Off Broadway shows, reviews, tickets and listings

Five college girls face a big test of their friendship when they stay up together to polish off their final coursework in Natalie Margolin's new play, directed by Jaki Bradley. Expect, if not outright slumber-party games, at least some Adderall-driven version of Truth or Dare. Tony nominees Julia Lester (Into the Woods) and Kathryn Gallagher (Jagged Little Pill) share the stage with Kristine Froseth, Havana Rose Liu and Alyah Chanelle Scott in the world premiere.

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.

Urban Stages presents the winners of its open-submission Dynamic Duos writing competetion in a double bill of one-act, two-character plays: Lynda Crawford's The Audit, about a straightlaced, ex-military IRS agent finds unexpected connections with a wild-living hippie songwriter; and Juan Ramirez Jr.'s The American Dream, about a would-be immigrant trying to be smuggled across the U.S. border. Joel Ripka and Disnie Sebastien perform the former, directed by Leigh Selting, and Ramirez and Libe Barer costar in the latter, directed by Maria Mileaf.

Singer-songwriter Dina Fanai's mythopoetic original musical, which draws inspiration from the Sufi mysticism of Rumi and the analytic acuity of Joseph Campbell, returns for an encore run after a successful workshop in January, directed once more by Dodd Loomis. Jenna Rubaii plays the title heroine on journey of spirtitual discovery; the large supporting cast is led by Broadway ringers Constantine Maroulis (Rock of Ages) and Maya Days (Aida), and also includes Madeline Serrano and Fanai herself.

Michael Sgouros and Brenda Bell's child-oriented musical adaptation of the classic folktale— as rendered in books by Jeanne-Marie LePrince de Beaumont and Madame De Villeneuve—celebrates a bookish girl's ability to see past the hirsute appearance or her kidnapper. Pierce Cassedy directs this 70-minute production; the first performance of each two-show day is preceded by an hour-long arts workshop at which kids can meet members of the company and create a mask to take home.

The Irish Rep gathers three short works by Nobel savage Samuel Beckett in a tryptich directed by the company's own Ciarán O’Reilly. The always compelling F. Murray Abraham (Amadeus) stars as a bitter man reflecting on his wasted life as he listens to recordings he made 30 years earlier in the evening's longest piece, Krapp's Last Tape (1958). That show is preceded by a pair of stark curtain-raisers: Not I (1972), a mouth-running monologue performed by Sarah Street; and Play (1964), in which Street, Roger Dominic Casey and Kate Forbes play a trio of inurned figures who babble about their love triangle. 

Mamma mia! That's a spicy comedy! Matthew Lombardo's one-act two-hander, party inspired by his own experience, traces the volatile relationship between a formidable Italian-American woman and her less self-assured son gay son. Caroline Aaron (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) and Matt Doyle (Company) share the stage, directed by Noah Himmelstein.

Sam Shepard's 1978 dysfunctional-family play Curse of the Starving Class, a dark satire of the American Dream set on a crumbling California farm, was revived at the Signature just six years ago, and the New Group's current revival of it in the same theater complex provides no good reason to see it anew. Christian Slater and Calista Flockhart are deeply miscast as the screwy Tate parents—each trying to sell the place out from under the other—as is the gentle-miened Cooper Hoffman as their violent son. (The scenes between Slater and Hoffman should be ticking time bombs; instead, they just tick.) Stella Marcus fares better as the outlaw Lisa Simpson of the factious clan, and Jeb Kreager adds a jolt of real energy in his brief turn as a local barman. But the star of this version is unquestionably a fluffy live sheep named Lois, who provides moments of authenticity that are otherwise rare in Scott Elliott's torpid, disjointed production. When Lois takes a poop onstage, at least she does it literally.—Adam Feldman

In this two-person thriller by Rajiv Joseph (Guards at the Taj), a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal at the turn of the 21st century veers by accident into a secret world of State Department intrigue. Abubakr Ali, Mia Barron costar in the show's world premiere at Manhattan Theatre Club, which commissioned it; May Adrales directs.

This ensemble play by Abe Koogler (Fulfillment Center), about nature lovers in the Pacific Northwest investigating the disappearance of an orca pod, was a highlight of the 2023 Summerworks festival. Now Clubbed Thumb brings it back for a longer encore run at the Public, directed once again by Arin Arbus (Waiting for Godot). Returning original cast members—including Crystal Finn, Jan Leslie Harding, Armando Riesco and stage treasure Maryann Plunkett (The Notebook)—are joined by newbies Miriam Silverman, Mia Katigbak, Arnie Burton, Ryan King and Carmen Zilles.

