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Articles by Tony Marinelli

About Tony Marinelli (193 Articles)
Tony Marinelli is an actor, playwright, director, arts administrator, and now critic. He received his B.A. and almost finished an MFA from Brooklyn College in the golden era when Benito Ortolani, Howard Becknell, Rebecca Cunningham, Gordon Rogoff, Marge Linney, Bill Prosser, Sam Leiter, Elinor Renfield, and Glenn Loney numbered amongst his esteemed professors. His plays I find myself here, Be That Guy (A Cat and Two Men), and …and then I meowed have been produced by Ryan Repertory Company, one of Brooklyn’s few resident theatre companies.
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The Cherry Orchard (LG Arts Center SEOUL)

September 21, 2026

What playwright and director Simon Stone does with "The Cherry Orchard" is less a conventional modernization than a cultural transplant: Anton Chekhov’s doomed Russian estate becomes a glittering Korean corporate dynasty, and the old anxieties about inheritance, class, obsolescence, and the inability to recognize that history has moved on to acquire the glossy, feverish atmosphere of a contemporary K-drama. Produced by LG Arts Center Seoul and arriving at the Park Avenue Armory after engagements in Seoul, Busan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Australia, Stone’s nearly three-hour reinterpretation retains the skeleton of Chekhov’s 1904 play while replacing its landed aristocracy with a Korean chaebol family whose sprawling business empire—cars, technology, hospitality, medical supplies, “and anything else from which money can be made”—is staggering toward collapse. The result is exuberantly theatrical, unexpectedly funny, and alive to the strange comedy that Chekhov always understood could coexist with catastrophe. [more]

America, Who Hurt You?

September 21, 2026

Sarah Jones has spent two decades turning the one-person show into an exercise in theatrical multiplication. In "America, Who Hurt You?," she fills the Polonsky Shakespeare Center with a sprawling collection of personalities who seem to have wandered in from different corners of the country, different generations, and, occasionally, different centuries. There are relatives, immigrants, elders, skeptics, patriots, malcontents, and people simply trying to figure out what happened to the country they inhabit. Directed by Eric Ting, the production is at once comic, intimate, intellectually restless, and unmistakably built around Jones’ extraordinary ability to make a single body feel inhabited by many. [more]

Lean-To

September 15, 2026

A multi-day hike is supposed to be restorative: an interval in which the civilized world recedes, the body remembers that it has muscles, and the mind, deprived of its usual electronic distractions, is given a chance to wander. But the woods have their own ideas about solitude. In Stephen Sheffer’s warm, funny, unexpectedly poignant "Lean-To," now playing at 59E59 Theaters, a rustic shelter becomes the unlikely site of a three-person collision involving loneliness, romance, race, vulnerability, betrayal and the peculiar intimacy that can arise when strangers are forced to share a roof. Directed with considerable sensitivity by Jesse Jou, the play gradually reveals itself as a small-scale comedy about the enormous difficulty of being alone with oneself—and the equally enormous difficulty of being alone with someone else. [more]

To Have and To Hold

September 4, 2026

There is something wonderfully perverse about naming two sisters Kate and Bianca after the heroines of Shakespeare’s "The Taming of the Shrew" and then setting them loose in the 21st century, where the old machinery of courtship has become at once more liberated, more commercial, and considerably more bewildering. In Laura Lapidus’ "To Have and To Hold," directed by Zoë Adams, and now playing at Chashama’s 154 Theater, Shakespeare’s notoriously troublesome romantic comedy becomes the occasion for a much more contemporary inquiry: What happens when the stories we inherit about love, marriage, womanhood, and ourselves collide with the stories we have painstakingly written on our own? The result is a buoyant, intelligent, unexpectedly tender comedy that knows its Shakespeare but refuses to be imprisoned by him. [more]

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Smoking Mirror Theatre Company)

September 3, 2026

At A.R.T./New York Theatres, Smoking Mirror Theatre Company’s production of Shakespeare’s "A Midsummer Night’s Dream," running through September 13th, offers the kind of theatrical escape that the play itself promises: a passage from the ordinary world into a place where logic loosens its grip, desire becomes unstable, and the boundary between comedy and nightmare grows deliciously thin. Co-directors John Gordon and Ruby Rich gift us a faithful restaging that conveys the fun and magic of Shakespeare’s original text while adding just enough distinctive flourishes to make a familiar work feel freshly discovered. [more]

The Bathroom Attendant

August 23, 2026

If Kelly can pare away the exposition, substantially tighten the second act, eliminate the extraneous political rhetoric, deepen the comedy through character rather than topical jokes, and give Marcus a more restrained and genuinely dangerous presence, "The Bathroom Attendant" could become considerably more than the intriguing but somewhat slipshod thriller it currently is. The ingredients are there: a perfectly matched cast, resourceful staging, a vivid setting and a playwright willing to look directly at the ugly underside of American life. What is needed now is not a new play so much as a more disciplined version of the very good one already struggling to emerge. [more]

benevolent

August 20, 2026

In benevolent, Sophie McIntosh turns a basement laundry room into a small theater of female confinement, where the dirty linens of respectable New York become both literal evidence and metaphorical residue. Set in 1917 at the fictional Inwood Benevolent Home, a reformatory modeled on the city’s historical Magdalene institutions, the play places four young women on a “soiled shift,” scrubbing blood, excrement, and other unmentionable traces from the underwear of people who will never have to touch their own filth. McIntosh’s subject is grim—sexual exploitation, class privilege, racial inequality, pregnancy, institutional punishment—but her method is anything but dour. With Nina Goodheart’s richly calibrated direction, benevolent becomes a remarkably nimble comedy-drama about women discovering one another beneath the categories that society has imposed upon them. [more]

