Thinking Theater NYC

In partnership with the New York City Emergency Management and the Waterfront Alliance, Rainy Day Plays presents Please Don’t Flush! , a municipal comedy with music and flood preparedness resources activating public spaces throughout New York City during Climate Week NYC 2026. Performanceswill be staged throughout the five boroughs from September 19-27, 2026. All performances are free to the public. Please Don’t Flush! is a municipal comedy about a community board scheduled to vote on a mysterious waterfront development that neighbors and seagulls and plumbers are worried will increase inland flooding. Instead, the board is derailed by planning their bi-annual gala, celebrating their second-vice-chair’s half birthday, and locking the anti-anti-anti-anti-development coalition in the bathroom. Developed in deep partnership with NYC Emergency Management and the Waterfront Alliance, come find the show in public spaces across the city with music, laughs, and resources about flooding this S...

Jane Arden On Her Shoulders is pleased to present a staged reading Vagina Rex & The Gas Oven , by Jane Arden, on Thursday, September 17th at New Perspectives Studio, 458 West 37 Street at 10th Avenue. Doors open at 6:45pm for a 7:00pm curtain, beginning with The Play in Context introduction by Osimiri Sprowal, who situates the script in its historical time and place, followed by the reading and a post-performance reception and discussion. Admission is $20 for the reading and reception. R.S.V.P. at Eventbrite . Jane Arden (1927-82), like many prolific women writers before and after her, could be described as a mad genius. Born Nora Patrice Morris in Pontypool, Wales, she went on to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. She began acting in the 1940s, starring in both television and film. Her first two plays, Dear Little Liz and Conscience and Desire (1954), were first performed at the New Lindsay Theater Club, directed by her then-husband Philip Saville. Her next play, T...

Victoria M. Fragnito, Monica Rounds, and Katharine Maness. Our favorite Gothic feminist playwright Patricia Lynn’s new play HYDE (Or Girls Can Kill Goats) will have a workshop production September 24 - 26 at A.R.T./New York Theatres. The play is a bold contemporary reimagining of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde , by Robert Louis Stevenson. A delightfully dangerous mix of Yellowjackets and John Proctor is a Villain , HYDE transforms the classic tale of good vs evil into a fierce feminist frenzy, featuring heightened language, vivid theatricality, and a vengeful goat goddess named Bernice Hyde. Lynn also serves as director. After a tenacious journalist threatens to expose her vibrant but violent past, Jane Patterson attends her twenty-year college reunion in hopes of confronting him face-to-face. But the night does not go as she expects. Jane drowns herself in drugs, old friends, and the memories of her delicious witchy youth instead. And Jane starts to wonder what she shoul...

Dirty Bird Written and directed by Whit Flint Adapted from Anton Chekhov Presented by Twenty Somethings Productions and Riot Act at ErF Gallery 1 Ingraham St, Brooklyn, NY 11206 September 4-20, 2026 AJ Molder and River Knight. Photo by Matt Street. Anton Chekhov's works may seem to us now as the epitome of canonical, but, Svetlana Evdokimova reminds us, in own time, he "questioned the certainties that sustained traditional modes of social organization and morality as well as traditional ways of conceiving of the human self" and "sought to break out of tradition and convention through experimentation with new literary forms and a new kind of theater" ( Staging Existence , 2023, pg. 239). As Whit Flint more succinctly puts it in the director's note for Dirty Bird , his adaptation of The Seagull , Chekhov was a "rebel." Dirty Bird , a joint presentation of NYC-based Twenty Somethings Productions and UK-based Riot Act, channels that rebellious spirit...

A Midsummer Night’s Dream Written by William Shakespeare Directed by Esther Cohen and Sarah Stevenson Presented by Riverdale Shakespeare Players at University of Mount Saint Vincent , Riverdale Y , and Christ Church Riverdale August 27, 28, and 30, 2026 Photo by Alice Dupree. NYC may seem like it abounds in free Shakespeare in the summer, and to some extent it does—any number of high-quality productions are mounted in parks big and small, parking lots, and otherwise quiet school yards. And yet, this bounty does not always reach the outer boroughs, to say nothing of the outer limits of the outer boroughs. If Riverdale Shakespeare Players’ outstanding and extraordinarily well-attended inaugural production is any indication, the community is hungry for more Shakespeare, for opportunities for actors and audience members alike.  A new volunteer-run community theater company in the Riverdale neighborhood of the northwest Bronx, the Riverdale Shakespeare Players is a joint collaboration...

I AM GOING TO DIE (And All They Gave Me Were These Lousy Cupcakes) Written by Lochlan MacLean and February Schneck Directed by February Schneck Associate direction by Bela Pascale Presented by LibLab Productions and HARP Theatricals (Helping Art Reach People) at The Rat NYC August 29, 2026 Sylvia Grosvold. Photo courtesy of LibLab Productions. Memento mori has a voluminous history of appearance in different forms of art: after all, what is more universally relatable than the inevitability of death? In terms of drama, one might think of the eponymous protagonist of the late medieval Everyman being made to leave behind even family on his unlooked-for pilgrimage into death, of Hamlet conversing with the gravedigger, or, several hundred years later, of Professor Vivian Bearing in Margaret Edson's Wit using the poetry of John Donne to process her experience of dying from cancer. A one-act contemplation of death and loss that artfully fuses melancholy, warmth, and humor, I AM GOING ...

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...