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Plays

BUM BUM (or, this farce has Autism)

December 13, 2025

In "BUM BUM (or, this farce has Autism)," EPIC Players—New York’s indefatigable standard-bearer for neuroinclusive performance—unfurls a world premiere that feels less like a conventional new play and more like a controlled theatrical detonation. Written by autistic playwright Dave Osmundsen, the play arrives disguised as farce, yet beneath its slapstick velocity lies an exacting critique of how neurodivergent lives are shaped, softened, and rendered consumable for mainstream audiences. It is a work that understands comedy not as an escape from politics but as one of its most effective instruments. Under the brisk, clear-sighted direction of Meggan Dodd, EPIC Players has assembled a company of actors on the spectrum to bring to life the buoyantly subversive text of award-winning Osmundsen—a writer whose instinct for farce is matched only by his ear for the humiliations, large and small, that so often attend the rhetoric of “inclusivity.” [more]

The American Soldier

December 11, 2025

The American Soldier, written and performed by Douglas Taurel, is a solid evening of theater with important messages about war and the soldiers who fight them. Taurel is an excellent actor and he has done a nice job adapting the show from actual soldier's letters and their accounts of their time in battle. [more]

This World of Tomorrow

December 9, 2025

This World of Tomorrow resembles the films "Back to the Future" (Bert cannot risk changing anything), "Groundhog Day" for its repetition of the same events, and "You’ve Got Mail" in which two undeclared lovers run the risk of missing each other. Both the message and the structure resemble those time travel movies of the 1940s like René Clair’s "It Happened Tomorrow" where the characters get to view a glimpse of the future only to end up back where they started. The problem with "This World of Tomorrow" is that the play attempts to do something that the movies do much better. While Derek McLane’s clever scenery making much use of projections on a series of square pillars which rearrange themselves for each scene as the projections change is appealing as well as eye-catching, it can only do so much to suggest the extensive and imposing World’s Fair, as well as other parts of New York City. All this will be more successful in a future film version in which CGI will allow us to really see the bygone fair and NYC in 1939. [more]

Diversion

December 7, 2025

I come from a family of nurses, and apparently so does playwright Scott Organ whose play "Diversion" is set entirely in an ICU nurse’s breakroom. Organ has clearly done his homework, because he’s written an honest, intense, and yet often funny piece centering on a few days in the work life of six nurses under the pressure of a “diversion” investigation. For those unfamiliar with the word in a medical setting, “diversion” is the delicate term given to the illegal practice of diverting drugs away from their intended use, on patients, and instead toward personal use or sale. [more]

Meet the Cartozians

December 5, 2025

Talene Yeghisabet Monahon’s new play "Meet the Cartozians," being presented by The Second Stage at The Pershing Square Signature Center, is simply the best new American play in New York this fall. This riveting two-part play set in two time frames 100 years apart asks the questions what does it mean to be an American, what does it mean to be white in America, and what does it mean to be an Armenian American. The timeliness of these questions will not be lost on audiences well aware of the current administration’s views on immigration particularly of non-white applicants for asylum. The Armenian American playwright’s last three plays ("How to Load a Musket," "Jane Anger" and "The Good John Proctor") have all had historical backgrounds but this one is personal to Monahon as it deals with her own heritage. Director David Cromer who has proven himself to be a wizard with new plays as well as his brilliant reinvention of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town has chosen a superb cast led by two-time Tony Award-winner Andrea Martin and 2024 Tony Award-winner Will Brill who are all excellent playing two roles each. [more]

Practice

December 4, 2025

With a three-hour running time (the first act runs two hours straight without an intermission) the play is too long for its repetitiousness having the actors go over the same theater games and monologues over and over again. Of course, the play becomes an endurance test for the actors as well as viewers, whether it was intended to or not. Actors who have undergone this kind of training may be amused; those of us who have not may be bored or lose interest. Although the actors who make up the ten-member cast of "Practice" play very different personalities, we see so little of them individually that it is hard to keep them separate and they become a big blur. [more]

Full Contact

December 1, 2025

In its final form, the piece stands as both elegy and proclamation: a testament to a heritage reclaimed, and to the fierce, necessary act of making contact—full, unguarded, and profoundly human—with oneself. Estrada exists here in a purgatorial tension, suspended between the gravitational pull of guilt and the stark instinct toward survival. The play chronicles not simply his attempt to move forward but the Herculean labor of taking even the first tremulous step toward healing—an act rendered as perilous as any physical combat he has ever undertaken. At times it seems his own mind, a treacherous and labyrinthine opponent, threatens to drag him beneath its tide. And yet, in the fragile space between collapse and catharsis, the work finds its most haunting register: a portrait of a man grappling to reclaim his narrative before the darkness that shaped him claims him once more. [more]

