El Beh

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]

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]

Travels

April 5, 2024

"Travels" at Ars Nova isn’t just a story of the many places James Harrison Monaco has been. That’s part of it, the most superficial part. "Travels" is far more: a deep look at the people in his life, two in particular, whose fascinating and moving stories emerge from a torrent of music, videos, lights and words. In eight songs/scenes a very personal saga unravels until a chilling coda. On the tiny Ars Nova stage, a console contains the control center of the production. Constantly moving images give the illusion of flying into a vortex, soon replaced by more informative images that illustrate the stories told by Monaco and his very talented compatriots: El Beh, Ashley De La Rosa, Mehry Eslaminia and John Murchison. [more]

The Hang

January 25, 2022

After a grand Pippin-style introductory opening, one exhilarating number follows another in acclaimed theater maker Taylor Mac’s "The Hang." Derived from jazz and opera, this vibrant musical fantasia is inspired by the Greek philosopher Socrates’ last hours in 399 BC Athens. He’d been sentenced to death by drinking the poison hemlock for “corrupting the youth” and “impiety.” The show is based on his student Plato’s account of these events. As there’s a homoerotic strain to the Greek philosophical milieu, "The Hang" has a raucous queer vibe. [more]