Isla

August 19, 2026

"Isla," the new musical-theater piece from Hit the Lights! Company now at WP Theater, is one of those productions in which the eye is continually rewarded while the mind is left waiting for the story to catch up. It is an act of love, remembrance, and theatrical ingenuity, inspired by the family history of co-artistic director Samantha Blain, whose mother and two aunts fled Cuba in 1969, during the early years of Fidel Castro’s regime, in search of freedom and a new life in the United States. Co-directed by Blain’s colleagues Roman Sanchez and Mikayla Stanley, and assembled collaboratively from family stories, recorded interviews, music, projection, movement, and puppetry, Isla possesses an almost tactile sincerity. Yet sincerity is not the same thing as dramatic necessity. The production has been given an abundance of means for telling its story; what it lacks is a sufficiently compelling story to tell with them. [more]

Broad Strokes

August 14, 2026

At first mention, a young woman suffering a stroke does not sound like a promising premise for a comedy, much less a musical comedy. It suggests frantic texts to a medically literate friend, and the sort of midnight internet search that convinces you that a headache is an aneurysm. Yet Catherine Cohen, whose comic persona has always depended upon turning private neuroses into public spectacle, has discovered in "Broad Strokes" an almost perversely fertile subject: the surreal experience of having a stroke at thirty, discovering that it was caused by a congenital hole in her heart, and then finding herself grateful, in a sense, to have been proved right about all the things she had spent her life worrying about. Under Alex Timbers’ brisk and extravagantly theatrical direction, Cohen turns a medical emergency into a fantasia of vanity, anxiety, pop culture, and self-invention. The result is a compact, highly polished Off-Broadway debut that is considerably more inventive—and considerably funnier—than its premise has any right to be. [more]

The Pass

August 8, 2026

John Donnelly’s "The Pass," which arrived at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 2014 and now makes its American premiere at La MaMa, is the sort of play whose subject seems almost unnervingly well chosen for the present moment. Professional soccer has never been more culturally omnipresent in the United States, while the question of what elite sports permit—or refuse to permit—men to reveal about themselves has acquired an urgency that extends far beyond the playing field. Yet Donnelly’s play is not a consoling story about athletes discovering the liberating possibilities of love. It is considerably darker, and more interesting: a study of a man who has so thoroughly converted himself into a marketable public object that, by the time he is offered the possibility of recovering his private self, he may no longer know what that self is. Across three hotel rooms and twelve years, "The Pass" traces the wreckage produced when ambition, masculinity, desire, celebrity, and shame become so thoroughly entangled that success itself begins to resemble a form of imprisonment. [more]

The Vessel

August 6, 2026

George's accomplishment lies in recognizing that public catastrophes reverberate far beyond the headlines. His protagonists are not heroes in any conventional sense but three hourly employees earning modest wages as "Park Ambassadors," a title whose corporate optimism barely conceals the grim reality of their assignment. They answer tourists' questions, direct pedestrian traffic, and, above all, watch. They observe faces, gestures, pauses, and hesitations, searching for invisible signs that someone has arrived not to admire the skyline but to disappear from it. Such vigilance is psychologically exhausting precisely because it demands certainty where certainty can never exist. George understands that the deepest wounds inflicted by preventable tragedy are often borne by those who survive wondering whether a different word, glance, or gesture might have altered another person's fate. [more]

This Lime Tree Bower

July 25, 2026

Christopher Ryan directs with remarkable confidence in the material's stillness. Presented upstairs at Quick Eternity, a cocktail bar tucked into the Seaport, the production dissolves the customary boundary between actor and audience. There is no conventional stage, scarcely any scenery, and almost no distance separating performer from spectator. Ryan wisely resists the temptation to manufacture unnecessary movement. Instead, the actors drift naturally among chairs, windowsills and walls, remaining present even while another tells his story, reacting with the smallest smile or glance. What might have become three isolated monologues instead resembles an evening in an Irish pub where conversation ricochets effortlessly from one raconteur to another. Ryan understands that McPherson's drama depends not upon theatrical embellishment but upon absolute trust in language, rhythm, and listening. The result is intimate in the truest sense: one feels less like an audience member than an invited confidant. [more]

Sukkot

July 21, 2026

Matthew Leavitt’s "Sukkot" begins with a deceptively simple premise: a grieving widower builds a sukkah because he believes it is the closest remaining path to his late wife. From that premise emerges one of the most satisfying new family plays to arrive this season, a comedy-drama that understands grief not as a singular emotion but as an unruly collection of contradictions. It is uproariously funny without ever mocking pain, deeply moving without reaching for sentimentality, and wise enough to recognize that families often express love most fluently through irritation. The 6th Act's superb production at 59E59 Theaters, directed with remarkable assurance by Joel Zwick, allows Leavitt's finely calibrated script to breathe, laugh, and ache in equal measure. [more]

