Thinking Theater NYC

(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...

Dreamcats! Written and directed by Charlotte Lily Gaspard Music by Nebraska ( FKA Jessie Davis ), Sabrina Chap , Zera Bloom , Doc Frost, and Malik Work Presented by Midnight Radio Show at The Gene Frankel Theatre 24 Bond Street, Manhattan, NYC April 23-May 3, 2026 Puppeteer Laurynn Starkey. Photo by Richard Termine. Cats, as anyone who lives with them knows, spend a lot of time sleeping. But what if all that shuteye were not merely relaxation but research? In Dreamcats! , the family-friendly world-premiere puppet musical from Brooklyn-based science-fiction fairy-tale theater company Midnight Radio Show, the eponymous Dream Cats are an ancient race who live cloistered from the rest of "the fantastical galaxy" on the planet Dicee One-I, where they collect and study dreams in pursuit (or purr-suit?) of "understanding all the riddles of existence." Written and directed by Midnight Radio Show creative director Charlotte Lily Gaspard, Dreamcats! fuses live action, diffe...

Truth Be Told Written by William Cameron Directed by Kim T. Sharp Presented by The Gene Frankel Theatre and ARA Theater at The Gene Frankel Theatre 24 Bond Street, Manhattan, NYC February 19-March 9, 2025 Michelle Park and Francesca Ravera. Photo by Bronwen Sharp. Avoidance and denial can be attractive options to many in the face of hard truths, whether personal or, as has become increasingly and visibly widespread, national or global (and, of course, the reasons for the former may often play a significant role in prompting the latter). This is not to say that people have access to a single totalizing Truth but rather that objectively verifiable truths exist independently of any one individual's perception or acknowledgment of them. Kathleen Abedon (Michelle Park) in playwright William Cameron's Truth Be Told , making its New York premiere at The Gene Frankel Theatre, must face the devastating truth that authorities have concluded that her teenage son, Julian, was responsible...

  The Gene Frankel Theatre and ARA Theater have announced the NY Premiere of William Cameron’s Truth Be Told , directed by Kim T. Sharp ( The Hummingbirds , by Garret Jon Groenveld, at Chain Theatre) and starring Francesca Ravera and Michelle Park. A powerful two-hander about the manipulation of objective truth and our obsession with true crime,  Truth Be Told  will play for three weeks at The Gene Frankel Theatre (24 Bond St, New York, NY, 10012). Performances begin Wednesday, February 19, and continue through Sunday, March 9. Tickets are $37 and available at https://our.show/truthbetold . Student and senior discounts are available for $26 with valid ID. Truth Be Told  is a gripping psychological drama that unravels the aftermath of an unspeakable tragedy through the eyes of two mothers on opposite sides of a devastating event. When true-crime writer Jo Hunter visits Kathleen Abedon—a grieving mother whose teenage son, Julian, allegedly carried out a mass shoot...

The Sex Writer Written by Adam Szymkowicz Directed by Philip Cruise Presented by Thin Duke Productions and SparkPlug Productions  at  The Gene Frankel Theatre 24 Bond St, Manhattan, NYC October 30-November 17, 2024 Seth Gilliam, Sionne Elise. Photo by Mark Veltman. Adam Szymkowicz’s excellent new play, The Sex Writer , probes questions of loss, love, and the writer’s vocation as Jane, (sex) writer and professor at Columbia, returns to her small-town childhood home on the occasion of her father’s death by suicide. Upon her return, Jane is reunited with an old flame, Aiden, and simultaneously rekindles her relationship to her former lover, her hometown, her father, and her writing. A bed sits at center stage and will remain there throughout the play. It is flanked by a writer’s desk and pages from an undetermined source pinned to the walls, providing a perfect codex to the production: sex and writing and their interpenetration are inescapable. As the action, and Jane, ...

Airport and the Strange Package Written by Sean King Directed by William Roudebush Presented by Great Cannonball Productions at Gene Frankel Theatre 24 Bond Street, Manhattan, NYC August 7-25, 2024 L to R: John Daniel Meehan, Michael Kishon, and Kyle McIlhon. Photo credit: Florence Rossiello It would be difficult to find people who enjoy what the protagonist of Sean King's new satirical play Airport and the Strange Package describes as the multi-hour humiliation inflicted on travelers before they get on a flight. One of the questions that Airport and the Strange Package asks is that of why we acquiesce. In the tradition of writers such as Franz Kafka and Joseph Heller, this very funny production presents the individual caught in the gears of absurd and dehumanizing institutional machinery; and, more particularly, it examines the way in which security theater–and the acceptance of it–functions as a gateway to ever-increasing/evolving surveillance and Foucauldian discipline. In a ni...