The jokes are well-worn but the costumes are worn well in this campy new musical, which is exactly what you'd expect: high heels, big hair, sassy one-liners and enough RuPaul’s Drag Race contestants to fill their own season. The script—by Tomas Costanza, Ashley Gordon and Justin Andrew Honard (a.k.a. Alaska Thunderf**k)—provides a fishnet-thin plot about two rival drag clubs facing different sets of troubles. But Marco Marco’s sculptural outfits are bejeweled works of art, the wigs are amazing and director-choreographer Spencer Liff works in some terrific hairography. The current cast includes Alaska, Nick Adams and Adam Pascal.—Melissa Rose Bernardo

Role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons are inherently theatrical: The players are all playing roles, after all. But the idea of building an actual stage show around the game—an entirely improvised one, guided by audience suggestions and decisions—seems, well, a little dicey. But an element of the unexpected is one of the things that makes this goofy fantasy show such fun. Whether or not you know much about D&D going in, it’s an adventuring party you won't want to miss.—Shaye Weaver

The dramatic archeologists of the Mint Theater Company bring another obscure play to light: a 1915 political satire by the British playwright Harold Brighouse (Hobson's Choice), in which a working-class Mancunian with a gift for oratory stands for election to the House of Commons. Matt Dickson directs the play's quite extremely overdue New York debut, which features Daniel Marconi in the title role. 

The expert Jack O'Brien directs the latest revival of Henrik Ibsen's once-scandalous 1882 play about the roots of deadly social disease, a classic indictment of bourgeois hypocrisy. Stage A-listers Lily Rabe, Billy Crudup and Hamish Linklater star opposite second-generation acting stars Levon Hawke and Ella Beatty in this Lincoln Center Theater production, which marks the New York debut of a new translation by Ireland's Mark O’Rowe. 

Samuel D. Hunter's consistently beautiful plays are like ships in a bottle: exquisitely crafted and detailed depictions of life in rural Idaho that explore recurring themes with endless variety and sympathy. His new two-hander, directed by Jack Serio, stars Brian J. Smith as a gay artist who has fled his hometown to live in the Netherlands, and Paul Sparks as his older half-brother and former bully, who reaches out when their mother is dying. The play renders their relationship with touching delicacy: the back and forth of two damaged people for whom reconciliation may or may not be in the cards.—Adam Feldman

Soho Rep, having recently been squeezed from its longtime home on Walker Street, begins a several-year residence at Playwrights Horizons with the U.S. premiere of Nia Akilah Robinson's debut play: an ambitious exploration of the treatment of black bodies in America that moves between 1830s Philadelphia—when grave robbery for medical research was not uncommon—and a modern summer camp on the same location. The implacable Crystal Lucas-Perry (Ain't No Mo') and current Juilliard student Clarissa Vickerie play the central mother-daughter pairs in both parts of the play, joined by Miles G. Jackson and the mononymic Holiday as men they encounter. Off Broadway newcomer Evren Odcikin directs. 

Julián Mesri, who co-adapted last year's Comedy of Errors for the Public Theater's Mobile Unit, satirizes the conventions of magical realism and the practice of economic imperialism in Latin America through this farcical tale of a woman left to run her husband's factory, an outpost of a multinational corporation called Cantilever—in a surrealistic jungle. Kathleen Capdesuñer directs INTAR Theatre's world-premiere production, whose cast includes include Octavia Chavez-Richmond, Reece dos Santos, Dario Ladani Sanchez, Keren Lugo, Lilian Rebelo and Katie Rodriguez.

Back in 2018, the oral historian and producer Jennifer Ashley Tepper—a gale force of musical-theater fandom—created a series of concerts at 54 Below devoted to airing unheard songs from the trunk of Jonathan Larson, who died suddenly on the eve of his breakthrough with Rent. Now that project has been expanded into an Off Broadway revue with a very talented cast: Adam Chanler-Berat, Taylor Iman Jones, Lauren Marcus, Andy Mientus and Jason Tam. John Simpkins directs; the orchestrations are by Charlie Rosen, co-arranged with Natalie Tenenbaum. 

