Titles, even subtitles, sway playgoers’ expectations. Take, for instance, a recent press performance of Laowang: A Chinatown King Lear. Alex Lin’s new farcical melodrama zips relentlessly around jocose hairpin turns. The dialogue, stylishly delivered by a first-rate cast, is witty, urbane, and frequently arch. Yet the audience—presumably anticipating King Lear or something akin to that monumental tragedy—sat in suspended, churchlike repose throughout the play’s early scenes.
In the U.S. premiere of What If They Ate the Baby? writer-performers Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland spin a seemingly polite 1950s housewife visit into a hilariously sinister dance of casseroles, secrets, and suburban dread. This queer clown two-hander uses absurdist comedy to probe surveillance, paranoia, and the pressures of American womanhood.
Put two single beds side by side, and the stage is set for a romantic comedy. But what if they are hospital beds? Could a depressing drama be on tap? Not to worry. Rajiv Joseph’s 2009 oddity, Gruesome Playground Injuries, returns to Off-Broadway with plenty of laughs, missed connections, and fleeting kisses. And when things do, on occasion, turn grim, the solid acting, ample stage blood, and traces of vomit make this piece more of a shocker than a bummer. In the reliable hands of veteran director Neil Pepe, it’s a slice-of-life one-act with the emphasis on slice.
If the title of Rajiv Joseph’s latest play, Archduke, conjures up Franz Ferdinand, the most famous archduke of all, that’s exactly what’s intended. But Joseph is less concerned with the death of the Serbian monarch whose assassination in 1914 sparked World War I than he is with the social and historical forces that helped radicalize the three principal killers: Gavrilo Princip, Nedeljko Čabrinović, and Trifko Grabez.
In his current revival of Pygmalion, director David Staller does more than remount Shaw’s 1912 comedy—he alters the play’s architecture by adding a mythic framing device led by four Olympian gods who introduce and comment on the action. This addition is not found in the published script, and theatergoers expecting a traditional revival may consider it a provocation. But Staller positions it as a reclamation rather than an invention.
Although it’s probably not among the top 10 elements for a successful farce, the awkward presence of a corpse has proved comic gold in such plays as Joseph Kesselring’s Arsenic and Old Lace and Joe Orton’s Loot. The first few moments of Messy White Gays suggest that playwright Drew Droege may have tapped into the vein as well. In darkness, a crash of breaking glass is heard, and the lights come up suddenly on two young men standing over a body. The corpse is Monty, the third in their throuple. But what ensues is more a nightmare of bad behavior than a comic soufflé.
Right in the middle of election season, 44—The Musical has arrived Off-Broadway. The show takes Barack Obama’s historic rise and views it through a carnival mirror, refracting statesmanship into satire. Written, composed, and directed by former Obama campaign staffer Eli Bauman, it gleefully revisits Obama’s presidency as Joe Biden “kinda sorta” remembers it, complete with political foibles, larger-than-life personalities, and musical swagger.
Relationships are hard—even moreso when you’re working from the literal points of view of both parties. In writer/director/performer Natalie Palamides’ Weer, love takes a dangerous—if a bit weird—turn while jumping through time across the entire lifespan of one couple’s wild relationship. Making its début at the Cherry Lane Theatre, newly reopened under the acclaimed independent film studio A24, the play arrives after a successful run in London.
“Art,” Oscar Wilde pithily postulated, “is useless.” Susannah Dalton’s The Importance of Doing Art directly challenges this aesthetic maxim. Far from being futile, the comedy asserts, art’s true purpose is to serve as an allurement for single-male schlubs and slacker underachievers to attract beautiful, sexually available women. Simply put, art is a chick magnet.
Rarely does a play get off to such a torturous start for its audience like Art of Leaving. The first scene of Anne Marilyn Lucas’s feeble comedy is a portrait of emotional abuse played for laughs, and interrupted only by a tedious monologue about shopping for lunch. Humor in the rest of the play draws on such worn-out sources as Yiddishisms, stereotypes of feminists and Jewish mothers, and mishearing by old people.
The flirtation between theater and television has turned serious in recent seasons. Small-screen favorites Stranger Things and Smash were adapted for Broadway, and Schmigadoon! is on tap for next spring. Meanwhile, Off-Broadway satires of The Office and Friends have settled into long runs. Now add to the lineup Not Ready for Prime Time, a new play by Erik J. Rodriguez and Charles A. Sothers. Neither an adaptation nor a parody, this likable, free-flowing piece is more a biographical comedy, albeit an unauthorized one.