Much Ado About Nothing Written by William Shakespeare Directed by Thomas G. Waites Presented by Faith American Brewing Company and Kelsey Grammer at the Gene Frankel Theatre 24 Bond Street, Manhattan, NYC June 7-30, 2024 [Update: Extended to July 7, 2024] The cast of Much Ado About Nothing . Photo by Rob Klein. With a minimalist set and a mere nod to the 1940s in its costuming, Much Ado About Nothing at the Gene Frankel Theater, directed by Thomas G. Waites, overwhelmingly relied on its cast to make one of Shakespeare’s most iconic romantic comedies legible for a modern audience. Led by a stellar Beatrice (Aislinn Evans), a charming and versatile Don Pedro (Jacque Coqueran), and some genuinely hilarious minor characters (Matt McGlade as Borachio and Ursala, Arnie Mazer as Dogberry, and John Galligan as Verges) and supported by the original musical stylings of Cedric Allen Hills as Balthazar, the acting in this production ultimately underscored the uncomfortable moments in the play th...

Bettye and the Jockettes Spinning Records at the Holiday Inn Written by Christie Perfetti Williams Directed by Sara Thigpen Presented by Retro Productions at the Gene Frankel Theatre 24 Bond St., Manhattan, NYC May 3-18, 2024 The Cast of Bettye and the Jockettes Spinning Records at the Holiday Inn . Photo by Greg Kanysicska. An "All-Girl Radio Station" in the mid-1950s, the setting for Retro Productions' new play, Bettye and the Jockettes Spinning Records at the Holiday Inn , might seem like a fruitful milieu for a comedy, if a bit unrealistic: except that it really existed. While the show's characters are fictional–or in the case of station owner Sam Phillips (Joe Mathers) fictionalized, Memphis, Tennessee's WHER was founded in 1955, operating out of one of the titular hotels, and persisted until 1973 . In the play's imagined WHER, it is 1956, and one departure and one arrival are set to roil the station. WHER's copywriter has just eloped, and her timing...

Heather E. Cunningham stars as Bettye in Bettye and the Jockettes Spinning Records at the Holiday Inn . Photo courtesy of Retro Productions Travel back to the atomic age in Christie Perfetti Williams's new play Bettye and the Jockettes Spinning Records at the Holiday Inn , making its world premiere from May 3-18 at the Gene Frankel Theatre in NoHo. Opening night is scheduled for Friday, May 3 at 8pm. The new comedy takes place at the 1950’s radio station WHER - 1000 Beautiful Watts. It’s July 3, 1956 and the jockettes of WHER, America’s first all-girl radio station in Memphis, Tennessee, are having one hell of a day; the copywriter has run off to elope, they have just found out that the Elvis Presley is coming to the station to be interviewed on-air, and their star DJ Bettye has shown up… in pants. When Elvis’s record promoter arrives and is none other than Bettye’s former flame Benjamin, sarcastic zingers fly, sisterhoods are forged, and secrets are exposed. The production was in...

Mi Abuela, Queen of Nightmares Written and directed by Christine Stoddard Presented by Quail Bell Productions at the Gene Frankel Theatre 24 Bond St., Manhattan, NYC June 15-26, 2022 Photo from MI ABUELA, QUEEN OF NIGHTMARES: A STAGE PLAY BY CHRISTINE STODDARD - Home (weebly.com) Family and culture, each in its own way, serve as sources of mythology, and Christine Stoddard's Mi Abuela, Queen of Nightmares brings together both varieties in a matriarchal meditation on intergenerational inheritances. Based on a 2018 chapbook of poems and winner of a national playwriting competition held by Table Work Press, which published the play in 2020 , Mi Abuela infuses folkloric elements into a young Salvadoran-American woman's reckoning with her past, a rendering of personal history in which her mother and grandmother loom large. The result is a magical-realist memory play that kindles a unique atmosphere while addressing traumas that are, for women (of color) particularly, all too com...

Constellations Written by Nick Payne Directed by Kim T. Sharp Presented at the Gene Frankel Theatre 24 Bond Street, Manhattan, NYC April 6-24, 2022 Francesca Ravera and Michael Chinworth. Courtesy Alton PR Would you feel better or worse knowing that, for every choice that you regret making (or not making), there existed other versions of you who chose differently? Playwright and screenwriter Nick Payne's Constellations explores a man and woman's lives through a multiverse-spanning lens that highlights the way in which any individual existence comprises complex webs of causality and chance without detracting one jot from its characters' flirty, funny, contentious, aching humanity. Having made its debut in Payne's native Britain in 2012 and arrived on Broadway in 2015, this award-winning play has now come to Manhattan's intimate Gene Frankel Theatre in a superb revival directed by Kim T. Sharp. Marianne (Francesca Ravera) and Roland (Michael Chinworth) meet (or, one ...