National Black Theatre presents the U.S. premiere of an original theater piece, directed by the Dutch team of Ira Kip and Winston “Winnie” Bergwijn, that explores the reclamation of Black identity in the shadows of mass migration, racism, colonialism and war. The text by Munganyende, Veronique Efomi and Smita James is in English, peppered with other languages (Papiamentu, Tigrinya, Sranantongo, Kikongo, Kimbundu, Lingala, Portuguese and Dutch). It is performed by its original Netherlands company: Saron Tesfahuney, Revé Terborg, Rubiën Vyent, Ayesha Jordan, Melvin Aroma, Daniel Pando and Giovanni Pisas. (The 2024 Dutch tour kicked off, appropriately enough, in Haarlem.)

Greta Quispe plays a terminally ill Latina woman who gets enmeshed in a crisis of healthcare and alternative medicine in a family dramedy by Queens playwright Anna Capunay. Gregory Lipson directs a cast that also includes Yessenia Rivas, Danny Borba, J. Santiago Suarez and Jared Trevino. 

The versatile playwright Bess Wohl (Small Mouth Sounds) looks at Ohio women's dreams of liberation in two time periods—1970 and fifty years later—in a world premiere directed for the Roundabout by Whitney White (Jaja's African Hair Braiding). The highly promising cast comprises Betsy Aidem, Susannah Flood, Kristolyn Lloyd, Adina Verson, Irene Sofia Lucio, Audrey Corsa, Kayla Davion and Charlie Thurston.

Audience members choose their own paths through a specially designed multifloor complex in the Financial District in this all-new immersive theatrical experience from Emursive, the producers of Punchdrunk's Sleep No More. Dozens of performers evoke life in the Gilded Age through narratives loosely inspired by real New York City history as well as literary sources like the Faust legend and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. Teddy Bergman directs the show, which is written by Jon Ronson and features scenic design Gabriel Hainer Evansohn and costumes by Emilio Sosa.

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The Russian writer-director Dmitry Krymov, working in exile in NYC since the invasion of Ukraine, returns to La MaMa's breast with an experimental dark comedy about anxiety, mourning and puppets. The show is performed by a cast of ten actors, puppeteers and musicans. 

Vinny DePonto reunites with the team behind his 2013 show Charlatan, co-writer Josh Koenigsberg and directeor Andrew Neisler, for an ambitious new theatrical magic act that revolves largely around audience participation. DePonto is an engaging crowd worker, and he has devised several clever variations on the standard mentalist repertoire, so the show is a pleasant diversion. But a conceptual throughline about dementia feels underdeveloped, while its corresponding physical set is overdone: a high-concept space that at first evokes a 1970s office and then morphs into walls of metal deposit boxes that represent where memories are stored. What should be impressive reveals sometimes get lost in elaborate set-ups, which is too bad: A mind trick is a terrible thing to waste.—Adam Feldman

Rotating casts of dynamos star in a new comedy by View master Joy Behar that looks at love, marriage and the end of both. Behar herself anchors the first cast (Jan 29–Feb 23) alongside Tovah Feldshuh, Susie Essman and Adrienne C. Moore. The second (Feb 26–Mar 23) comprises Susan Lucci, Cathy Moriarty, Tonya Pinkins and Judy Gold; the third (Mar 26–Apr 20) includes Veanne Cox, Jackie Hoffman and Andrea Navedo, joined by Gina Gershon at the start of April. Randal Myler directs the world premiere. 

Brian Lee Huynh stars as Toraichi Kono, a Japanese immigrant to the U.S. who served as Charlie Chaplin's valet for nearly 20 years but was confined to an internment camp amid the anti-Japanese fervor of World War II, in a historical drama by Philip W. Chung. Jeff Liu directs the world premiere for the Pan Asian Repertory Theatre. The cast of eight also includes Kiyo Takami as Kono's wife, Conlan Ledwith as Chaplin and Emma Kikue as Paulette Goddard. 

The Wooster Group has been on the front lines of postmodern, tech-forward, intensely detailed avant-garde performance in America for 50 years, and much of its recent output has a somewhat haunted quality. This latest piece revisits a 1978 piece by original members Elizabeth LeCompte and Spalding Gray, Nayatt School, which was Gray's first foray into the monologue format that would later bring him worldwide fame. Fellow Wooster founder Kate Valk shares archival video of Gray and reflects on the original production; she then joins other performers in re-creating scenes from it, including portions of T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party (an LP of which figures into Gray's monologue). Wooster deity LeCompte designs and directs the production, in which troupe regulars Volk, Ari Fliakos, Andrew Maillet, Michaela Murphy and Omar Zubair are augmented by guest artists Suzzy Roche, Scott Shepherd and Maura Tierney.

