Thinking Theater NYC

The Fire This Time Alumni Spotlight: Roger Q. Mason Presented by The Fire This Time Festival in collaboration with FRIGID New York via Facebook and YouTube Live November 24, 2020 live, and recording streaming on YouTube This Thanksgiving week, when we are supposed to be thinking about what we are grateful for, and ideally also about the dark undersides of our national mythology, seems like a particularly fitting time for the first annual The Fire This Time Festival Alumni Spotlight. The Fire This Time (TFTT), founded in 2009, amplifies Black voices by showcasing the work of writers of the African diaspora through short plays, staged readings, and more. As well as a richly deserved celebration of Roger Q. Mason and his artistry, this inaugural Alumni Spotlight also acted as a fundraiser for TFTT: donations can be made via TFTT's website . In addition to a sampling of Mason's corpus, the Spotlight featured reflections from a selection of other theater artists. TFTT Artistic Di...

  A Day Written by Gabrielle Chapdelaine Translated by Josephine George Directed by Sameul Buggeln and Wendy Dann Presented by The Cherry Artists' Collective via YouTube Live November 13-21, 2020 Sylvie Yntema, Karl Gregory, Jahmar Ortiz, Erica Steinhagen. Courtesy Emily Owens PR Each twenty-four-hour period simultaneously brings a fresh start and another installment of a seemingly endless repetition, one aspect of our lived experience among many poignantly captured by Montreal-based playwright Gabrielle Chapdelaine's A Day . Presented by The Cherry Artists' Collective in a translation by Josephine George, A Day follows two men and two women from one midnight to the next, demonstrating along the way that mundane does not mean unimportant. The actors playing these central characters livestream their performances from partitioned spaces on the stage of Ithaca's State Theater, and the live portion is seamlessly blended with pre-recorded elements, including interactions w...

  Keely and Du Written by Jane Martin Directed by Brandon Walker and Erin Cronican Presented by The Seeing Place Theater October 31-November 1, 2020 via Zoom and November 3-7, 2020 via YouTube Audrey Heffernan Meyer (Du) and Erin Cronican (Keely). Credit: The Seeing Place Beginning on the last day of Domestic Violence Awareness Month and extending through an election week that may have significant ramifications for women's health and reproductive rights (as well as the continued existence of the nation as a democracy) and that arrives hard on the heels of the installation of a Supreme Court justice hostile to these rights comes The Seeing Place Theater (TSP)'s reading of Keely and Du , a work that is deeply rooted in issues of women's bodily autonomy. This reading of (the pseudonymous) Jane Martin's Pulitzer Prize-nominated 1994 play about a pregnant woman kidnapped by a radical Christian anti-choice group continues TSP's its excellent "Body Politic" seas...

  The Pumpkin Pie Show: Quarantine Tales Written by Clay McLeod Chapman Performed by Clay McLeod Chapman and Hanna Cheek Presented via YouTube Live October 31, 2020 Clay McLeod Chapman. Photo credit: Antonia Stoyanovich Halloween has, sadly, come to an end (although this coming week might be the really frightening one). If end it must, then at least this season of scares came to a creepy, funny, and enjoyably unsavory close with a new installment of Clay McLeod Chapman's macabre storytelling series The Pumpkin Pie Show . The show boasts a history stretching back to 1996, and with its latest (re)incarnation, The Pumpkin Pie Show: Quarantine Tales , playwright, novelist, and comics writer Chapman joined fellow performer Hanna Cheek to bring a quartet of finely crafted and expertly told tales into audiences' homes via the dark magic of YouTube Live . The four stories, totaling about an hour, are each narrated in first-person, often with a sense of confessional intimacy that inten...

  A Five Mile Radius Written by Tasha Partee Directed by Jim Furlong and Devin Klos Presented by Hudson Guild Theatre Company via YouTube October 23-25, 2020 [UPDATE 10/27/20: additional performances have been added from Friday October 30th at 7:30PM through Sunday November 1st, ending at 5PM] Top left: Stacey Wright (Edie), below left: Michelle Quintero (Caitlin), below right: Tasha Partee (Roberta). Photo credit: Devin Klos Hudson Guild, focused on the Chelsea area, provides services in the arts, education, mental health, community building and more to more than 14,000 people of varied sociocultural and socioeconomic backgrounds per year. Its dramatic arm, Hudson Guild Theatre Company (HGTC), founded in 1994, involves community members, particularly the economically disadvantaged, as spectators and participants in live theater, as well as serving "more than 4,000 low income residents of diverse cultural backgrounds and their youth in neighborhood schools." HGTC's lates...

  Image courtesy Spin Cycle PR the american vicarious in collaboration with BRIC will broadcast  DEBATE: Baldwin vs Buckley , a live staging of the historic clash between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr.,   October 22, 23, and 24. This live staging will be streamed and broadcast via YouTube and cable. UPDATE 10/17/20:  If you missed the live streamed performances, one night’s broadcast is now available to watch anytime for free via YouTube through November 15. View it here .   “Is the American Dream at the expense of the American Negro?” This was the topic on February 18, 1965 when an overflow crowd packed the Cambridge Union in Cambridge, England, to bear witness to a historic televised debate between James Baldwin, the leading literary voice of the civil rights movement, and William F. Buckley Jr., a fierce critic of the movement and America’s most influential conservative intellectual. The stage was set for an epic confrontation that p...

  Far Away Written by Caryl Churchill Directed by Cheryl Faraone Presented by PTP/NYC via YouTube October 15-18, 2020 Nesba Crenshaw (Harper), Ro Boddie (Todd), and Caitlin Duffy (Joan)  PTP/NYC (Potomac Theatre Project), in association with Middlebury College, has been presenting its thirty-fourth season virtually, and Caryl Churchill's 2000 play Far Away concludes this season. These performances, presented via PTP/NYC's YouTube channel , have been free, but not only are any donations welcomed by PTP/NYC but 10% of all donations benefit the National Black Theatre, the oldest continuously-operated Black theater in New York City. Assured and entertaining, PTP/NYC's production of Churchill's absurdist indictment of human violence, oppression, and tribalism feels powerfully relevant to our present moment. The play opens with a close-up of an eye, then eyes, suggesting the themes of witnessing, secrecy, and perspective to follow. Far Away , which comes in at under an hou...