Needle & Bone
20 Thomas Street, Manhattan, NYC
May 6-16, 2026
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| Caye Navarrete, Tom J. Reid, Jeffrey Robb, & Morgan Zipf-Meister. Photo by Adam Fontana. |
Before the audience at The Flea has found their seats and
Needle & Bone fully begins, The Knitting One (Caye Navarrete) is already waiting for us; maybe she always has been. Seated at the side of the stage in a rocking chair, draped in knitting and working their needles in silence, they establish the production’s metaphysical logic before a word is spoken. Around them, yarn winds through the set like exposed nervous tissue, sinews coating tattoo-machine wires and tendrils transforming the shop into something simultaneously workplace, shrine, family archive, and haunted house. At the center of the stage stands the evening’s defining image: a tree growing directly through the tattoo parlor itself.
Written by Maggie Cino and Scott C. Sickles, with additional material by Montserrat Méndez, and directed by Felicia Lobo,
Needle & Bone understands the body as an unfinished archive. Tattoos, scars, transition, addiction, grief, ritual, and inheritance are all written onto flesh here. Skin keeps the score.
The dead remain close because the living continue to carry them.
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| Morgan Zipf-Meister, Lizzie Roberts, Tom J. Reid, & Jeffrey Robb. Photo by Adam Fontana. |
Lobo’s production succeeds largely because it resists the temptation to over-mythologize its material. The play moves through addiction, queer identity, spiritual practice, family rupture, and literal ghosts, but the evening remains grounded in the rhythms of work, banter, and bodily presence. The tattoo shop feels lived in rather than symbolically arranged, a place where people flirt, bicker, relapse, and remember while surrounded by the dead. That tonal balance allows the production’s stranger elements to emerge organically, to arresting effect. A Santería ritual becomes one of the evening’s strongest sequences precisely because the line between stagecraft and lived praxis remains respectfully, compellingly, porous. The scene refuses imitation, abstraction, and artificial self-seriousness, grounding ritual in imperfect human behavior, including tattoo shop customer Hector (Anthony Naranjo) sheepishly consulting his grandmother’s instructions on his phone rather than trusting memory alone. Naranjo’s cool, consistent demeanor projects the aura of one who is seeking, infusing this scene in particular with the curiosity, competency, and care befitting the complexities of a character on a quest.
Throughout the production, bodies and blocking carry emotion more powerfully than exposition ever could. Characters line themselves up across the space with the precision of people unconsciously arranging themselves into families, alliances, and absences, while ghosts move among the living not as interruptions to realism, but as extensions of it, blurring the line therein beautifully. Billy, played by Tom J. Reid, is the shop’s previous owner, and the deceased father of protagonist – and his first appearance carries the haunting weight those positions deserve. Emerging with yarn in hand to seemingly play cat’s cradle, he searches instinctively for a partner only to find none on this coil. Reid gives Billy a looming physical presence that makes the gift of seeing ghosts feel less comforting than dangerous. Hulking, restless, and difficult to look away from, Reid’s performance reminds us that unresolved grief does not return in softened form.
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| Anthony Naranjo & Val Quinonez. Photo by Adam Fontana. |
Morgan Zipf-Meister anchors the production emotionally as Izzy, the tattoo artist and grieving daughter struggling to hold composure together as loss steadily erodes the structures around her. Zipf-Meister is a marvel, wisely resisting turning Izzy’s toughness into cute cliché or quirk; her performance allows vulnerability, humor, and anger to coexist within the same utterance. The production repeatedly returns to tattooing as a form of binding, an attempt to keep memory physically present, and Zipf-Meister makes that impulse feel equal parts understandable and dangerous. Her scenes with the ensemble remain dynamic throughout, but particularly striking are the moments where crisis suddenly gives way to comedy, as when Izzy snaps, “this is what happens when you marry a Virgo,” to one of the evening’s biggest laughs from a genuinely racked audience. Crucially, the humor never undercuts the grief; rather, it reveals how deeply these characters depend on wit and performance (and ink) to survive the emotional weight they are carrying.
Navarrete’s performance as The Knitting One quietly shapes the emotional atmosphere of the entire evening. Though largely silent, they bring extraordinary presence and physical expressiveness to the role, establishing from the outset that the production’s spiritual framework will be observational rather than ornamental. Watching patiently from the margins of the stage, knitting steadily as the living stumble through cycles of grief, relapse, love, and reconciliation, The Knitting One becomes less a conventional ghost than a witness to continuity itself. The image of yarn running throughout the production gradually transforms into something far larger than scenic texture, as knitting and tattooing begin to mirror one another, both acts of threading, marking, repairing, and binding lives together across generations.
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| Val Quinonez, Tom J. Reid, & Morgan Zipf-Meister. Photo by Adam Fontana. |
Val Quiñonez brings a grounded warmth and emotional punch to Rafael, whose journey through transition and family inheritance becomes one of the play’s most quietly affecting threads. His bantering “you know nothing of the world” exchange with Izzy lands as another one of the evening’s biggest laughs precisely because the relationship beneath it feels fully inhabited. Jeffrey Robb and Lizzie Roberts likewise deepen the production through Samuel and Lita, whose shared grief over illness, parenthood, and unfinished futures expands the play’s understanding of what it means to carry memory inside the body. Together, the ensemble creates a tattoo shop atmosphere that feels genuinely communal, full of overlapping histories, flirtations, tensions, and wounds.
Needle & Bone refuses to treat embodiment as metaphor alone. Tattoos become acts of preservation and self-invention; ghosts carry the unfinished weight of addiction, violence, and family inheritance. Even the tree splitting through the tattoo shop begins to feel less like surrealist flourish than unavoidable truth: roots sustain, but they also crack foundations apart.
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| Lizzie Roberts & Jeffrey Robb. Photo by Adam Fontana. |
By the production’s final moments, the tattoo shop no longer feels merely like a setting, but like a living body itself, threaded together through grief, ritual, memory, addiction, transition, and love. Yarn still stretches across the space. Ghosts still linger at the edges of the living. The tree remains rooted stubbornly through the foundation.
Like Billy’s ghost reaching outward through strands of yarn for a partner who could never arrive,
Needle & Bone understands grief not as mere separation, but as the refusal of separation and the ties that bind.
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