Below is a calendar of theater opening* in September, with some starry and inventive fare, including a herd of life-size buffaloes! Jasmine Amy Rogers comes back to Broadway after “Boop!” with “School Girls…” while Lupita Nyong’o initiates the rotating cast in Marin Ireland’s “Pre-Existing Condition,” and David Greenspan stars in a revival of Tom Stoppard’s “The Invention of Love” There are arts events to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center, and numerous shows that address America on its 250th birthday, obliquely or directly, such as “Delirium,” Arlekin Players’ adaptation of Eugene Ionesco’s play about a bickering couple who ignore the complete catastrophe raging outside their doors, and Sarah Jones’s solo “America, Who Hurt You?” There are several other solo shows this month, including Jacob Ming-Trent’s “How Shakespeare Saved My Life”, and, direct from the Edinburgh Fringe, “Garry Starr: Classic Penguins.” There is an opera by Giuseppi Verdi, a new musical by Todrick Hall, and Taylor Mac’s 260-minute queer songfest, excerpted. Plus immersive and hybrid theater difficult to describe. But I try.
The calendar is organized chronologically by opening date*, or (if no official opening) first performance, but we must consider the dates subject to change, because of the various pathogens going around that are, like theater itself, unpredictable.
Each title below is linked to a relevant website.
Color key: Broadway: Red 🟥. Off Broadway: Blue 🟦. Off Off Broadway: Green 🟩
Digital or Hybrid Theater: Yellow 🟨. Theater festival: Orange 🟧. Immersive/site-specific/interactive/audio: Silver ⬜️.
Puppetry: Brown 🟫. Opera: Purple 🟪. Concert: 🎶. Outdoors 🌲Out of Town: 🇺🇸. Free or pay what you can: 🆓
September 1
⬜️🌲🆓 Loops (Prospect Park)
A serialized walking audio mystery through Prospect Park. There are two walks now available, ‘Lou & Abigail” and “Searchers.” Three more will unfold over the next two or three years.
September 1 – forever?
🟩SisterPlay (The Flea)
A new play inspired by the true story of playwright Elizabeth Ostler’s sister, Lisa, who died while in custody at the Salt Lake County Metro Jail.
September 1 – 13
September 2
🎶🌲Allen Ginsberg at 100 (Little Island)
An epic series of concerts, readings and park wide takeovers celebrating poet Allen Ginsberg’s centennial curated by: Thomas Bart, with a house band and different guests each night, including Justin Vivian Bond, Rufus Wainwright, Gina Gershon, Taylor Mac and Laurie Anderson
September 3
🟩Safe House (Theatre Row)
Marc Kudisch and Karen Ziemba star in L.B. Browne’s play about a dying family man’s obsession with safety in the days leading up to a U.S. presidential election
September 3 – 13
September 5
🟩Tawasol (La MaMa ETC)
One-night only presentation of El-Funoun Palestinian Dance Troupe, which asks the audience to share stories, and dance with them.
September 8
🟦Garry Starr: Classic Penguins (Studio Seaview)
A hit at Edinburgh and other Fringe festivals, Starr cleverly performs every Penguin Classic novel ever written in under an hour, and does so entirely naked, though sometimes in a penguin outfit.
September 3 to October 4, 2026
🟦The Ford/Hill Project (BAM)
An encore presentation that uses the verbatim Senate testimony of Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford about their being sexually harassed decades apart by nominee for the Supreme Court – Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, respectively. The four-person ensemble features co-creator Elizabeth Marvel, Gabby Beans, Teagle F. Bougere and Josh Hamilton
September 8–20, 2026
September 9
🟧🆓 The Judith Champion Mixfest 2026 (Atlantic)
Free readings of full-length musicals by Cheeyang Ng, é boylan, and Natalie Brown. Plus on September 9 (already sold out) excerpts from three new musicals , by Ariella Serur & Sav Souza, Tommy Newman & Jaime Lozano, and Lianah Sta. Ana
September 9 – 18
September 10
🟦After All These Years (AMT Theater)’
A musical memoir of producer/songwriter Al Tapper, who appears on screen while a live company brings his songs to life
September 9 -October 10
🌲🆓Don Juan (Moliere in the Park at Prospect Park
Over the course of a single adventure-filled day, he and his loyal sidekick, Sganarelle, encounter many of the people Don Juan has betrayed. As he seduces women, defies social conventions, mocks religion, and revels in provocation, his appetite for transgression seems impossible to satisfy)
September 5–27
🟦⬜️Becoming Hamlet (Five Angels Theater)
In Damon Horowitz’s version of Shakespeare’s tragedy, audience members become scene partners to the cast, speaking lines and shaping their character.(Theatergoers are not required to participate.)