Kyoto

November 26, 2025

Unlike J.T. Rogers’ Tony Award-winning "Oslo" which handled similar material about the secret Oslo Peace Accord conference, "Kyoto" by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson makes little concession to its audience giving almost too much information and depicting too many characters, while being patently undramatic much of the time. However, the topic is so explosive that it carries its audience through its 11 conferences. (One hardly notices Natalie Pryce’s costumes so closely does one have to listen to follow the flow of the arguments.) One does come away with the knowledge these sorts of conferences are almost futile with each nation having its own agenda and limits to how far it will go even at the expense of other nations. It is almost remarkable that the Kyoto conference reached any consensus at all. The question now is how much of that was actually enforced by the signatories to the protocol. [more]

Richard II (Red Bull Theatre)

November 25, 2025

If you know the play, you many have trouble following it as several actors double: Ron Canada plays both John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster (Richard’s uncle and Henry Bolingbroke’s father) and later the Bishop of Carlisle. Daniel Stewart Sherman doubles as both Sir Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfork and later as courtier Sir Stephen Scroop. Ryan Spahn is seen as Richard’s favorite Bagot, a Welsh Captain, and as a companion to the Queen. The ending has been changed as there is no Sir Piers Exton: another character comes to murder Richard in his cell, giving a different import to the scene. As there is no Duke and Duchess of York, the Duchess’ defense of her traitorous son after Bolingbroke becomes King Henry IV is given to the Queen instead. [more]

Archduke

November 24, 2025

Patrick Page (back row) and Jason Sanchez, Adrien Rolet and Jake Berne (front row) in a scene from [more]

Gruesome Playground Injuries

November 24, 2025

In Neil Pepe’s stark revival of Rajiv Joseph’s "Gruesome Playground Injuries," Nicholas Braun and Kara Young trace three decades of bruised connection. Childhood scars, teenage volatility, and a late-night reckoning unfold in jagged time jumps that reveal how two people can orbit each other without ever landing in the same emotional place. [more]

HardLove

November 23, 2025

By the time the play reaches its understated yet piercing climax, the question is no longer whether ChiChi and Theodore are “right” for one another—though that question lingers—but rather what it means for any of us to seek connection in a world where desire is both compass and mirage. "HardLove" distills the fragile thrill of two strangers attempting to divine each other’s contours—emotional, physical, moral—and uses that single night’s encounter as a prism through which larger anxieties of belonging, expectation, and becoming refract. In the end, this bold, darkly funny, and unexpectedly tender work stands as a testament to the theater’s capacity to anatomize intimacy without anesthetizing it: a funny, poignant hour that leaves its audience pondering not only these two characters but the mysterious machinery of desire itself. [more]

Little Bear Ridge Road

November 16, 2025

However, like its characters in their narrow world, the play itself—which premiered last year at Chicago’s dynamic Steppenwolf Theatre—seems small and isolated on a Broadway stage, even at the relatively intimate Booth. Despite a typically sterling performance by Laurie Metcalf, whose presence in a part that fits her like a glove is the principal reason to make a visit worthwhile, Hunter’s dramatic tropes seem too familiar to generate the kind of breakthrough excitement warranted by the price of a Broadway ticket. [more]

Ready for Company and Other Family Tales

November 16, 2025

"Ready for Company and Other Family Tales" is at times quite heartwarming. Amidst jokes and cakes, Kim Ima explores her family history across a century of change in the United States. The tone is light, Ima is quite fun as a performer, and the show never wears out its welcome. While the show is charming for what it is, yet leaves much material unexplored. Instead, there are long digressions about aunts and grandfathers that tend to blend together, making it difficult to keep track of who’s who in the winding family tree the show seeks to present. Ima herself is at ease onstage, with a definite charisma. However, the show’s subject matter often renders the entire production perfectly pleasant though somewhat forgettable. [more]

The Harvest

November 16, 2025

James Carthage, Jr. (TC Knutson) and Sarah Pinnelly (Tylyn Turner) Photo by MariAnn Ryan Skoyen Photography
In a Montana farmhouse worn thin by grief and memory, "The Harvest" exposes the fractures beneath a family’s final crop. What begins as a quiet drama of duty erupts into a raw reckoning—where a mother’s long-silenced truth rewrites everything her children thought they knew. [more]

