Thinking Theater NYC

  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...

Photo courtesy of Ana Radice-Morras Catatonic , a darkly comic new one-act by Baltimore-born, D.C.-raised, and NYC-based playwright Diego Rio Ortiz, will be presented at Teatro LATEA in Manhattan as part of the New York Theater Festival (see the full list of shows for the 2025/2026 winter festival  here ). In this surreal and unsettling short play, a desperate man responds to a Craigslist ad to become a cat for a man and his daughter. The production runs 35 minutes and is presented alongside another one-act in a 90-minute program. It is directed by Chris Grubb and features Diego Rio Ortiz, Ana Radice-Morras, Patrick T. Feeney, Ruby Rodgers, Peter Hart, Sammy Schwartzman, and Kyle Douthy. Photo courtesy of Ana Radice-Morras Performances of Catatonic  are: Wednesday, 28 January 2026 at 4:00 PM Friday, 30 January 2026 at 6:30 PM Sunday, 1 February 2026 at 1:00 PM Tickets are available at:  https://innovationtickets.com/product/catatonic/ .

The Fire This Time Festival With plays by Preston Crowder , Donathan Walters, Teniia Micazia Brown, Mo Holmes, Naomi Lorrain , and DeLane McDuffie Directed by Ken-Matt Martin Presented by FRIGID New York and The Apollo at the Jonelle Procope Theater at The Apollo Stages at The Victoria 233 West 125th Street, Manhattan, NYC January 23-31, 2026 Malik Childs (foreground), Naomi Lorrain, and Victor Musoni in Goose . Photo by Maya Jackson. The Fire This Time Producing Artistic Director Cezar Williams ended his preface to the performance of the festival's annual 10-Minute Play Program that we attended with James Baldwin's assertion, "There is something terribly radical about believing that one's own experience and images are important enough to speak about, much less to write about and to perform." As the current federal government openly suppresses and attempts to disappear certain types of representation, Baldwin's words hold as true as ever, and work like that ...

Packed Written and directed by Elise Wilkes Don't Push the Red Button Written and co-directed by Zachary Mailhot Directed by Chris Cavazza Presented by RJ Theatre Co. in partnership with The Actor Launchpad at AMT Theater 354 W 45th St., Manhattan, NYC August 30-October 19, 2025 Two women in an apartment. Two men in a bunker. Two short plays that peer through a lens of unusual circumstances at relationships, loneliness, and the search for connection, even if it means becoming friends with a potato. Presented as a double bill titled Close Encounters , Packed and Don't Push the Red Button are both part of the 2025 Circle Theatre Festival , which aims to highlight experimentation and urgent storytelling over Broadway-style gloss and is dedicated this year to playwright Edward Allan Barker (1950-2021). Opening the double bill is writer and director Elise Wilkes's Packed , in which two women, Gail (Katie Gilhooley) and Dina ( Wynn McClenahan ), meet for the first time as they...

Theatre Now New York, one of the nation’s leading producers of original short-form musicals, has announced the creative teams for the 10 short musicals to be presented in its SOUND BITES XII Festival of 10-Minute Musicals. The festival will take place on May 5th at 7pm at Merkin Hall at Kaufman Music Center (129 W 67th St, New York). Tickets are now on sale at tnny.org/soundbitesXII . This year's twelfth annual Festival of 10-Minute Musicals promises to be a fast-paced evening of new and diverse short musicals from 10 teams of emerging musical theatre creators. From comedy to drama to absurdity, Aristotle to aliens to Art Garfunkel, crime and love and almond milk, SOUND BITES XII has something for everyone. Since the beginning of the festival in 2013, Theatre Now has premiered over 100 new musicals by almost 200 emerging writers, published an anthology of festival highlights, and helped license festival shows for performances around the world. Theatre Now's Artistic Director To...

The 16th Annual The Fire This Time Festival Ten-Minute Play Program Out , written by FELISPEAKS Pound Cake , written by Brittany Fisher Security Watch , written by TyLie Shider Immanentize the Eschaton , written by Garrett Turner Just One Good Day , written by Jeanette W. Hill …But Not Forgotten , written by D.L. Patrick Directed by Kimille Howard Presented in collaboration with  FRIGID New York at wild project 195 E. 3rd St., Manhattan, NYC January 23-February 2, 2025 Anita Welch-Smith and LaDonna Burns in Out . Photo by Dante Crichlow The time has arrived once again for one of our most anticipated annual theatrical events, The Fire This Time Festival Ten-Minute Play Program. In its 16th season, the Obie Award-winning Fire This Time Festival, which provides a platform for playwrights of African and African-American descent, has adopted the theme of "Taking Space" and has put the Ten-Minute part of things into quotation marks, loosening the time restriction to allow each ...

The Witching Hour Curated by Andrew Agress Kudzu, written by Daniel Prillaman and directed by Hannah Katz Metamorphosis , written by Blues Bland and directed by Allyson Broyles Camping with Vlad , written by Brad White and directed by Andrew Agress Apex Predator , written by Rachael Carnes and directed by Randall Simmons The 5 Brendas of Murray County , written by Heather Meyer and directed by Michael Landes Presented by Something from Abroad and FRIGID New York at UNDER St. Marks 94 Saint Marks Pl., Manhattan, NYC October 24-25, 2024 October is a bit like Christmas for fans of horror and the Gothic, and FRIGID New York's annual Days of the Dead festival has a sackful of gifts on offer–even if that sack resembles the one in Audition more than the one toted by Saint Nick. The Día de Muertos-inspired festival, which runs from October 17th to November 2nd, features a range of shows themed around death and the afterlife, one of which is The Witching Hour, comprising a selection of...

The Fire This Time Festival : Season 15: Ten-Minute Plays Ethel & Ethel , by Joël René Scoville; Mamas & Papas , by Kamilah Bush; What's Love Got to Do With It? , by LeeLee Jackson; Why Jamira Gotta Do All Da Werk? , by Nia Akilah Robinson; It's Karen B****! , by Taylor A. Blackman; The Mural , by Monique Pappas-Williams Directed by Cezar Williams Presented in collaboration with FRIGID New York at the wild project 195 E. 3rd St., Manhattan, NYC January 15-28, 2024 Marinda Anderson and Danielle Covington in Ethel & Ethel . Photo by Garlia Jones 2024 marks not only the fifteenth year of The Fire This Time Festival, which showcases "early career playwrights of African and African-American descent," but also a move south and east from the festival's longtime home at the Kraine Theater to the wild project, where audiences can experience an exhibition of paintings by multidisciplinary artist Moses Harper in the lobby prior to the show (or the festival...

American Blues: 5 Short Plays by Tennessee Williams Written by Tennessee Williams Directed by Jim Niesen Presented by the Irondale Ensemble Project at The Space at Irondale 85 South Oxford St., Brooklyn, NYC October 27-November 26, 2023 Shadenia Savid in Moony's Kids Don't Cry . Photo by Natasha Rotondaro In 1948, Tennessee Williams published American Blues , a collection of five one-act plays, and a remarkable new production of this collection by Brooklyn's Irondale shows that these works have lost none of their power to both entertain and challenge audiences in the intervening three-quarters of a century. Comprising plays written in the decade between 1936 and 1946 - Moony's Kids Don't Cry (1936); The Dark Room (1939); The Case of the Crushed Petunias (1941); The Long Stay Cut Short, or, the Unsatisfactory Supper (1946); and Ten Blocks on the Camino Real (1946) - American Blues represents the second part of Irondale's American Century, the first install...