwright Francesca Becchetti, whose play Tekken Dram a was selected by In Scena! from the finalists of the 2025 Hystrio Scritture di Scena, will be mentored by Dave Johnson, an American playwright and poet, who was one of the authors selected fo...

Azadeh Kangarani in Echoes of My Silence . Photo by Nathan Zhe. Iranian playwright and performer Azadeh Kangarani brings her autobiographical solo show Echoes of My Silence to New York for its premiere at the 2026 New York City Fringe Festival this April. Following a critically acclaimed run at the 2025 Toronto Fringe Festival, the production will play five performances at Chain Theatre Mainstage. Echoes of My Silence confronts sexual assault, trauma, and the patriarchal beliefs instilled at a young age, tracing one woman’s journey toward reclaiming her voice and power. Kangarani performs the solo show, which runs April 5–14. In Echoes of My Silence , on a flight from Germany to the U.S., a female pilot triggers Azadeh’s reckoning with a life shaped by patriarchal norms. Through her memories, she confronts the silence that has defined her beliefs about gender, power, and herself. The play was praised by critics at the 2025 Toronto Fringe Festival. Born in Tehran, Iran, playwright/per...

The Meeting Written by Brian James Polak Directed by Richard Piatt Presented by Theatre Unleashed at Chain Theatre 312 West 36 Street, Floor 4, Manhattan, NYC April 1-6, 2026 Mitch Lerner as Joe. Photo by Matt Kamimura, courtesy of Theatre Unleashed. Since last January, the United States has seen certain words, particularly related to climate science or diversity, effectively banned by the federal government in, for instance, higher education programs, museum displays, and grant applications, including in the arts; the ego-driven renaming and planned shuttering of one of the nation's premiere arts centers; and, this week, governmental threats to jail journalists for doing journalism. So the fascist dystopia in which Brian James Polak's The Meeting immerses audiences, where all forms of art are prohibited and saying a banned word can trigger omnipresent sensors, feels entirely too recognizable. As discomfiting as it is reaffirming, The Meeting is part of the 2026 New York Cit...

Chip on Her Shoulder Written and directed by Jen McAuliffe Presented by Off with their Heads Productions at Chain Theatre 312 West 36 Street, Floor 4, Manhattan, NYC April 5-17, 2026 Victoria Nieves. Courtesy of Off with their Heads Productions  Food, as most of us have experienced, can be a source of comfort and even of control. For Angela (Victoria Nieves) of the one-woman show Chip on Her Shoulder , the go-to catalyst for such feelings is chips, specifically salt and vinegar. When Angela calls salt and vinegar chips "the perfect balance of pain and pleasure," her description also echoes the unerring blend of comedy and trauma that characterizes the play, in which the constant stresses from career, dating, and lingering familial hurts sometimes seem like they can only be countered, always temporarily, by a good, crisp snack. Chip on Her Shoulder , the debut play from Australian screenwriter and playwright Jen McAuliffe, was first seen at the Melbourne Fringe in 2025 and now...

Lipstick Co-written by Edu Díaz and Linda Morales Caballero based on a story by Linda Morales Caballero Directed by Lil Malinich Presented by Edu Díaz at Chain Theatre 312 West 36 Street, Floor 4, Manhattan, NYC April 5-19, 2026 Edu Díaz in Lipstick . Photo by Krystal Pagán. For centuries in Western culture, cosmetics have been discussed as having a transformative power, which has been invoked in ways ranging from a condemnation of their facilitation of falsehood and pride to a selling point for potential consumers. In Lipstick , a solo show based on acclaimed Peruvian author Linda Morales Caballero's short story "Labial," from her book El libro de los enigmas , the titular cosmetic wields just such a power across two generations of one family. Lipstick 's unnamed narrator-protagonist, expressively and affectingly inhabited by Canary Islands-born actor and the show's co-writer Edu Díaz, shuffles through his past experiences and present anxieties in a contemp...

How to Become a Saint (while wearing pants) Created and performed by Lex Alston, Becca Canziani , Brooke Ferris, Lynn Hodeib, and Ania Upstill Presented by Butch Mermaid Productions at wild project 195 E 3rd St, Manhattan, NYC April 1-4, 2026 Lex Alston, Becca Canziani, and Brooke Ferris. Photo by Ruby Goldner. One might not think of excessive weeping as a divinely bestowed gift, but medieval English mystic Margery Kempe claimed her copious crying as a sign of her special relationship to Jesus Christ, arguably repositioning a "feminine" weakness as a strength. Kempe is one of a trio of the saintly who assemble in How to Become a Saint (while wearing pants) for a celebration of one of their own that ends up throwing their perceptions of history and self into question. Written by the cast, the freewheelingly funny How to Become a Saint is part of the 2026 New York City Fringe Festival , an open lottery-based theater festival in which one hundred percent of box office proceeds...