The Taming of the Shrew

July 19, 2026

What ultimately distinguishes this production is its refusal to flatten Shakespeare into a contemporary thesis. It neither apologizes for the play's misogyny nor sensationalizes it. Instead, Otto trusts that audiences are capable of holding competing truths in their minds simultaneously: that "The Taming of the Shrew" is uproariously funny, dramatically exhilarating, and profoundly unsettling. In embracing the play's ambiguities rather than escaping them, Shakespeare CSE has launched its "Shakespeare Entirely" series with a production that is not only intellectually invigorating but also enormously entertaining—a reminder that the greatest classics endure not because they provide easy answers, but because they continue asking impossibly difficult questions with inexhaustible theatrical delight. [more]

The Potluck

July 15, 2026

César Alvarez's "The Potluck," directed with uncommon daring by Sarah Benson, is that increasingly rare theatrical achievement: a musical willing to risk confusion, contradiction, and formal unruliness in pursuit of emotional and historical truth. Inspired by the 1979 Greensboro Massacre—in which members of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party, aided by astonishing failures of law enforcement, murdered five labor organizers during an anti-Klan demonstration—the production refuses to transform political martyrdom into tidy historical pageantry. Instead, Alvarez, in concert with Benson's characteristically adventurous theatrical imagination, constructs an expansive meditation on inheritance, memory, identity, and the uneasy obligations of art itself. The result is not documentary theater, nor autobiography, nor agitprop, nor conventional musical comedy, but an exhilarating synthesis of all four. It unfolds less as a linear narrative than as an act of excavation, uncovering the ways political violence reverberates through generations long after headlines have faded. [more]

Lines

June 29, 2026

A theatrical audition has always carried the faint aura of ritual: a small room, a handful of strangers vested with authority, and an actor asked to compress talent, vulnerability, and desperation into a few fleeting minutes. "Lines," a taut new psychological chamber play by Bellamy Brewster and Ewan Lloyd, recognizes that the audition is already a form of theater—and then pushes that premise into increasingly disquieting territory. Brewster, who also directs, transforms the familiar rituals of casting into a claustrophobic examination of power, ambition, and the hidden price of artistic validation. Set entirely within the confines of an audition room, the play begins with recognizable industry conventions before gradually mutating into something far more sinister. As the process unfolds, the rules become increasingly rigid, the room itself seems to contract, and what initially appears to be a professional evaluation evolves into an unsettling psychological contest. The central question lingers over every exchange: What, exactly, is the cost of being chosen? [more]

Misterman

June 28, 2026

Walsh has long been fascinated by characters imprisoned within the architecture of their own memories, people condemned to relive the past not because they have forgotten it, but because they remember it with unbearable precision. "Misterman" may be his most devastating examination of that obsession. Thomas Magill, a profoundly isolated young man living alone in the Irish village of Inishfree, believes himself chosen to shepherd his neighbors toward God's grace. Every morning he ventures into town with his pen and pad noting what his flock must work on to improve their paths to heaven, determined to save their souls, convinced that he alone sees their hidden sins and their capacity for redemption. Yet beneath this evangelical certainty lies a psyche splintering under the weight of grief, abuse, loneliness, and delusion. Walsh transforms what could have been a familiar portrait of mental illness into something metaphysical: an inquiry into the terrible cost of constructing a reality so complete that it ultimately devours its creator. [more]

Camping

June 26, 2026

What emerges over time is not merely a friendship but one of the most intricate love stories currently playing in New York. Ari and Brit have been entwined since birth, neighbors in a trailer park, companions through every formative humiliation and triumph. They know one another with an intimacy that exceeds romance even as it continually gestures toward it. Their connection exists in that difficult territory where friendship, devotion, desire, resentment, dependence, and yearning become impossible to separate. Theater often struggles to depict such relationships without reducing them to categories. Barclay refuses simplification. The result feels startlingly true. [more]

La Cage aux Folles (New York City Center Encores!)

June 24, 2026

Few musicals occupy quite the same place in the American theatrical imagination as "La Cage aux Folles." Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein’s 1983 landmark arrived disguised as an old-fashioned musical comedy—complete with farce, mistaken identities, and melodies that seemed to float effortlessly into the ear—yet it carried within it a quietly radical vision of queer domesticity. More than four decades later, that vision remains startlingly potent. At a moment when drag artists once again find themselves the targets of political opportunism and manufactured moral panic, Robert O’Hara’s exuberant New York City Center Encores! revival feels less like an exercise in nostalgia than a reaffirmation of the show’s enduring conviction that family is defined not by conformity but by love. [more]

And Then the Rodeo Burned Down

June 11, 2026

Throughout, Rice and Roland demonstrate extraordinary command of tone. They move effortlessly from slapstick to philosophical inquiry, from broad clowning to moments of startling vulnerability. Their dialogue crackles with wit, but it is their physical storytelling that leaves the deepest impression. Every gesture feels considered. Every movement carries meaning. The years of collaboration between these artists are visible in every second of stage time, producing a level of trust and precision rarely encountered even among the most accomplished theatrical partnerships. [more]