September 5 through October 3, 2026
🟧Neurotica Fest (Under St. Marks Theater)
A four-day festival of one-act plays, stand up, storytelling. etc
September 10 – 13
🟩⬜️Beyond the Stardust (The Flea)
Conceived by Niegel Smith (who also directed and choreographed) and the duo known as the Illustrious Blacks, this is an inter=galactic, live-album experience with 12 original songs, aerialists, dancers, go-go boys and girls.
September 10 – October 18.
September 11
🎶🆓🌲🟨Table of Silence Project 9/11 (Lincoln Center)
A free outdoors dance concert Friday morning (with a Thursday evening rehearsal open to the public) on Lincoln Center’s Josie Robertson Plaza, and simultaneously online, “conceived and choreographed by Jacqulyn Buglisi to commemorate the loss of life and honor the bravery of all individuals affected by acts of terror, war, and oppression.”
🎶🟨🆓Sounds of Remembrance (PAC NYC)
A free landmark concert by the New York Philharmonic and U.S. Army Field Band Soldiers’ Chorus, commemorating the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. The in-person event at capacity, but it will be simulcast.
🟩11 Reflections NYC (HERE Arts)
A commemoration of the 25th anniversary of 9/11 “centering voices that have too often been absent from the national conversation on the impact.” Created and directed by Lebanese American theatre-maker Andrea Assaf.
September 12
🟩Afterwards (La MaMa ETC)
A non-linear play by Patricia Enz based on three real-life characters, Sam Shaw (best known as the photographer of Marilyn Monroe), his son, and film actress Françoise Dorléac, who was the sister of Catherine Deneuve and died in a fiery car crash at the age of 25.
September 11 – 19
September 13
🎶🌲🆓🟨 Sounds of Remembrance: Come From Away (PAC NYC)
Former Broadway and national tour company members of Come From Away reunite in honor of the 25th anniversary of 9/11. This 100-minute open-air concert staging will be performed on the World Trade Center campus.
“The outdoor seating for this concert has reached capacity, but we warmly invite you to reserve a general admission ticket to attend a live simulcast in our indoor theater.” (This too apparently has reached capacity)
🟩Lean-To (59e59)
A hiker unexpectedly finds himself sharing a rustic lean-to shelter with a couple he doesn’t know, deep in the woods.
September 10 – October 10, 2026
September 14
🟦Pre-Existing Condition (Greenwich House Theater)
This encore production of a play written by Marin Ireland and directed by Maria Dizzia features a starry rotating cast — Lupita Nyong’o, Phillipa Soo, Susannah Flood, Hari Nef, and Edie Falco – as a woman trying to move forward after a violent relationship.
September 1 – December 19
🆓From Brooklyn to Broadway (Billie Holiday Theater)
In celebration of National Black Theater Day, a panel discussion of Broadway artists who live in Brooklyn, exploring Brooklyn’s connection to Broadway and offering a behind-the-scenes look at some of the shows heading there this season.
September 16
🟩Repro Echo: Tomorrow is Now (Repro Freedom Arts at The 14Y Theater)
Six short plays and four modern dances by women exploring the intersection of reproductive health and environmental justice
September 9 – October 4
September 17
🟦America, Who Hurt You? (National Black Theater and TFANA at Polonsky)
It’s America’s 250th birthday, and writer and performer Sarah Jones (Tony winner for one of her previous solo shows “Bridge & Tunnel”) is dragging the whole country onto the therapy couch to mark the occasion.
September 10 – October 4
🟦Truly, Howard Hughes (York at Theatre at St. Jean’s)
In this new musical, Howard Robard Hughes Jr.—the aviator, filmmaker, businessman, and famously reclusive billionaire—looks back on the events that shaped his extraordinary journey.
September 9 – October 4
🟦The Hope Theory (at NY City Center)
Illusionist Helder Guimarães blends autobiographical storytelling about his immigration to America from Portugal with sleight-of-hand magic.
September 9 – December 6
September 18
⬜️🟫Return of the Buffalo: Tatanka Owe Akupi (St. Ann’s Warehouse)
Over two days, a herd of life-size buffalo puppets will gather in downtown Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan, encountering live music, poetry, ceremonies, and performances along the way.
September 18 and 19
🟦Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library (59e59)
In this play by Jenny Lyn Bader set in 1933 Berlin and based on a true story, a young Gestapo officer interrogates a married graduate student, who is better known now as the writer Hannah Arendt (author of “The Banality of Evil.”)
September 12 – October 25
🟩Crazy Mama: A True Story of Love and Madness
Sharon Scott Williams’ adaptation of her memoir about the effect of her mother’s mental illness on the family. Linda Purl stars.
September 16 – October 18, 2026
🟩Happy Days (Brave New World at Loading Dock Theater)
A revival of Samuel Beckett’s play in which a woman is happily buried in a mound of dirt, featuring real-life married couple Claire Beckman and John Edmond Morgan as Winnie and Willie.
