Thinking Theater NYC

Vanessa Fleming. Photo courtesy of Zeider’s American Dream Theatre. ...but what if it rains?,  an award-winning, one-woman show written and performed by Vanessa Fleming, will have its NYC premiere at FRIGID New York's Neurotica Fest this September. The show will run September 12th and 13th at UNDER St. Marks, 94 St. Marks Pl, NY, NY 10009. In ...but what if it rains? , the carefree and unburdened Vanessa (Vanessa Fleming), finds herself clumsily stumbling through a different type of coming-of-age experience after the sudden and unexpected new role of becoming a caregiver for her mother, Diane (Vanessa Fleming). As she navigates the world she is now in that throws mammoth-sized curveballs at every turn, challenging her stamina and her wits as it reshapes her sense of self, she tries to meet the moment with humor and understanding, no matter how impossible everything seems. The show has been described as a "moving and well-crafted piece that strikes a ba...

Clay Mommy Written by Aviva Pearl Ocean Creation Directed by Lili Rosen Presented by FRIGID New York  at UNDER St. Marks 94 St. Marks Pl, Manhattan, NYC June 4-7, 2026 When Hana, the titular Clay Mommy appears, clad in brown bodysuit with אמת ( emet ) written across her forehead, she looks less like a miracle than a wish that has gone too far. The hardest thing about family, Clay Mommy suggests, is that the people we need most can never fully become what we need them to be. Written by Aviva Pearl Ocean Creation, directed by Lili Rosen, and presented by FRIGID New York at UNDER St. Marks, Clay Mommy is a funny, painful, and deeply Jewish meditation on care, dependency, and the risks of trying to shape another person into an answer for our loneliness. The production uses the stripped-down confines of UNDER St. Marks to fine effect. A backpack, a sparkling dress, and a sculpture in progress do much of the visual storytelling. The minimalism works because the play's real landscape is...

Do a Little Dance is a drag performance art show. A certain gentleman asked Mae to do a little dance, and she froze. She blew it. She blew it! Join her now as she tries to put on the show that she needs to redeem herself through burlesque, live music, lip-syncing, performance art rituals, and other strategies.  Featuring Mae. B. Tomorrow,  Do a Little Dance comes to UNDER St. Marks (94 St Marks Pl, Manhattan) for performances on May 22nd, 23rd, 24th, and 30th.  Content warning for partial nudity, sexually suggestive content, needles, simulated bodily fluids. Tickets are available here . 

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...

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...

Revenge of the Soy Boy , written and performed by Justin Avery Smith and directed by Jacob Musgrove, will be presented as part of the 2026 New York City Fringe Festival with FRIGID New York at UNDER St. Marks (94 St Marks Pl, New York, NY 10009) with performances on Sat April 4 at 2pm, Mon April 6 at 6:30pm, Sun April 12 at 7pm, Mon April 13 at 9:50pm & Sun April 19 at 5:20pm. After being heavily mocked online by Star Wars fans in 2025, Justin now uses Star Wars as an intersection for personal comedic stories that also provide personal and social commentary about the galaxy far, far away, our own world, and discovering what his place is in all that. Nerds, LGBTQ+, neurodiverse, film buffs/cinephiles (especially Star Wars fans), anyone who can appreciate pop culture, and anyone who has struggled in the past ten years with their place in the world amid both political and digital unrest will enjoy this show. Justin Avery Smith (he/him) is a writer, comedian and performer based in Ce...

  Loose End Productions, an independent Australian theatre and screen production company founded by playwright and actor Rose Treloar, will present Watch Me Sleep written by Treloar and directed by Talia Benatar as part of the 2026 New York City Fringe Festival with FRIGID New York at UNDER St. Marks (94 St Marks Pl, New York, NY 10009), with performances on Tue April 14 at 7pm, Thu April 16 at 6:30pm, Thu April 16 at 9:50pm, Sat April 18 at 5:20pm; and Sun April 19 at 2pm.  Fresh from two sold-out Australian seasons, Watch Me Sleep is a fiercely intimate one-act play bringing a love story from down under to NYC. Ava and Emmett invite the audience into the private anatomy of their relationship – its humor, heat, fractures and scars, beginning and ending in the present day with the belly of the play a series of flashbacks into their relationship’s highs and lows. Using direct address, the audience becomes a silent third character in the play, a mutual friend to the couple acti...