Rob Lake Magic With Special Guests The Muppets

November 14, 2025

If the Muppets are deployed as window dressing, the illusions themselves are a museum of inherited gestures. Lake presents the familiar canon of contemporary stage magic: the bifurcated assistant, the levitating woman afloat above a bed of water (which, in its defense, has the best stage accoutrements of the evening), the interlocking wedding rings that actually make it back to their owners, the transmogrified paper rose born of a Kleenex, the sealed-box prediction trick. These are the old reliables, charming chestnuts of the craft. And to be fair, if it is your first encounter with such wonders in the flesh, they retain an undeniable potency. Something impossible happens before your eyes, and for a moment one senses the naïve astonishment that once greeted Houdini or Blackstone. But the long shadow of 20th-century spectacle looms large. When David Copperfield made a woman vanish, he seemed to risk something existential—his illusions were staged with the gravitas of a metaphysical wager. Doug Henning, all fringe and mystical glow, imbued the form with a countercultural buoyancy. Lake’s versions, by comparison, feel perfunctory, the delivery mechanical rather than miraculous. To deploy the same tricks as one’s predecessors is no sin, but to do so without reimagining them—or without doing them better—is a kind of aesthetic resignation. [more]

Pygmalion

November 13, 2025

In their latest, Shaw’s ever-popular "Pygmalion," Staller has staged Shaw’s never-used prologue created for the 1938 film version which has the gods and goddesses on Mt. Olympus recount to the modern audience the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea which inspired Shaw’s Edwardian comedy. The set by Lindsay G. Fuori creates an Al Hirschfeld-inspired Greek temple used for all of the play’s five scenes. Four of the actors dressed in white Grecian robes (courtesy of designer Tracy Christensen) greet us and tell us the myth that we will see in Shaw’s updated 20th century comedy in which the sculptor becomes a professor of language and linguistics and the statue becomes a flower girl who wants to improve her speech well enough to get a job in a flower shop. However, Staller does not stop there but has created narrative introductions for each act which is rather intrusive though it may help some first-time viewers to understand the play. (Is there any theatergoer who has not seen the play’s musical version My Fair Lady on stage or screen?) [more]

Liberation

November 9, 2025

Kristolyn Lloyd, Adina Verson, Betsy Aidem and Audrey Corsa in a scene from the Roundabout Theatre [more]

The Yellow Wallpaper

November 9, 2025

"The Yellow Wallpaper" is an enthralling new stage adaptation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story of the same name. Gilman’s original narrative is written as a series of diary entries by a woman who’s been confined to the upstairs room of a rented mansion by her husband, who is also her doctor. He prescribes her bed rest and little else, leading her to slowly losing her mind due to the stifling restrictions she is forced to exist under. Actress/choreographer Susannah Millonzi (Beldam's "Fall River Fishing," "Hedda Gabler," "The Crucible") and director Caitlin Morley ("Macbeth," "Twelfth Night") adapted the story together, taking a very direct approach. The diary entries become a series of monologues to be read by the nameless protagonist, the play’s only character. At the same time, the creative production and clever blocking adds significant depth to the narrative, introducing new ideas and exploring them wonderfully. [more]

Queens

November 8, 2025

Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Martyna Majok, who has specialized in plays about the immigrant experience like Ironbound and Sanctuary City, has revised her play Queens first seen at the Claire Tow Theater at LCT3 in 2018. The new version now at Manhattan Theatre Club Stage I at New York City Center still with an all-female cast has three fewer characters and is now in two acts instead of three. However, the play, though still powerful and authentic, continues to be confusing as it goes back and forth between scenes in the borough of Queens in 2017, 2001 and 2011, and with two middle scenes set in the Ukraine in 2016. Mostly taking place in the same basement apartment in New York, at one point women from both 2001 and 2017 are on stage simultaneously. It is all a little bit difficult to keep the chronology straight. [more]

Art

November 5, 2025

James Corden, Neil Patrick Harris and Bobby Cannavale in a scene from Yasmina Reza’s “Art” at [more]

The Wasp

November 5, 2025

'The Wasp" is not for the faint of heart. It confronts the audience with themes of mental illness, domestic violence, and sexual trauma, yet resists the easy descent into nihilism. For all its darkness, there is a fragile thread of mercy woven through the play’s venomous fabric—a suggestion that even amidst cycles of cruelty, one might still choose compassion. Malcolm leaves us with the uneasy sense that the line between victim and aggressor, between wasp and spider, may be far thinner than we care to admit. And so, like the sting of its namesake, "The Wasp" lingers long after the curtain falls—sharp, unsettling, and impossible to forget. [more]

Hannah Senesh

November 1, 2025

At the center of it all stands Apple, whose performance is nothing short of revelatory. As Catherine, she is brittle yet unbowed; as Hannah, she radiates vitality and purpose. Her voice—both spoken and sung—cuts through the air with the precision of belief. A stirring portrait of resistance, resilience, and unyielding hope, Apple’s one-woman tour de force unfolds with the emotional breadth and intensity of a full ensemble. Apple commands the stage with a virtuosity that transcends mere performance; she channels something elemental and deeply human, crafting an experience that lingers long after the lights fade. It is as inspiring as it is unforgettable—a testament not only to the power of storytelling, but to the indomitable spirit it so eloquently celebrates. Around her, Simon Feil lends quiet gravity as the spectral voices of Hannah’s brother and her Nazi captor. [more]

Oh Happy Day!

