Thinking Theater NYC

Interstate Written by Amina Henry Directed by Cat Miller Presented by Dixon Place and That OId Hillside at Dixon Place 161A Chrystie Street, Manhattan, NYC December 4-20, 2025 Marvelyn Ramirez, Amy Hargreaves and Willow Wilhelm. Photo by Taryn Kamauu. Being a parent can be hard. So can being an adolescent. The collision of these truths propels Amina Henry's tightly constructed new play, Interstate , which pays equally multifaceted attention to both a mother and her children as they wrestle with finding happiness, each other, and themselves during a cross-country road trip to see America (a nation that proactively works to make being a parent more difficult). The journey that Interstate takes the audience on is deeply funny as often as it's incontestably poignant, all of which is only intensified by small irruptions of strangeness along the way. Flight attendant Red (Amy Hargreaves), the mother of our protagonist family, touches on a different meaning of strangeness in the p...

Camille Thomas. Photo Credit: Peter Yesley Dixon Place will present paRenT PlUs LOaNs , a new play written and performed by Camille Simone Thomas, directed by Sierra B. Nicole, beginning on Friday, September 9, 2022 at 7:30 PM (with a panel discussion facilitated by Judy Tate). paRenT PlUs LOaNs follows Camille as she navigates a predominantly white institution in pursuit of an undergraduate degree through rising tuition costs, familial expectations, and her own personal aspirations. Simultaneously startling and funny, the show merges text, projections, slam poetry, and defining moments from her past to analyze the racket that is student debt and how it affects students of color. The play has been developed with BlackBoard, the National Women’s Theatre Festival, and American Slavery Project. Camille Simone Thomas is an associate artist with Sanguine Theatre company, and current cohort member of Moxie Arts Incubator as a producer. She is an alum of Broadway Advocacy Coalitions Artivism ...

  Mine Created and performed by Shayna Strype Presented by Dixon Place via Theatermania.stream Streaming live April 21-24, 2021 and on demand April 26-May 3, 2021 Photo courtesy Michelle Tabnick PR Not many plays come to mind that feature a mountain as a central character. Creator and performer Shayna Strype, in her new show Mine , inhabits characters from said mountain to some sentient home appliances to a TV psychic by way of an eclectic mix of costumes, puppets, green screen, and more. Even her toes get to dress up and take part. Strype makes a wry gesture to the show's being livestreamed by replacing the usual request for audience members (here composed of claymation figures) to silence their cell phones with encouragement to close their other browser tabs. Visions , a psychic call-in show of the type that one might find on late-night cable and complete with a satirical commercial break, provides the frame for Mine 's meditations on ecosystems both actual and emotional. Wh...

PackRat Written and directed by Renee Philippi Presented by Concrete Temple Theatre at Dixon Place 161A Chrystie St., Manhattan, NYC January 31-February 14, 2020 L-R: Alanna Strong (Kitt); Maggie Gayford (Kip); Carlo Adinolfi (Bud); and Kayla Prestel (Happy). Photo by Stefan Hagen The inciting incident in Renee Philippi's new puppet-forward play PackRat is a fire. Ignited accidentally by a careless rancher, it forces the animals of the Valley to flee before its advancing flames. PackRat cites Watership Down as an inspiration, but in these opening minutes, it is hard to avoid also thinking not only of the animals in Bambi desperately running from a forest set ablaze by a human campfire but also of how much worse human avarice and disregard has made such events in the close to 80 years since the Disney film, as witnessed by the fires in California in recent years and, even more immediately, by the catastrophic, heart-sickening crisis in Australia. In PackRat, the ...