The Song of Lip and Tarantula Written by Aviva Pearl Ocean Creation Directed by Sasha Gheesling Presented by FRIGID New York NY, Big Beef Productions, and Kelley-Marie Van Dilla at UNDER St. Marks 94 St. Marks Place, Manhattan, NYC February 4-8, 2026 Raising a child is a hefty responsibility, especially within the attenuated care networks of heteropatriarchal capitalism. So just imagine what it would be like to raise 26 of them. That is the number mothered by the title characters of The Song of Lip and Tarantula , a new play from writer, comedienne, and educator Aviva Pearl Ocean Creation. While this number may sound like something from Greek mythology (or Titus Andronicus ), the more dreamlike elements of The Song of Lip and Tarantula are imbricated with verisimilar details rooting the play in the current political landscape, lived queer experience, and a granular, unsentimental evocation of New York City. When the play opens, Tarantula ( Airen Guevara ) is sitting, eyes closed, in ...

Luis Feliciano (rear) and Kristen Hoffman (front) After winning Best Play in the 2024 NYC Fringe (you can read our review here ), The Trash Garden, written  and directed by Padraig Bond, will be presented by FRIGID New York as a fundraising performance on its way to the Adelaide Fringe Festival. The performance will be presented at UNDER St Marks (94 St Marks Pl, New York NY, 1009) on Saturday, January 31st at 7:00pm. Tickets are $18 on a sliding-scale and are available for advance purchase at www.frigid.nyc . The performance will run approximately 60 minutes. Padraig Bond (Playwright/Director) is an award-winning playwright, director, actor, and producer from New York City. He is the author of The Climate Fables , rated 5 stars in the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and Best Play winner at the 2024 New York City Fringe. He is currently a resident playwright at FRIGID New York and has worked at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the United States Congress, and at So...

Señor Babyhead Written and performed by Analisa Raya-Flores Presented by FRIGID New York at UNDER St. Marks 94 St Marks Pl, Manhattan. NYC October 24 and November 1, 2025 The history of immigration in the United States boasts no shortage of governmental racism and inhumanity, with our current moment, however extraordinary in certain aspects, part of a recurring pattern. The solo show Señor Babyhead , written and performed by Analisa Raya-Flores, who is also responsible for its make-up, costumes, and props, including a full-head papier-mâché mask for one memorable sequence, approaches this dark topic with a clowning sensibility, a sharply honed sense of absurdity, and a refusal to cede to the audience the comfortable distance of passivity. With its recent performances part of FRIGID New York's fourth annual Days of the Dead Festival, a celebration of life and death inspired by the Día de Muertos, Señor Babyhead expertly embeds trenchant critiques in hilarious set pieces that showc...

The Climate Fables: The Clouds Written and directed by Padraig Bond Presented by  FRIGID New York at UNDER St. Marks 94 St. Marks Place, Manhattan, NYC August 21-23, 2025 Since the most recent staging, in January, of one of the plays of Padraig Bond's cycle The Climate Fables , the United States government has moved from not doing nearly enough to address humanity's effect on the climate to actively fighting anything that might mitigate climate disaster. Closing out a literally fiery summer, The Climate Fables returned to UNDER St. Marks with a (very) staged reading of a new installment of the cycle from FRIGID resident playwright Bond: The Clouds . The Clouds closes the multi-play, millennium-spanning arc of the witchy Miranda and the burden that she bears of struggling to reconcile humanity and a world ecology devastated by anthropocentric climate change and ever less able to support life. Alongside Miranda, a cast of new characters, including one from a skybound society...

Anti-Gone Created by Sivan Raz Presented by Needs More Work Productions at FRIGID New York 's 5th Annual Little Shakespeare Festival at UNDER St Marks 94 St Marks Pl, Manhattan, NYC August 14-17, 2025 L to R: Elizabeth Fox, Emily Phelps, and Penelope Rose Deen, and Photo by Noah Simon Jampol Anti-Gone , created by Needs More Work Productions, is something like a reimagining of Sophocles’ Antigone , one of the most enduring tragedies of the Greek stage. Rather than retell the story in straightforward fashion, the company makes the audience a collaborator, placing us inside the questions of justice, memory, and communal responsibility that have haunted this text for centuries. Staged in the intimate confines of UNDER St. Marks as part of the Little Shakespeare Festival, the production opens with a bag at center stage, the body of Polynices within; players come and go; there is a bit of very fine crowd work, and the sound of a cello plucking and bowing. From the first moment, we are ...

UNSEX'd Written by Jay Whitehead and Daniel Judes Directed by Josh Bradley Presented by JB Theatricals at UNDER St. Marks 94 St. Marks Place, Manhattan, NYC August 10-17, 2025 The playful use of bardcore covers of contemporary songs in scene transitions encapsulates both the era-bending sense of humor in Jay Whitehead and Daniel Judes's Renaissance-set UNSEX'd and the continuities in the issues that the play raises between the early modern period and our own. In commercial theater in Shakespearean England, public self-exhibition onstage was frowned upon for women, so female roles were played by boys or young men, and UNSEX'd , with psychological acuity and enough bawdy humor to make the Bard proud, irresistibly draws us into the friendship and rivalry between two such specialists in female characters in Shakespeare's own company. In its run at UNDER St. Marks, UNSEX'd is making its U.S. premiere as part of the FRIGID New York 's 5th annual Little Shakespe...