In a spirited revival of John Patrick Shanley’s Italian American Reconciliation, director Austin Pendleton brings fresh verve to the tale of Huey, a lovelorn dreamer who enlists his best friend Aldo to help win back his fiery ex-wife, Janice. The production captures the play’s blend of romantic folly and heartfelt yearning that first endeared it to audiences decades ago.
Anonymously penned scripts are rare—and rarer still when the identity of one of its two characters is obscured. In Murdoch: The Final Interview, a multimedia drama/farce directed by Christopher Scott, that actor portrays both an enigmatic interviewer and media magnate Rupert Murdoch.
“I’ve heard that this is being referred to as an Off-Broadway play,” sighs comedian Julio Torres at the outset of Color Theories. Julio, author and leading actor, casts a knowing glance across the audience, pausing for a comically timed beat, and shakes his head laconically: “No … no, no, no, no. … That could not be further from the truth.” As this sly, charming theater piece zips along, however, it becomes clear that Color Theories is indeed an Off-Broadway play, not merely a spiffily staged stand-up routine.
It’s a minor theatrical annoyance, but one that does irk some critics: When your set displays a large wall clock, center stage, make sure it’s running. The wall clock in This Is Government, Nina Kissinger’s disappointing new comedy at 59E59, displays 4:55 in the 15-minute first scene and stays there, with the three denizens of Washington’s Cannon House Office Building moving the hands manually to tick off the subsequent scenes in a roughly seven-hour dramatic arc. It plays amateurishly, and so, unfortunately, does much of This Is Government.
After a year’s hiatus, Free Shakespeare in the Park triumphantly returns to the revitalized Delacorte Theater with Saheem Ali’s multicultural staging of Twelfth Night. With wit, music, and romance seamlessly entwined, this timeless comedy revels in love’s unexpected twists and delightful disguises.
Elizabeth McGovern is spending the dog days of 2025 Off-Broadway in Ava: The Secret Conversations. Known in recent years as the beloved chatelaine of Downton Abbey, McGovern has written herself a role that’s the antithesis of Lady Cora Crawley. Her new play depicts the twilight of Ava Gardner, screen goddess from backwoods North Carolina who married both Mickey Rooney (the “biggest star in the world” when she met him) and mob-adjacent crooner Frank Sinatra.
Anyone searching for a rabbit-out-of-hat show in which a master magician saws a femme fatale in half or makes her disappear should look elsewhere than Jamie Allan’s Amaze. Allan’s show has some dazzling glitter and glitz, but underneath it all there is a moving story that director Jonathan Goodwin has deftly and incrementally integrated with Allan’s sleight-of-hand illusions and interactions with his audience.
In The Day I Accidentally Went to War, comedian Bill Posley turns a twist of fate into a riveting true tale of survival, absurdity, and the scars of service. Under the deft direction of Bente Engelstoft, Posley’s solo show fuses sharp comedy with searing truth to capture the American veteran’s experience in all its contradictions.
In his solo show ta-da!, Josh Sharp draws on his immense charm and deft wit to navigate subjects that are far weightier than his upbeat title implies. They include pedophilia, cancer, gay-bashings of varying intensity, and a near-death experience. He does it while holding a clicker that initially projects everything he says on a screen behind him precisely: “Hi. Hello. What’s up. How are you? Hi. Hello. Hi. Welcome.” His diction is crisp and clear, so there’s really no need for the screen, except as a display of physical stamina and memory, and a source of visual variety. Eventually, though, under Sam Pinkleton’s direction, Sharp’s script and the screen projections diverge amusingly to add a layer of comic counterpoint—a practice that reaches back to Woody Allen’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily? in 1966.
Well, I’ll Let You Go is written by actor Bubba Weiler, who’s a little over 30, and directed by Jack Serio, still under 30 and seemingly ubiquitous in New York theater. It’s set in a mid-size, midwestern town that has lost its skill-based, manufacturing economy. Weiler’s characters are adjusting, in sundry ways, to coarsening influences, including the regional fulfillment facility of a gargantuan online retailer, which is the town’s sole surefire source of regular employment. Weiler and Serio bring a balance of intellect and feeling to their work, and the result is a fresh, engrossing chronicle of ordinary citizens contending with change for the worse.