In the Devil’s Hands

June 9, 2026

Helen Banner’s "In the Devil’s Hands," receiving its haunting world premiere at Zoopraxic’s newly opened Long Island City performance space, is one of those rare theatrical experiences that seems to alter the rhythm of time itself. Inspired by the true story of Alphonse Le Gastelois, the Jersey resident who voluntarily exiled himself to a barren reef after being falsely suspected of a series of crimes, Banner transforms a historical curiosity into a profound meditation on loneliness, forgiveness, memory, and the strange seductions of self-imposed isolation. Set in the aftermath of the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands during the 1940s, the play unfolds with the inevitability of a tide, drawing audiences into a world where innocence is insufficient protection against suspicion and where exile can become both punishment and refuge. [more]

Dirty Books

May 28, 2026

For most of its running time, "Dirty Books"—a slyly seductive immersive production written and directed by Mara Lieberman for Bated Breath Theatre Company—behaves less like a play than like a forbidden object one has discovered hidden in a filing cabinet marked “Moral Decay.” The audience enters a narrow white-walled performance space on West 14th Street that has been transformed into a miniature museum of American censorship: stacks of banned books, clothespinned documents, timelines of obscenity law, View-Masters displaying coyly erotic photographs, typewriters waiting for confessions. Before a word of drama has officially begun, the production has already implicated us in its central question: who gets to decide what stories may be told, what desires may be spoken aloud, and what forms of intimacy are permitted to exist in public? [more]

Animal Wisdom

May 26, 2026

There are evenings in the theater when one feels not merely entertained but altered—mysteriously unfastened from the ordinary mechanisms of perception and delivered into some older, stranger chamber of human experience. Signature Theatre’s revival of Heather Christian’s astonishing "Animal Wisdom," now directed with ecstatic precision by Keenan Tyler Oliphant, belongs emphatically to that rare category. To call it a musical is technically accurate in the same way that calling a cathedral a building is technically accurate. What Christian has fashioned is less a stage work than a séance disguised as an oratorio, a requiem disguised as autobiography, and a communal rite disguised—very loosely—as theater. The evening begins with a sly acknowledgment of its own displacement. This piece, we are informed, was intended for a ruined church or some other “holy space,” though the observation quickly becomes theological rather than logistical: theaters, after all, are continually deconsecrated and reconsecrated. By the time the performance ends, one understands precisely what Christian means. The Romulus Linney Courtyard has ceased to function as a conventional performance venue. It has become a sanctum for grief, memory, and ecstatic release. [more]

Specimen

May 25, 2026

Visually, "Specimen" resembles the fever dream of a junk dealer raised on 1970s science fiction. We anxiously anticipate the arrival of Robot B-9 from" Lost in Space" shouting “Danger, Will Robinson!,” but that level of comfort zone never materializes…wink, wink. The set, designed collaboratively by Sharp, McCormick, and Mancinelli, is a glorious landfill of keyboards, monitors, knobs, exposed wiring, and industrial debris. It evokes a radical version of the control room from any low budget sci-fi film of the 70s, as though salvaged after decades drifting through radioactive space. David Zeffren’s lighting bathes the production in bruised blues and flashing emergency reds, transforming the basement theater into a claustrophobic purgatory of technological exhaustion. The entire environment feels one electrical surge away from extinction. [more]

The Emporium

May 22, 2026

John, discovered as an infant in a basket outside the grand department store known as the Emporium, grows up haunted by the place’s almost metaphysical allure. Like so many Wilder protagonists, he is both an innocent and a seeker, a fundamentally decent American pilgrim wandering toward a destination he only dimly understands. The Emporium itself becomes at once department store, cathedral, artistic calling, romantic ideal, and existential mirage. Wilder once described the play as “a mixture of Horatio Alger and Franz Kafka,” and the description proves hilariously apt: John’s yearning possesses the earnestness of American self-invention while the bureaucratic evasions surrounding the store carry the absurd, unknowable menace of a dream. [more]

Constance: A Confession

May 20, 2026

The evening’s pleasures derive less from narrative surprise than from tonal dexterity. Sindelar knows exactly how ridiculous this world is, but resists the temptation to become smug about it. The libretto and score gleefully catalogue the linguistic debris of internet spirituality—“divine feminine,” trauma jargon, gut-health evangelism, pseudo-mystical affirmations—yet the satire lands because it is rooted in recognizable human hunger. These characters are not fools so much as spiritually malnourished people searching for coherence in a culture that increasingly offers branding in place of meaning. [more]

Canciones

May 14, 2026

Inside, "Canciones" unfolds less like a play than like an actual family gathering one has somehow wandered into midway through the evening. The house hums with side conversations, overlapping instructions, beer coolers on the patio, guitars in the basement, cousins teasing one another from room to room. Guests are separated organically into shifting clusters and ushered through the home not with theatrical rigidity but with the casual hospitality of relatives making space at a crowded party. Downstairs, primo Ricky, played with irresistible warmth and improvisatory ease by Sammy Rivas, and sister-in-law Jenn, wife to brother Tommy who has a history of not making an appearance at family gatherings, played by the welcoming EJ Zimmerman, invite audience members into a basement jam session lined with wood paneling, family photographs, storage bins, and the cluttered archaeology of real domestic life. He hands out instruments from a basket on the floor, riffs on guitars, jokes about getting high with cousins, and casually points to photographs of the family’s prized mariachi heirloom hanging nearby. Jenn joins on fiddle. The realism is so granular, so socially exact, that one stops observing and simply begins participating. [more]

