Below is a preview of the theater festivals in New York City this month, which are presenting more than eighty shows, many of them far from traditional theater — call them experimental, avant-garde, mixed-genre (it’s also fine to call them weird) – at much lower ticket prices than most theater in New York.
January became the month for theater festivals in the city because of the presence of thousands of members of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters here each year for their convention.
From its peak of more than a dozen annual festivals, one after another shut down, exacerbated by the pandemic, until in 2023 there were only four. And it looked like the oldest and largest of those four, Under the Radar, would be the latest casualty, when its long-time sponsor the Public Theater simply omitted it from its next-season announcement last June and then, responding to inquiries, announced: “The Public has made the difficult decision for UTR to go on hiatus, with no expected return date at this time.”
But then something unprecedented occurred. More than a dozen other theaters, from BAM and Lincoln Center to La MaMa and the Invisible Dog, banded together to sponsor the festival collectively this year.
Adding to that quasi miracle, several new festivals have sprouted this month.
It’s worth sorting through the festival offerings yourself (their titles below are linked to their websites.) The shows are too numerous, and their descriptions often too cryptic, for me to offer a thorough play-by-play preview. But here is a rundown of the seven festivals, going roughly in chronological order (after the two biggest ones), with some highlights, first impressions and suggestions:
Under The Radar Festival
January 5-21
The 19th annual Under the Radar, the granddaddy of January theater festivals, for the first time sponsored by a consortium of Off and Off-Off Broadway theaters, has a new motto: “Three weekends. 23 shows. 17 venues.” In keeping with the festival’s tradition, the shows are mostly experimental, and more than half come from abroad.
Shows We Know
Let me start with three shows, with acclaimed earlier runs in New York, that are getting encore productions in the festival, and a fourth by a company I much admire:
- “Public Obscenities,” (Polonsky Shakespeare Center, Jan 17-21) a bilingual play written and directed by Shayok Misha Chowdhury, a Bengali American poet and playwright who lives in Brooklyn, tells the story of a gay Bengali American visiting with his Black boyfriend to his grandfather’s home in Kolkata, with a mission to interview LGBT residents for a documentary, when he makes a discovery about his family. My review.
- Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin In Our Own Words (BRIC, Jan 10-21 ) was one of the two shows on the bill called “Short Trip” by exiled Russian director Dmitry Krymov. I saw the other one, Three Love Stories Near a Railroad, which riffed on stories by Hemingway and O’Neill, a show full of physical clowning and alluring off-kilter anarchy. Everybody said that the riff on Pushkin was even better.
- this house is not a home (Abrons, Jan 6-14) is Neil Harris’s “furious, dance-filled eulogy for Harris’s friend Trevor Bazile” (as one critic put it), that takes place against the backdrop of an inflatable mausoleum that turns from children’s bounce castle to “an embattled U.S. capital, and a simulacrum of superficial liberal empathy” (as another critic described it.)
- Our Class (BAM, Jan 12-21) tells the story of ten Polish classmates — five Jewish and five Catholic — who grow up as friends and neighbors, then turn on one another with life and death consequences. Inspired by real life events surrounding a horrific 1941 pogrom in a small Polish village, the play is the latest from Arlekin Players, a company founded by Igor Golyak, a Ukrainian-born Jew. The company probsbly best known for The Orchard, which starred Jessica Hecth and Mikhail Baryshnikov, has three specialties: Updated versions of Russian classics, shows that explore Jewish life, and cutting-edge digital theater, sometimes all three at once.
Avant-garde riffs on classic theater
Hamlet | Toilet, (Japan Society)
William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, A Radical Retelling by Cliff Cardinal (NYU Skirball)
Of The Nightingale I Envy The Fate, feminist adaptation of “The Oresteia, (La MaMa)
Two works that involve books
The Eagle and the Tortoise (BRIC). Audiences read a hand-made book that tells the story of the transformation of a young student from symbol of leftist resistance to proxy soldier in an American war.
The First Bad Man (Lincoln Center), a book club based on the novel of the same name by Miranda July
A sort of musical
Queens of Sheba (Lincoln Center, Jan 5-13) features four Black women who call out the bigotry they’ve encountered, but also sing a cappella versions of songs made famous by Tina Turner, Diana Ross and Aretha Franklin.
A smorgasbord
UFO, (Jan 10-21) a six-show, sixteen-performance series of works-in-progress from some exciting experimental theater-makers, Including Zora Howard, Sinking Ship Productions and Theater in Quarantine, Matt Romein with Peter Mills Weiss and Julia Mounsey, Penny Arcade,
Holland Andrews and yuniya edi kwon, and Jenn Kidwell
Exponential Festival
“Roar,” “Natural Studies,” “Puppy Moon,” “Movable Pieces”
Jan 5 – Feb 4
The ninth annual Exponential Festival offers sixteen shows at seven Brooklyn venues plus Exponential’s YouTube channel. (Check out on YouTube, for example, Kennie Zhou’s “Puppy Moon“, January 22 for free, a mockumentary that takes on the perspective of a digital voyeur.)