The Mousetrap, or Prince Hamlet wrote a dumb play and now we have to do it… Written by Margaret Rose Caterisano Directed by Jackson Paul Walker Presented by Broomstick Theatre Co. at UNDER St. Marks 94 St. Marks Place, Manhattan, NYC August 2-14, 2025 If in William Shakespeare's England, plays were required to be approved by the Master of the Revels and playwrights would take care not to openly criticize the current monarchy, in today's United States, a major network has curried favor for a merger by canceling a show critical of the government, while the government itself takes time out to attack episodes of South Park that satirize its officials. In this environment of governmental attacks on the arts, The Mousetrap, or Prince Hamlet wrote a dumb play and now we have to do it… , from playwright and professor Margaret Rose Caterisano, takes up the question of the place of art in calling out those in power through a return to Hamlet and its play-within-a-play that dramatizes t...

As You Will Created by Conor Mullen, David Brummer, and George Hider August 3-16, 2025 As You Wish It...or The Bride Princess....or What You Will Written by Michael Hagins Directed by Kat Santomoreno and Michael Hagins Presented by Fork the Odds Productions July 31-August 9, 2025 Part of the Little Shakespeare Festival 2025 presented by FRIGID New York at Under St. Marks, 94 St Marks Place, Manhattan, NYC, July 31-August 17, 2025 For most American high school students, their experience with Shakespeare is with the tragedies, and surely this contributes to the sense of Shakespeare as the Bard, writer of elevated, high culture entertainment. Of course, in reality, in his own time, Shakespeare was anything but, which is beautifully captured in this year’s Little Shakespeare Festival, “Not Your English Teacher’s Shakespeare.” The unscripted, improvisational As You Will and the Shakespearean  Princess Bride  parody  As You Wish It are both poignant reminders that Shakespeare ...

Alice Fishbein. Photo by Caeli Smith It's been 84 years… or 26, since April 1999, when six-year-old Alice Fishbein was finally allowed to watch James Cameron's classic, Titanic , on VHS, and a star was born. Written and performed by  Alice Fishbein , a tour de force in the comedy scene of New York City, and directed by Ryann Lind,  Leo Still Dies in the End is a one-woman parody re-enactment of James Cameron’s Titanic where Alice plays all the roles and the scenes are randomly selected by a prize wheel. Some may call it a sickness, but Alice calls it “nostalgia.” Leo Still Dies in the End is a laugh out loud commentary on how the content we consumed as children affects us as we grow up. The show’s pre-production began in Alice’s parents’ apartment, where a young Alice would mouth the words along to the entire movie. It was soon subsequently banned in the apartment. However, the show concept really formed during a trip to Portugal in 2019 when, during dinners, Alice’s si...

Clay Mommy Written by Aviva Pearl Creation Directed by Jael Scott Presented at UNDER St. Marks 94 St. Marks Place, Manhattan, NYC July 1-2, 2025 As a monster, the golem, a humanoid creature in Jewish tradition commonly created from mud or clay and animated via a word written on its forehead or on paper placed into its mouth, destabilizes normative boundaries and categories. A golem occupies the eponymous role of Clay Mommy in Aviva Pearl Creation's play of the same name, adding a complementary supernatural layer to the show's concern with such destabilizations, as well as with self-fashioning and mothering. With an all-trans-femme cast, Clay Mommy presents a nuanced narrative of one young woman's struggles to define and enact what it means for her to be a daughter and granddaughter, a prospective mother, a trans woman, and Jewish after she returns from New York City to the West Coast and her estranged mother. Clay Mommy is part of FRIGID New York's 2025 Queerly Festiv...

Femme in Yellow Tombola: mystical queer italian bingo Written and performed by Summer Minerva Presented at UNDER St. Marks 94 St. Marks Place, Manhattan, NYC June 12 and 28, 2025 Numerous cultures have traditionally included–and often celebrated–third gender categories: a person might be, for instance, a bakla in the Philippines, two spirit or equivalent designations among various North American Indigenous peoples, or a femminiello in Naples, Italy. It is the femminiello  who is a central, structuring figure in Summer Minerva's punningly titled solo show Femme in Yellow Tombola: mystical queer italian bingo . Feminielli , while socially excluded in some ways—prompting them to queer certain traditions—are also considered lucky and, relatedly, have often called the numbers in the titular tombola, a traditional game comparable to bingo but in which the numbered squares have names and meanings attached to them (number 66, for example, is le due zitelle , the two spinsters, associated...