73 Seconds

May 11, 2026

The title refers to the catastrophic 73 seconds between the Challenger’s launch and explosion, and Mezzocchi turns those seconds into the play’s governing existential paradox. Had Rosemary not become pregnant, might she have boarded that shuttle instead? The playwright comes to see himself simultaneously as the force that prevented his mother’s cosmic aspirations and the accidental reason she survived. Few memoir plays confront the absurd intimacy between guilt and gratitude with such honesty. The production recognizes how families construct themselves around contingencies so enormous they become nearly impossible to contemplate directly. Mezzocchi’s very existence becomes entangled with one of the most traumatic public tragedies of the 20th century. [more]

The Door Slams, A Glass Trembles

May 4, 2026

Inspired in part by "he Magic Mountain," Thomas Mann’s 1924 meditation on illness and temporality, Zimet’s play borrows not its plot but its sensibility: the peculiar dilation and contraction of time as it is lived, remembered, and imagined. Like Mann’s sanatorium-bound protagonist, Zimet’s characters find themselves suspended in a liminal zone where past, present, and future bleed into one another with disorienting grace. The result is not mere homage but a vivid reanimation of Mann’s central insight—that time, far from being fixed, is a profoundly subjective medium. [more]

Beauty Freak

May 2, 2026

What lingers, long after the final moments—which are, indeed, superb—is not a tidy judgment but a series of disquieting questions. Clements refuses the comfort of easy condemnation, even as he lays bare the cost of moral evasion. Riefenstahl emerges neither exonerated nor simplified, but as a figure whose brilliance and blindness are inseparable. The play does not ask us to forgive her; it asks us to understand how such a figure could exist, and, more provocatively, what it means that she did. [more]

The Bad Daters

May 2, 2026

Derek Murphy’s "The Bad Daters" arrives Off Broadway from Ireland and the United Kingdom with the unassuming air of a chamber piece and the stealthy force of something far more piercing: a romantic comedy that has the good sense to distrust romance, and the better sense to proceed anyway. Murphy, an Ireland-born New Yorker with an ear for the bruised lyricism of everyday speech, has fashioned from the well-trod terrain of app-based courtship a work of surprising delicacy and cumulative emotional power. Under Colm Summers’ exquisitely modulated direction, and animated by two performances of uncommon acuity from Kate Arrington and Shane McNaughton, the production unfolds with a patience that feels almost radical, allowing its jagged edges to soften—though never quite smooth—into something like grace. [more]

Love Story

May 1, 2026

Where past and present commingle—as they so insistently do in a play like "Love Story"—the burden falls squarely on the director to furnish the audience with a legible temporal grammar. Without such guidance, fragmentation risks reading not as intentional lyricism but as simple confusion. Here, despite the production’s many sensitivities, that grammar is not always clearly articulated. Judging by the palpable hesitations in audience response—the delayed laughter, the uncertain silences—it takes an inordinate number of transitions before one fully apprehends a crucial fact: that Maria is already dead at the top of the play. This is not, in itself, a flaw; dramatic revelation can be a powerful tool. But the production does not so much reveal this reality as obscure it, leaving spectators to assemble the timeline retroactively, often at the expense of emotional continuity. [more]

Kenrex

April 30, 2026

There are evenings in the theatre when the air seems to tighten, as though the room itself has drawn a breath it cannot quite release. Such is the case with "Kenrex," a work of unnerving command and cumulative force, written by Jack Holden and Ed Stambollouian, and directed by the latter with a vigilance that borders on the prosecutorial. What begins as a seemingly familiar excursion into the annals of American true crime—its outlines recognizable, its destination foreknown—steadily transforms into something far more disquieting: a communal autopsy, conducted in real time, of a place where the mechanisms of justice have not merely failed but quietly abdicated. [more]

Lost in Del Valle

April 21, 2026

Van Zandt is a cyclone that tears through the intimate confines of SoHo Playhouse’s Huron Club, detonating with the force of lived experience refined into art. What might, in lesser hands, resemble a familiar confessional is here transformed into something far more volatile and exacting: a darkly comic, genre-defying work that refuses containment even as it unfolds within a single body onstage. Van Zandt’s performance achieves the rare feat of appearing both recklessly spontaneous and meticulously controlled. He moves through the evening with a muscular precision, shifting registers and emotional temperatures with such fluency that the boundaries between character, narrator, and witness begin to dissolve. It is acting of a high order—technically exacting, yet fueled by something that feels perilously close to exposure. [more]

The Pushover

April 12, 2026

Di Zou as Pearl and Rebecca De Mornay as Evelyn in a scene from John Patrick Shanley’s “The [more]

