Theater for the New City

For whatever good it does her, Briana Bartenieff is a nepo grandbaby of the Off-Off Broadway scene: Her grandparents Crystal Field and George Bartenieff founded Theater for the New City in 1971, and Field still runs it today. It was at TNC that she first put pen to paper as an adolescent playwright, and now—all grown up—she comes home to the complex with her first full-length musical: the tale of an underhanded con artist who trades the prospect of romance for money but winds up falling for one of her victims. Bartenieff directs the premiere, and wrote the libretto to music by J.H. Greenwell.

Roberto Monticello's drama, inspired by stories told to him by friends and family members who survived the Second World War, is set during the Nazi occupation of Paris and centers on a fictional café and bordello that is commandeered for use by German officers but secretly provides assistance to Jews and members of the French Resistance. Lissa Moira directs the production, which includes period music and features a cast of 20.

Writer-director Barbara Kahn, who has been presenting plays at Theater for the New City for more than three decades, returns with a new work that takes tonal inspiration from The Twilight Zone. A married couple traveling at night is led astray by a faulty GPS and winds up in an unfamiliar and enigmatic new locations, where they are presented with three historical vignettes that may have some wisdom to impart.