Thinking Theater NYC

 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 ...

What a World! What a World! Written by Eric Marlin Directed by Ilana Khanin Presented by The Tank 312 W 36th St., Manhattan, NYC July 9-August 2, 2026 Queen-Tiye Akamefula and Annie Hoeg. Photo by Maria Baranova. Film studies brought us the concept of the heterosexual male gaze as the default mode of looking in media, implicit in how the camera mediates between the image and audience, and the new play What a World! What a World! , uses an old movie to anchor its thinking about the gaze, both in (the) film and in the world. What a World! What a World! , by Eric Marlin, explores being seen, self-presentation, the inscription and interpretation of texts and bodies and bodies as texts, all in relation to queerness and camp. Making its world premiere at The Tank after previous workshopping at Ars Nova ANT Fest in 2019 and the Prelude Festival in 2023, What a World! What a World! stages a smart, surprising sixty-five minutes of slippery boundaries and contested perspective. Queen-Tiye Akame...

The cast of Crimes of the Heart . Courtesy of Kampfire PR.  This July, Red Door Productions will present its production of Beth Henley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Crimes of the Heart , directed by Eve Bianco.  Crimes of the Heart  will play a limited engagement at Theater 154 (154 Christopher Street, New York, NY 10014). Performances begin Wednesday, July 15 and continue through Sunday, July 26. Opening Night is Friday, July 17 (7:30 p.m.). ​ Tickets are $40 and available here . Crimes of the Heart  follows the three Magrath sisters as they reunite in their hometown of Hazlehurst, Mississippi after the youngest shoots her husband. The Magrath sisters are three women who've been dismissed, misunderstood, and written off, who survive anyway, entirely on their own terms. As Bianco says, “They are not victims; they are warriors, unapologetically rebelling against the forces that seek to define and confine them.”  In Henley's play, it's been a bad few days for the Mag...

This July, Forgotten Artist Productions is pleased to present the play When In God's Country, Hide In The Closet , written and directed by Michael Thomas Cain, as part of 2026 Spring/Summerfest at the New York Theater Festival (NYC). The theatre production features Mark Parsia as Francis/Frank, Charles Kramer as Honorè/Hank, and Ron Barba as Dr. Sonny Moore. When In God’s Country, Hide In The Closet follows Francis and Honoré while they are attempting to enjoy each other’s company in the Bible belt, but they're careful to hide at a corner table of a restaurant on a Monday night for social and professional reasons. What will be the fate of this gay couples love during a time and place that is not accepting? Forgotten Artist Productions is a full-service production company based in New York that has produced critically acclaimed plays and award-winning films such as Not Approved For Cancer Treatment (theatre and short film), Where Art Lives (theatre), 15 Minutes with Ellen (the...