Scorched Earth

April 12, 2026

In Luke Murphy’s astonishing "Scorched Earth," a vitality is rendered with a ferocity that feels at once ancient and bracingly new. Murphy, working under the banner of his multidisciplinary company Attic Projects, has fashioned a work that does not so much adapt John B. Keane’s play "The Field" (which went on to great acclaim in the landmark film starring Richard Harris) as detonate it—scattering its themes across a landscape of dance, film, sound, and theatrical invention, and then reassembling them into something hypnotic and wholly its own. [more]

Desi SNL

April 8, 2026

For all its incremental gestures toward inclusivity, "Saturday Night Live"—now improbably in its 51st season—has remained curiously bereft of a regular South Asian cast member, a lacuna that feels less like oversight than inertia. Desi SNL, an ensemble-driven sketch revue, cheekily appropriating the familiar architecture of "Saturday Night Live"—the opening monologue, the mock-news desk, the parade of quick-change characters—and refitting it with a distinctly South Asian sensibility, performed by an entirely South Asian ensemble, arrives not so much to fill that absence as to gleefully upend it, at once affectionate and insurgent. What emerges is not mere pastiche but a lively act of cultural translation: a show that gleefully inhabits the grammar of American late-night comedy while infusing it with the textures, tensions, and tonalities of diaspora life. [more]

Uncle Vanya, scenes from country life

April 7, 2026

The narrative architecture of "Vanya"—its languors, its longings—is assumed, even beside the point. In its essence, this distilled adaptation unfolds less as a conventional staging than as a kind of theatrical mixtape, an assemblage both deliberate and mischievous, in which the familiar architecture of this oft-performed play is artfully dismantled and recomposed. Scenes arrive out of their expected sequence, as though guided by emotional rather than narrative logic, while character motivations are subjected to a searching reconsideration—some gently refracted, others boldly reconfigured—yielding a work that feels at once recognizably rooted and thrillingly unmoored. What Dmitry Krymov has fashioned instead is a kind of theatrical palimpsest, a dream-logic fantasia in which the gravitational center is unmistakably Yelena, that luminous and unwitting axis of desire (much to the dismay of Vanya). One might, without doing violence to the enterprise, retitle Krymov’s audacious, dreamlike reimagining of Chekhov’s inexhaustible classic evening: "All Roads Lead to Yelena." [more]

The Last Audition

April 7, 2026

There is, in "The Last Audition," something almost defiantly modest—a chamber piece of sorrow that refuses the grandiloquence of tragedy even as it circles one. The play, a solo vehicle of hushed ambitions, written by and starring Paul Shearman, sensitively directed by David St John, unfolds like a fading echo in an empty theater, its emotional register pitched not to catharsis but to the quieter, more unsettling key of recognition. It is, at heart, a drama about diminishment—of memory, of stature, of self—and yet it proceeds with a delicacy that feels, in its way, like a form of grace. [more]

The Unknown

March 30, 2026

Hayes proves wholly persuasive, gliding among a gallery of supporting figures (Hayes delineates 11 distinct characters with astonishing lucidity, his transitions so fluid they seem almost instinctive, even as the narrative around them grows increasingly clouded and labyrinthine.) with a lightness that never calls attention to its own virtuosity. As Elliott, he is coolly, almost disquietingly composed, revealing only the briefest fissures beneath a meticulously maintained façade—a man who seems able to exist only in the telling of stories, never quite as himself. [more]

Antigone in Analysis

March 30, 2026

Yet the production proves curiously reluctant to pursue the implications of its own provocations. The philosophers, rather than evolving into distinct and dynamically opposed sensibilities, settle into the dramatic equivalent of bullet points. Kierkegaard cleaves to divine absolutism; Hegel dismisses women with a glib reductionism; Lacan invokes madness as a universal solvent; Irigaray insists upon feminine multiplicity; Butler reiterates the performativity of gender. These positions are announced, then reiterated, but seldom interrogated or transformed. What might have been a dialectic becomes a recitation. [more]

Ivanov

March 26, 2026

New American Ensemble may be young, but this production announces a company of rare precision and ambition. Every element—the mulch underfoot, the bar at your shoulder, the dead tree overhead—feels deliberate, considered, necessary. In a theatrical landscape often defined by haste, such care is not merely admirable. This true theatre company in every sense of the word is most welcome and we look forward to productions in their future. [more]

Touch

March 24, 2026

In "Touch," a work of disarming modesty and unnerving emotional precision, a life that has been carefully tamped down begins, almost imperceptibly, to leak. The play, written by Kenny Finkle, sensitively directed by Jonathan Silverstein, and performed with aching lucidity by Anthony Rapp, takes as its subject a man whose disappointments have calcified into habit, and whose sense of self—once animated by artistic ambition—has settled into something quieter, if no less fraught. There is, at first glance, something almost perversely austere about Touch:  Rapp, seated for 90 uninterrupted minutes, inhabiting the brittle interiority of a middle-aged gay man whose emotional register oscillates between panic, irritation, and quiet devastation. And yet the experience proves not merely engaging, but quietly transfixing. Its modesty is its method, its intimacy, its force. [more]

The Wild Party (New York City Center Encores!)

