Thinking Theater NYC

The Last Audition Written and performed by  Paul Shearman Directed by David St John Presented by Banjo & Bongo Productions at Chain Theatre 312 West 36 Street, Floor 3 & 4, Manhattan, NYC April 1-17, 2026 A STAN IS BORN! Written and performed by Alexis Sakellaris Presented at Chain Theatre 312 West 36 Street, Floor 3 & 4 Manhattan, NYC April 14-19, 2026 Paul Shearman. Photo by Eric Moore. It may be an old question, but in an age of struggling arts organizations and the dismantling of funding institutions, it’s one that still merits some reflection: why do we need theater? What does it do for society that cannot be achieved in other ways? Although wildly different, The Last Audition and  A STAN IS BORN! , presented as part of the 2026 NYC Fringe Festival , answer these questions with stunning clarity: theater helps us to make sense of the most fundamental aspects of human existence in community with others. Written and performed by Paul Shearman,  The Last Aud...

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...

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...

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...

Desi SNL Written by Azhar Bande-Ali Directed and produced by Azhar-Bande Ali, Shreya Thakur, and Sandalina Sattar, presented with FRIGID New York at wild project 195 E 3rd St, Manhattan, NYC April 3-18, 2026 The cast and crew of Desi SNL .   Photo by Nader Farzan.   While Saturday Night Live , currently in its fifty-first season, has gotten (a bit) more diverse over the decades, it has still never, to our knowledge, had a regular South Asian cast member. Luckily, with an entirely South Asian ensemble cast, Desi SNL is more than ready to remedy this lack. Across a mix of stand-up, sketches, and satire modeled on its television namesake, Desi SNL is consistently hilarious, and a number of its comedic targets, such as pushy parents or group-chat-addicted relatives, work simultaneously in universal and culturally specific dimensions. Desi SNL is currently part of the 2026 New York City Fringe Festival , an open lottery-based theater festival in which one hundred percent o...

Our Price to Pay Written by Frances Smith Directed by Emmie D'Amico Presented by Deepti Aravapalli and Frances Smith with FRIGID New York at UNDER St. Marks 94 St. Marks Place, Manhattan, NYC April 2-15, 2026 L to R: Nikki Cannon (Mrs. Jones), Louis Dean (Uncle Marcus), Avaana Harvey (Ellie), James Miller (Uncle Carl), Gail Tierney (Sylvia), Corinne Kaleta (Sophia), Margo Hera (Aunt Meghan). Photo by Rainer DeLalio. The zombie, from its Afro-Caribbean incarnation as a corpse enslaved by a zombie master, through its reinvention as a cannibalistic ghoul, to its increasingly common contemporary representation as a victim of viral infection, has long served as a figure of political critique; so the intersection of the zombies and queerness should come as little surprise. Some zombie narratives feature explicitly queer zombies; some scholars see all zombies as queer, due to, for example, their nonnormative reproduction and loss of gender markers as they decay; and some zombie narrative...

Two-Way Glass Productions, an independent production company that seeks to emphasize the ever-shifting relationship between spectator and spectacle, will present Walter Schlinger’s Romeo and Juliet , written and performed by Sean Gordon and directed by Dixie O’Connell. The production will be presented as part of the 2026 New York City Fringe Festival with FRIGID New York at The Rat NYC (68-117 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY 11201) with performances on Fri April 3 at 9:50pm, Sat April 11 at 8:40pm, Mon April 13 at 6:30pm, and Sun April 19 at 2:00 pm.  Former English undergraduate Walter Schlinger stands alone in a wide, infinite, green field. In this meta-theatrical solo performance, Walter reckons with the role our mentors play in our development and attempts to provide insight into the world's most famous love story. While desperately trying to share his work with anyone who will listen, he grapples with the notions of youth, tragedy, and validation. The creative team include...