October 31, 2025

"Oh Happy Day!" demonstrates an advance of technique over Cooper’s eight-scene sketch evening in "Ain’t No Mo’." However, the new play is much too talky and seems to cover some of the same material more than once, even though on another level it deals with our relationship with God. The play is an interesting entertainment but one assumes Cooper meant it to be more than that. It is, however, an artifact of the difficult times we live in. [more]

The Lucky Ones

October 31, 2025

A moving, funny meditation on mortality and friendship, Lia Romeo’s “The Lucky Ones” opens not with sentimentality but with shock — and ends with a grace note of acceptance that feels wholly earned. [more]

Playing Shylock

October 30, 2025

Mark Leiren-Young’s timely one-man show, "Playing Shylock" (formerly called simply "Shylock"), has arrived in New York after its premiere run in Toronto in its new version rewritten around the life and career of veteran film actor Saul Rubinek ("The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel," "Unforgiven," "Frasier") playing himself. Returning to the stage for the first time since 1990, Rubinek plays an actor performing Shylock in a (fictional) production of Shakespeare’s "The Merchant of Venice" which is shut down by protestors claiming that the play is anti-Semitic and the theater company has caved in to their demands. While the play is fascinating and provocative, it also has some flawed passages but Rubinek is commanding at all times. [more]

Did You Eat? (밥 먹었니?)

October 30, 2025

To have emerged from a childhood like Zoë Kim’s—with enough self-awareness, critical distance, and sheer emotional stamina to craft a piece of theater with even a hint of uplift—is in itself an act of tremendous courage. The piece’s very existence is a quiet triumph: a testament to survival, to the insistence of choosing a path of identity in the face of sheer cruelty, and to the reclamation of one’s own narrative. Yet "Did You Eat?" accomplishes something beyond testimony. Artistically, it is a layered, deeply felt work that reveals Kim’s aesthetic intelligence and her willingness to experiment with form, language, and the body. [more]

Art of Leaving

October 27, 2025

While Broadway was once filled with plays like this a generation or two ago, "Art of Leaving" now seems very dated. It would have been more believable set back in an earlier decade. Matt Gehring’s direction emphasizes the sit-com nature of the play which is a mistake as it makes the proceedings seem all that much more shallow. Both Aaron and Diana are very thinly written so we learn little about their 25 year marriage except that Diana has lived her life to please her unhappy and demanding husband. Jordan Lage’s Aaron is a total egoist who is lacking in sympathy, while Audrey Heffernan Meyer’s Diana seems unbelievably naïve as to what is available to women today. [more]

Let’s Love!

October 26, 2025

The fourth evening of one-act plays by Academy Award-winning screenwriter and director Ethan Coen is coyly called "Let’s Love!," when by rights it should be called "Let’s Have Sex!" In three one-acts, all on the same theme, couples are looking for love in all the wrong places - or all the wrong ways. Neil Pepe, artistic director of Atlantic Theater Company smoothly directs the high-powered cast led by Aubrey Plaza, Nellie McKay and Mary McCann as he has done the previous three Coen evenings ("Almost an Evening," "Offices," and "Happy Hour.") What is unusual about "Let’s Love!" is that the language is continually raunchy and the foul-mouthed women have all the best lines, though not the most completely written characters. [more]

Heaux Church

October 26, 2025

In "Heaux Church," writer-performer Brandon Kyle Goodman does not so much deliver a sermon as they detonate one—turning the pious pulpit upside down and shaking loose its centuries of shame, repression, and whispered taboo. What emerges from the rubble is something gloriously unholy and defiantly sacred: a new gospel of pleasure, pride, and personal liberation. Directed with ecstatic precision by Lisa Owaki Bierman, and buoyed by the ecstatic ministrations of DJ Ari Grooves, enveloping sound design of Christopher Darbassie, and flirty adult puppets of visual provocateur Greg Corbino, Goodman presides over a theatrical communion that is part revival, part stand-up confession, and part drag-tinged spiritual exorcism. [more]

Not Ready for Prime Time

October 25, 2025

Sketches are performed, in this case approximations of the originals, which is understandable (the authors Erik J. Rodriguez and Charles A. Sothers didn't have the rights to use the actual SNL material) but also a little odd for the more famous bits. It mostly doesn't matter though, and only hardcore fans will notice the difference. The women feel slighted, which makes sense if you watched the show in the 70s (and the 80s). [more]
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