September 17–October 3.
🌲🎶🆓Bark of Millions (Delacorte)
Taylor Mac and Matt Ray’s electrifying music of their epic rock opera meditation on queerness. This is excerpts from the full 260-minute piece, which I saw in 2024. (my review.)
September 18-20
September 20
🟩The Invention of Love (The MAP at Theaterlab)
David Greenspan stars in a revival of Tom Stoppard’s play about poet, scholar and unrequited gay lover A.E. Housman on his final journey across the River Styx
September 17 – October 3
September 22
🟪Macbeth (Metropolitan Opera)
In this production of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera based on Shakespeare’s tragedy, Quinn Kelsey is the Scottish king haunted by the ghosts of his murderous ascent to the throne, opposite Lise Davidsen, “the world’s reigning dramatic soprano,” as the power-mad Lady Macbeth,
⬜️🟨Bad Practices (Thirdwing at Chain Theater)
“Bad Practices” is an umbrella title for two different plays — and five streamed episodes. “This May Sting” is about doctors. “Make Them All Pay” is about lawyers. They are on the third and fourth floor, as if sharing office space; udiences can take the elevator trip to see both plays on the same night or come back at different times over the run.
September 22 – October 4
September 24
🟦Delirium (Arlekin Players at The Space at Irondale)
Igor Golyak’s adaptation of Eugene Ionesco’s 1962 absurdist one-act “Delire a Deux” (Frenzy for Two), stars Andrey Burkovskiy and Chulpan Khamatova as a bickering middle-class couple who are trapped inside a small apartment, oblivious to the violence — a war? societal collapse? – that rages outside
September 8 – October 24
🟩⬜️Ectoplasm (spit&vigor)
A private séance in the year 1912 at the home of the roguish and eccentric Madame Montfort. A mysterious guest interrupts. Guests sit among the players.
September 24 – October 31
🟩Thomas & Me (Frank Shiner Theater)
Written, directed and starring Thomas Ellenson, a theater artists with cerebral palsy who uses a power wheelchair and communicates through an iPad, the play with music follows a young man who revisits his life and his many challenges as he prepares to ask his girlfriend to marry him,
September 24-28
🟩Maedeup: Weaving Shin Yun-bok (La MaMa)
Inspired by the visual world of Shin Yun-bok, an 18th-century Korean painter, the non-verbal show turns his artwork into living events in real time.
September 24-27
September 25
🟦Human Things (West End Theatre)
Victoria Clark stars in this play by Joshua Owen about two couples on a remote atoll in the South Pacific, one of them stranded, the other couple (or at least half the couple) there to study migratory birds.
September 12 to October 18
September 27
🟦How Shakespeare Saved My Life (Red Bull at Public Theater)
Calling on the Bard and a host of genius rappers, half-crazed preachers, and soulful poets to throw him a lifeline, writer and performer Jacob Ming-Trent (Merry Wives, The Harder They Come) takes us on a propulsive ride that reaffirms the power of language.
September 15 – October 18
🟦Midnight (Daryl Roth Theater)
Written and directed by Todrick Hall, this musical is set in the American South during the 19th century and follows twelve characters, half of them Black, half Caucasian.
September 17 – November 8
September 28
🟥School Girls, or the African Mean Girls Play (MTC’s Samuel J. Friedman Theater)
A new production of Jocelyn Bioh’s comedy about Ghanese school girls competing in a beauty contest. Directed by Whitney White, its eight-member ensemble cast features Jasmine Amy Rogers (Boop), Patina Miller (Tony winner for Pippin) and Denee Benton (The Gilded Age). My review of the 2017 Off-Broadway production, with a different cast.
September 8 – November 1
September 29
🟦Degenerates (Playwrights Horizons)
Else Went’s play is set within the depths of an online incel community, whose members offer each other proof that the game is rigged against men
September 16 – October 11
⬜️A Ghost In Your Ear (Audible’s Minetta Lane Theater)
Tony-nominated director Jamie Armitage (Six) has devised an audio-only “immersive horror show set inside an audiobook recording session gone terrifyingly wrong.” Audience members wear headphones to catch the action.
September 29 – November 15
*Opening Night
This selection of plays is organized chronologically by opening night, but includes the dates when a show’s run starts and ends (when available.)
Opening night is usually not the same as the first performance on Broadway and Off-Broadway — although it is the same for shows in festivals and most Off-Off Broadway shows.
For Broadway and Off-Broadway, there is usually a “preview period” that can last days or weeks, sometimes months. But professional reviews are forbidden from being published until opening night, which is why I organize this calendar by opening night (when it exists and when I can find it) rather than first performance, as a way to support the continuing relevance of theater reviewing. (Shows that begin in September but don’t officially open until October will be listed in next month’s calendar.)
Check out my article: What is Broadway Opening Night? How it’s changed, why it matters.