The York Theatre Company's New2NY series offers spare stagings of original musicals. This year's spring lineup begins with Platinum Dreams, the latest effort to rescue the flop 1978 musical Platinum, which originally starred Alexis Smith as a 1940s movie-musical star striving to make a comeback in the 1970s. The score by composer Gary William Friedman and lyrics by Will Holt—who previously collaborated on The Me Nobody Knows—remains, but the books that Holt wrote with Bruce Vilanch for the Broadway production and by himself for a previous revision, Sunset, have been replaced with a new one by Friedman's wife, the singer-songwriter Stevie Holland (who also contributes new lyrics). The York's acting artistic director, Joseph Hayward, directs; Holland plays the central role, flanked by Conor Ryan (Desperate Measures) and Jovan E’Sean (Cats: The Jellicle Ball) as two younger men in the music industry. 

D.A. Mindell's play juxtaposes Adam and Eve in the aftermath of their expulsion from Eden with the dilemma of a modern-day pregnant transgender man and his twin sister, a genetic scientist who has made an important discovery about gender dysphoria. Jess McLeod directs the world premiere for Second Stage, which has recently been cast out of its own little corner of heaven—midtown's Tony Kiser Theater—but has found shelter at the Signature Theatre complex.

The Village Theater Group revives Arthur Miller's 1968 family drama, in which estranged brothers sift through their dead father's belongings and weigh their value, ethical and otherwise. Noelle McGrath directs the cast of four: Bill Barry as the loyal cop Victor, Janelle Farias Sando as his dissastisfied wife, Cullen Wheeler as his wealthy brother and Michael Durkin as Solomon, a very old but still savvy appraiser. 

The Irish stage and screen actor and international lust object Paul Mescal, who beefed up to star in Gladiator 2, now plays the most famous sexy brute in dramatic history: Stanley Kowalski, the role that made Marlon Brando a star in Tennessee Williams's steamy 1947 masterwork. Patsy Ferran co-stars as the cracked belle Blanche DuBois; Anjana Vasan is Stanley's wife, Stella, and Dwane Walcott is his poker pal Mitch. This revival, which premiered at London's Almeida Theatre in 2022, is directed by Rebecca Frecknell, who also guided the misguided Broadway revival of Cabaret, so be prepared for some wildly stylized choices. Tickets through BAM have already sold out, so if you want to get your hot hands on a ticket, you'll have to depend on the kindness of scalpers.

A young wrestler begins physical and spiritual training at a Tokyo sumo facility in this weighty new drama by Lisa Sanaye Dring, whose New York premiere is directed by Ralph B. Peña for Ma-Yi Theater Company and the Public Theater. The cast includes Scott Keiji Takeda, Red Concepción, Michael Hisamoto, Ahmad Kamal, Earl T. Kim and David Shih.

Tony Sportiello and Al Tapper's Zanna Don't!–ish new musical comedy imagines a world where gayness is the norm and a pair of musical-theater writers entertain the crazy notion of writing a show about heterosexual love. Director-choreographer Taavon Gamble directs the production, whose cast is led by Jeffrey Kringer, Matthew Liu and Brogan Nelson.

Joshua Harmon (Prayer for the French Republic) reteams with his Significant Other director, Trip Cullman, for a new dark comedy in which original Into the Woods star Joanna Gleason plays a dying woman who asks her young playwright grandson—played by Andrew Barth Feldman, an estwhile Evan Hansen—to write a vicious dramatic exposé of their family. The estimable Jeanine Serralles (Catch as Catch Can) is also in the cast of the play's world premiere at Manhattan Theatre Club. 

LaChanze, who shone in the overdue 2021 Broadway premiere of Alice Childress's Trouble in Mind, makes her directorial debut at CSC with another work by the pioneering playwright: a 1969 drama, set against the backdrop of the 1964 Harlem riot, that she originally wrote for the Boston public-television series On Being Black. Grantham Coleman plays a painter working on a triptych about Black womanhood, and Olivia Washington—the daughter of Denzel and sister of John David—plays a downtrodden woman he thinks would be a good model for the unflattering final panel.