March 23, 2026

In the hands of Michael John LaChiusa (music, lyrics and book) and George C. Wolfe (book), the feral, syncopated verse of Joseph Moncure March’s Prohibition-era poem is not so much adapted as reforged—heated, hammered, and hurled forward as a kind of theatrical locomotive. Their "Wild Party" arrives like a runaway train of jazz, gin, and envy, its momentum at once intoxicating and annihilating. It careens down the rails with a velocity that promises, even as it seduces, an inevitable and exquisitely catastrophic derailment. [more]

Entangled: 12 Scenes in a Circle K off the I-40 in New Mexico

March 20, 2026

In "Entangled:12 Scenes in a Circle K off the I-40 in New Mexico," the beguiling and philosophically mischievous collaboration between Mona Mansour and Emily Zemba, the American desert becomes less a landscape than a condition of thought—a place where the ordinary laws governing time, consequence, and human attachment appear to have loosened their grip. Set in the fluorescent limbo of a Circle K somewhere in the New Mexico expanse—30 miles from the nearest outpost of civilization, and perilously close to both an atomic testing site and a nuclear laboratory—the play hums with a low-grade metaphysical dread that it wears, with admirable restraint, as comedy. [more]

Spare Parts

March 14, 2026

What begins as a satirical clash between corporate swagger and academic idealism gradually deepens into a more unsettling inquiry. The play’s true subject, it turns out, is not merely the arrogance of billionaires but the universal temptation to trespass upon the limits of the body. Humanity, after all, has always been drawn toward transgression—whether through cosmetic surgery, pharmaceutical enhancement, or the relentless drive to improve the species one experiment at a time. [more]

Body Count

March 10, 2026

If the show’s point of view occasionally feels one-sided, that imbalance ultimately serves its chief purpose: entertainment. 'Body Count' may not function as a comprehensive treatise on contemporary sexual politics, but it is undeniably electric as a performance vehicle. Knowles’ Pollie is charismatic to the point of hypnosis—funny, sharp, wounded, and persuasive enough to feel utterly real. Her barbs may sometimes be a shade too neat, a shade too gleefully cruel, but they land with a sting that lingers. Long after the laughter subsides, one finds oneself turning the lines over again, wondering what uncomfortable truths might be hidden inside the joke. [more]

Marcel on the Train

March 1, 2026

Slater’s performance is a revelation of synthesis. Known for his buoyant athleticism in Broadway’s "SpongeBob SquarePants" and his chilling portrayal of the Balladeer and Lee Harvey Oswald in Classic Stage’s brilliant "Assassins," he here channels that dexterity into something at once lighter yet more harrowing. His Marceau moves with balletic precision: fingers unfurl like petals; wrists trace invisible architecture; the torso leans into unseen walls. Butterflies tremble from his cupped hands, a flower blossoms and droops along the line of his arm. Guided by movement consultant Lorenzo Pisoni, Slater achieves an embodiment so exacting it appears to suspend the laws of bone and gravity. [more]

Hold on to Your Butts

February 28, 2026

Actors Kerry Ipema and Natalie Rich, joined by the live Foley artist Kelly Robinson, proceed to conjure Spielberg’s dinosaur epic. They marshal an arsenal of materials so defiantly homespun it borders on subversive: cardboard cutouts standing in for apex predators, skeletal wooden frames sketching out jeeps and laboratories, pocket flashlights pressed into service as cinematic chiaroscuro, and a scattering of objects manipulated with priestly concentration, shot for shot—all deployed with an almost ascetic economy of means that make the absence of machinery feel not like deprivation but like principle. [more]

Mother Russia

February 26, 2026

In Lauren Yee’s exuberant and stealthily devastating new comedy, "Mother Russia," history arrives not with a bang but with an order of fast food. Two young men, perched at the lip of a new world order, cradle their first-ever Filet-O-Fish sandwich from McDonald's as though it were a sacred relic. They tear into it with the devotional hunger of converts, pausing only to roll their eyes heavenward and lick tartar sauce from their fingers with an abandon that feels both comic and liturgical. Capitalism, Yee suggests, is best introduced as a condiment. [more]

Hate Radio

February 22, 2026

The premise—a radio broadcast—might seem theatrically inert, yet Rau ingeniously implicates the audience by issuing each spectator a set of headphones. We are not merely watching propaganda; we are tuning in. If we need to gauge our own humanity while we watch the hideous display, all we need to do is look straight ahead - on the other side of where the actors play sits the other half of the St. Ann’s Warehouse audience. The isolation produced by the earphones intensifies the intimacy of the rhetoric. One hears the laughter, the rhythm, the coded exhortations as if they were meant for one’s own ear. The imaginative leap—who would listen to this? who would believe it?—collapses. The seduction of format, the familiarity of tone, do much of the ideological work. [more]

MANO A MANO

February 20, 2026

To enter the performance space of Paul Pinto’s "MANO A MANO" is to find oneself seated not before a proscenium, but around a giant Arthurian round table, a scenic choice that immediately dismantles the distance between the observer and the observed. One is not merely an audience member; one is a guest at a grim, historical banquet where the main course is the fractured psyche of the British Isles. Pinto, a playwright-composer-performer of singular, manic energy, has crafted a libretto that functions as a rhythmic autopsy of masculinity, tracing a lineage of "headless alpha males" from the Trojan War to the contemporary boxing ring. [more]