Ginger Twinsies is a parody of the 1998 film The Parent Trap, itself a reboot of the 1961 film of the same name. Although the parody focuses on the 1998 Lindsay Lohan version, both films share a completely ridiculous storyline that allows a child actor to play two characters. So many coincidences and lapses in logic boggle the rational mind. Therefore, Ginger Twinsies, written and directed by Kevin Zak, has carte blanche to unmercifully mock its source material. It is 80 minutes of high-energy hijinks, slapstick, sight gags, wordplay, and enough 1990s trivia to be its own Trivial Pursuit category.
Can one improve upon Shakespeare? That is the question. Or at least that is the question that propels the plot of Brian Dykstra’s Polishing Shakespeare. For more than 400 years, Shakespeare’s identity has been debated, challenged, and disputed, and his plays have been revised, reimagined, and rewritten. Yet it is only recently that the literary ethics of directly translating his works from early modern to present-day English have been thoroughly considered.
It’s impossible to ignore chemistry, whether it’s as basic and essential as two molecules of hydrogen and one of oxygen, or as toxic and unwelcome as a string of PFAs. In Charles Randolph-Wright’s Duke & Roya, the chemistry goes beyond the molecular level, as Jay Ellis and Stephanie Nur demonstrate in the title roles. It’s a powerful component for this play, which by turns is romantic and political and covers a lot of ground without quite bursting at the seams.
In Emmanuelle Mattana’s Trophy Boys, four debaters huddle in an empty schoolroom (nifty scenic design by Matt Saunders), strategizing for the final match of an interscholastic tournament. They’re seniors at Imperium, an elite boys’ prep school; the imminent debate is against a team from a similarly tony girls’ school. This is the swan song of the boys’ high-school extracurricular lives. They’re undefeated and, being fiercely ambitious, terrified of losing this last debate, especially to a female team.
Abby Rosebrock’s 2018 dark comedy, Dido of Idaho, featured an act of extreme violence carried out with a household object. Her 2019 follow-up, Blue Ridge, focused on addicts trying to form relationships in the midst of a recovery program. Her new work, a twisted tale of good will and bad romance called Lowcountry, utilizes both of these dramatic elements in its exploration of a first date warped by bouts of desperation and deception. In this Atlantic Theater Company production directed by Jo Bonney, some scenes might be over-extended, but the sexual tension simmers, then boils over.
Taylor Mac is chronicling slapstick goings-on backstage at a not-for-profit’s fundraising gala in his new comedy Prosperous Fools. Murphy’s Law is in high gear, and things are haywire. Since the not-for-profit is called National Ballet Theater, it’s clear this is Mac’s assessment of the state of the arts under the new federal administration that has made its leader chair of the board at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
In life, people are all haunted by one thing or another. For some, it might be love, loss, or anything in between. For the characters in Tim Mulligan’s latest play, Point Loma, what haunts them are literal ghosts. The play explores the supernatural with an immersive production by the Manhattan Repertory Theatre.
The Imaginary Invalid is of interest to historians not just because it is Molière’s last play and not just because Molière himself performed the lead role of Monsieur Argan. It is also due to the fact that, while Argan is a hypochondriac, Molière suffered from dire, real-life ailments that caused him to collapse on stage during just his fourth performance. He died soon afterward. Such dark irony does not haunt his lighthearted comedy, though, and so it has floated, for more than 350 years, from one fizzy reinterpretation to the next. The latest, adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher and produced by Red Bull Theater, is a loosey-goosey affair. The vibe is French farce à la The Marx Brothers. The company is a puff pastry stuffed with ham. And the story is King Lear, but with enema jokes.
When Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life premiered a few days before Christmas in 1946, New York Times reviewer Bosley Crowther was not exactly filled with glad tidings. “The weakness of this picture,” he bah-humbugged, “is the sentimentality of it—its illusory concept of life.” He observed that the small-town denizens represented in the film, “all resemble theatrical attitudes rather than average realities.” In a return engagement of Irish Repertory Theatre’s It’s a Wonderful Life! A Live Radio Play, Anthony E. Palermo’s adaptation of the film’s screenplay unapologetically leans into the sentimentality and accentuates the theatrical attitudes to deliver a sparkling and joyful Yuletide delight.