The festival offers some of the longest and most vivid titles since the death of the New York International Fringe Festival: Opening night marks the debut of two shows, “Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods,” (Loading Dock in Fort Greene, Jan 5-13) which is so popular that it’s already sold out for all five performance (although they do have a waiting list), and, even more elaborate, “Being Up in Here and All the Other Businesses that Don’t Concern You OR When You See a Buncha Black People Running, What Do You Do?” (The Brick, Jan 5 – 13)
Unfortunately many of the blurbs for the Exponential shows don’t conjure up a clear sense of what they’ll be like (other than “different”), at least not for someone who is as literal-minded as I am. “Natural Studies” (The Brick Jan 18-20) is a double bill by thingNY, “a collective of composer-performers who fuse electronic and acoustic chamber music with new opera, improvisation, theater, text, song and installation.” The first half is entitled “You Against Nature” and is “based on the decadent, French classic, Against Nature. It is a tale of modern day self-isolation, attempts at life-hacking, and nihilistic indulgence taken to extraordinary lengths.” The second show on the bill, “Mouthful” “is situated in the orbit of a large communal table and explores ancestry, lineage, and linguistic transmission through food and digestion, through blood, and through community and family structures.”
A notable outlier in the festival in both title (which is short) and description (which is clear), is Roar! (Cloud City, Jan 11-13), described as “a rock musical based on a true story about the making of the most dangerous, most expensive home movie in Hollywood history — the 1981 movie Roar, starring Tippi Hedren and 100 lions, tigers and other untrained big cats.” (Those dangerous predators are in the musical, we’re assured, but “played by human actors.”)
The International Fringe Encore Series
SoHo Playhouse
January 4 – February 11
Nine shows that debuted in various fringe festivals, including three from Edinburgh, such as “Bacon,” (Jan 4-28), a confrontation between two students that exposes toxic masculinity, and “It’s a Motherf**king Pleasure,” (Jan 4-21) by Flawbored, a disability-led theater company that satirizes attitudes towards the disabled. “Split Lip” (Jan 30 and 31) is a solo show from Australian fringe festivals by Blake Anderson, who portrays a character with dissociative identity disorder, presented in “spoken-word lip-synching” (a technique that worked much better than one might have expected in the Broadway play “Dana H.”)
PhysFestNYC
Stella Adler Center for the Arts
Jan 5-14
A first festival of physical theater, a genre of theatrical performance that tells stories primarily through physical movement, promises workshops, panels, parties and sixteen shows. Among the most intriguing: War and Play: A Clown Odyssey of Survival (Jan 6 and 7), which follows three clowns through Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine; Why I Live at the P.O/Dearly Departed, (Jan 12) a double bill, the first based on a short story by Eudora Welty, the second inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead in which a widower tries (comically) to deliver a eulogy.
Prototype Festival
January 10-21
The eleventh annual festival of opera theater and musical theater presents nine works in venues in Manhattan and Brooklyn, outdoors, and online. The most exciting is Terce: A Practical Brevery (Irondale, Jan 10-Feb 4) because it’s by Heather Christian, whose Oratorio for Living Things was one of the best works of theater in 2022. This new non-narrative song cycle is sung by a community choir of 30-plus caregivers and makers, and intended as a “wild meditation/celebration of the sacred mothers alive in all of us.”
“Adoration” (Sheen Center Jan 12-20) is an adaptation of Atom Egoyan’s film of the same name, centering on Simon, a high school student who reimagines a historical terrorist attack as a tragic event involving his parents.
“Angel Island” (BAM, Jan 10-13) is named after the immigration station in San Francisco Bay, that Chinese immigrants passed through between 1910 and 1940, facing mass discrimination under the Chinese Exclusion Act. Composer Huang Ruo and director Matthew Ozawa weave a requiem from the century-old poetry engraved on the detention center’s walls
“Swann” (online, Jan 10-21) is a digital aria based on William Dorsey Swann, the first self-identified “queen of drag” in the US. Who was arrested for organizing drag balls in Washington, DC in the latter part of the 19th century.
The Fire This Time Festival
The Wild Project
January 15-28.
Features the 15th annual program of a half dozen ten-minute plays by emerging Black playwrights.
Next Stage Festival
Second Stage
January 31 – March 11
Not really a January festival, this presentation of five new works by early-career playwrights starts with “The Apiary” by Kate Douglass: Two lab assistants hatch a plan twenty-years in the future that could change the world. All they need are a few volunteers. The play is directed by Kate Whoriskey (“Sweat” and “Clyde’s”)
