59E59 Theaters

The 1718 publication Mrs. Mary Eales's Receipts is commonly credited as the first English cookbook to include a recipe for ice cream. Danny Tieger's play, directed by Ryan Emmons for No.11 Productions, imagines Mary—whose clients allegedly included the notoriously indulgent Queen Anne—presenting her culinary creations (in the mode of Julia Child) while reflecting on the personal journey that has brought her where she is. In keeping with the theme, No.11 has enlisted Ample Hills Creamery to create a custom flavor—cream cheese ice cream with butter cake, toffee chips and caramel—for the audience's delectation. 

59E59's second annual Amplify Festival, devoted to the work of playwright Chisa Hutchinson (Somebody's Daughter), concludes with the NYC premiere of this fraught drama about a rural Marylander whose desire to join a white supremacist group is at odds with the results of his ancestry test. Jade King Carroll directs the production for Primary Stages, which helped develop the play and featured it in the 2018 edition of its Fresh Ink Reading Series. Daniel Abeles, Molly Carden, Luke Robertson, Tobias Segal, Andrea Syglowski, Amber Reauchean Williams and Victor Williams form the cast.

The gritty LAByrinth Theater Company gets down to the skin with short, back-to-back test runs of two dramas, mounted as works-in-progress with miminal technical fuss: Seth Zvi Rosenfeld's House of Blue Robes (Mar 7–16), directed by Brian Roff, in which cultural worlds collide in a Hell's Kitchen apartment in 1985; and Madeline Barr's Recurring (Mar 21–30), directed by John Gould Rubin, a magical-realist portrait of a woman whose life is still shaped by past trauma. (The shows cost $30 apiece, or $40 for both.)