Ai Yah Goy Vey! – Adventures of a Dim Sun in Search of His Wanton Father

February 15, 2026

Chang is an agile performer, and his quick shifts among characters recall the early solo work of urban shapeshifters who built entire neighborhoods out of voice and posture. Yet here the gallery of types is unevenly realized. Too often, figures arrive as the sketch of a stereotype rather than the surprise of a person. When Chang draws on the stylization of Chinese opera—particularly in the rendering of Jackie’s diva-like mother—the show briefly discovers a richer theatrical language, one in which Eastern and Western performance traditions spar and flirt on equal terms. Such moments hint at a more adventurous piece than the one that predominates. [more]

The First Line of Dante’s Inferno

February 14, 2026

The opening gesture of Dante Alighieri’s "Inferno"—that immortal confession of midlife disorientation in which a wanderer finds himself astray from the “straight road” and deposited in a “dark wood”—has rarely felt as theatrically apt as it does in "The First Line of Dante’s Inferno," Kirk Lynn’s sly, searching, and disarmingly funny new experiment in staged storytelling. Lynn, a polymath of the American theater—playwright, novelist, screenwriter, educator, and guiding spirit of the Austin collective Rude Mechs—treats Dante’s premise less as a theological map than as a psychological condition. His forest is not an allegorical afterlife but a contemporary wilderness in which several souls, one quite literally at midlife, appear to have misplaced the coordinates of their former selves. [more]

High Spirits (New York City Center Encores!)

February 11, 2026

The afterlife has always enjoyed a sturdy tenancy on the musical stage, but "High Spirits"—Hugh Martin and Timothy Gray’s tuneful graft onto Noël Coward’s "Blithe Spirit"—has, until now, seemed a ghost itself: spoken of fondly by aficionados, seldom seen, and rarely summoned with conviction. That New York City Center Encores! has revived it, in its first professional New York outing since 1964, makes its long absence feel less like neglect than a curious collective lapse in memory. For this effervescent score and Coward’s indestructible farce reveal themselves, in performance, to be not merely viable but positively tonic. Under Jessica Stone’s direction, "High Spirits" is presented with a spareness that registers as notable even within the intentionally stripped-down aesthetic long associated with Encores! The concert format, here, feels less like a stylistic choice than a visible process: once again scripts remain firmly in hand, and the performers give the impression of artists still negotiating their relationship to the material in real time. At moments we are treated to some hilarious spontaneous reactions, tongue-in-cheek banter when one actor has turned too many pages in his or her binder. [more]

Manon! (Heartbeat Opera)

February 10, 2026

For Heartbeat Opera’s presentation of Massenet’s exquisite "Manon," the co-adaptors Rory Pelsue, who also directs, and Jacob Ashworth, the company’s artistic director, take a scalpel to Massenet’s expansive five-act opéra comique, paring it down to a fleet, intermissionless ninety minutes. In the process, they excise subsidiary characters and the bustling choral tableaux that French opera has traditionally treated as both ornament and social panorama. What remains is not a diminished work but a distilled one: the narrative’s spine emerges with unusual clarity, its emotional stakes thrown into sharper relief by the absence of decorative detours, oh, and it’s performed in English and retitled "Manon!" [more]

King Lear (Compagnia de’ Colombari)

February 2, 2026

By loosening the moorings that usually tether one actor to one role, director and adaptor Karin Coonrod peers, with unusual intimacy, into Lear’s psychic weather. The choice to distribute him among ten bodies does not dilute the character; it refracts him. We are invited to watch a consciousness under siege, a man stripped so thoroughly of title, certainty, and familial illusion that what remains is not a king discovering wisdom so much as a human being stumbling toward self-recognition. Lears circulate through the auditorium, each member of the company outfitted by Oana Botez in a palette of muted greige, topped by gilded paper crowns, courtesy of Tine Kindermann, that rise a good foot and a half into the air, their fragile grandeur at once comic and faintly forlorn—a visual joke that curdles into a metaphor. The multiplicity supplies a chorus of selves: monarch and parent, tyrant and child, sovereign and supplicant. At times they seem to echo one another; at others they compete for the same thought, as if Lear’s mind were a crowded room he can no longer govern. The image captures something essential about the play’s cruelty: identity, once propped up by power and praise, proves alarmingly divisible. [more]

Watch Me Walk

January 30, 2026

Anne Gridley begins "Watch Me Walk" by taking its title at punishingly literal face value. She introduces herself, grips her walking stick—never a cane, a semantic correction that quickly reveals its philosophical weight—and proceeds to walk the length of the stage again and again, in near silence, for so long that the initial charge of provocation slowly discharges. What remains is not suspense but facticity. In another theatrical ecosystem, this might register as endurance art or a sly conceptual prank; here, in a Soho Rep production presented in association with the recently concluded 2026 Under the Radar Festival, it operates as a recalibration of spectatorship itself. We arrive alert, waiting for the performance to “start,” only to discover that it already has—and that the only thing lagging behind is our attention. [more]
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Copyright Jack Quinn, 2001-2026