On stage during the first week of October: Plays about the Epstein Files. Gun violence. Black women silenced. Complicity. Sexism. Homophobia. This seems an unusual burst of political theater even for New York. Maybe it’s because the midterm elections are just a month away.
Theater Quiz for September 2026
October 2026 New York Theater Openings: Broadway Revivals, Off-Broadway Musicals, Acts of Resistance
The Week in New York Theater Reviews
School Girls, or the African Mean Girls Play
Almost a decade after we first met the students at the Aburi Girls Boarding School in Jocelyn Bioh’s breakthrough comedy, Paulina, now portrayed by Denée Benton, is as mean as ever, the meanest girl in this school in central Ghana in 1986. But she is also the most popular – until, that is, her classmates meet the new transfer student Ericka (Jasmine Amy Rogers)…The Broadway version has a longer running time, a more elaborate set and extravagant costume design, and a starrier cast than the original Off-Broadway production. But it also somehow feels slighter than it did when I saw it in 2017…
“Degenerates,” which begins in literal darkness and seems to work hard throughout its overly long running time to keep me in the dark, is a play about the incel community: Incel, short for “involuntary celibate”; community, meaning lonely men who chat online. Playwright Else Went doesn’t much like that phrase “incel community,” as she tells us in a note in the program, finding it an insult. But she has clearly done extensive research, giving what sounds like authentic voice to vitriolic characters…
“Under Siege,” an extraordinary work of collective theater written by dozens of Black women playwrights, which is being performed over the weekend in cities across America as part of Fall of Freedom, began with a conversation between playwrights Lynn Nottage and Dominique Morisseau. “Black women, whether they be politicians or artistic leaders or civil servants or artists, are finding themselves being pushed out of positions,” Nottage told the audience at the Studio Museum in Harlem right before the staged reading produced by the National Black Theater.
Czech playwright and politician Vaclav Havel, who would have turned 90 years old this week, was a different kind of president: He too had been an outsider with a visceral understanding of the connection between theater and politics, but he used it to defeat – rather than try to impose – a totalitarian regime. A dissident and a political prisoner who spent years in jail, he led his country’s “Velvet Revolution” and reluctantly became its head of state starting in 1989.
When Havel wrote “Unveiling,” in 1975, he had gained an international reputation as a playwright, but his own country’s regime banned his plays, and he was forced to work in a brewery. This did not stop his countrymen from seeing them; they were performed secretly in people’s living rooms. This is necessary context to appreciate the current revival of “Unveiling”….
“Kramer/Fauci” is billed as a verbatim re-creation of a 1993 discussion of the AIDS epidemic on C-SPAN between Dr. Anthony Fauci and Larry Kramer, but the original hour on cable didn’t feature a caller dressed as a chicken, banks of bright lights shining directly at the audience’s eyes, or a massive stage filling with soap suds. No matter. Director Daniel Fish, whose dark version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!” similarly featured some distracting avant-garde touches, nevertheless provides a useful historical perspective with this production,
The Week in New York Theater News
Andrew Rannells, Megan Hilty, Tituss Burgess, Harry Hamlin, and Lisa Rinn will star in a holiday run on Broadway of “It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play,” November 4 to January 3, 2027. Opening November 18 at the Broadhurst, the play is set in a 1940s radio studio, where a company of celebrated actors gathers to perform Frank Capra’s movie, live on-the-air, complete with a foley artist and holiday carols.
The cast for Here There Are Blueberries, opening November 9 at the Barrymore (listed alphabetically): Scott Barrow, Michelle Beck, Michael Cerveris, Kathleen Chalfant, Delia Cunningham, Brandon Flynn, Montego Glover and Conrad Ricamora. (My review of the play Off-Broadway)
The Public’s 2026-27 Season grows to 18 productions, including a free (20-minute) play by Caryl Churchill, a premiere by Elevator Repair Service, Susan Glaspell’s clasic The Verge, and Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen’s The Surge, a direct response to the Trump administration’s Operation Metro Surge that resulted in the deaths of Renée Good and Alex Pretti,
Vocalist Stella Cole will step into the role of “Gil Brentley” (pronounced Jill) in “Maybe Happy Ending,” for four weeks October 20 to November 15, 2026, during a short leave by Dez Duron, who will return November 17.
A free digital reading of American Nightmare by Lortel-commissioned playwright Hassan Abdulrazzak will stream online October 5-19, 2026. What begins as a routine negotiation in a Dubai conference room becomes a dangerous game of power, desire, and complicity. Free with RSVP
Jeremy O. Harris in Vanity Fair video interview: “Mamdani, you are calling everyone. Anyone who talks about a pothole, the subway being too hot, you are answering their call,” Harris began. “I’m doing this on Vanity Fair. Call me. Your people know me. Let’s talk about how to make theater more accessible in the city, how to bring the rents down on theater, how we do a theater rent-freeze somehow, because I think that there is something really frightening about the greatest city in the world not having the greatest culture in the world.”
Also in the interview: Why he keeps coming back to the theater:
“The reason I keep coming back to the theater is because I love it. It is my lifeblood. I think it’s the language I speak the best. It is like where collaboration feels the most fun. I think this is like sort of like amazing ideal of like middle class work, middle class honest work. If it’s if everyone’s being taken care of the way they should be taken care of, and I think that like the way in which you go to the theater and it still feels like high school in a weird way. Like tech, tech doesn’t change when you’re on Broadway. It’s still like just a bunch of people trying to figure out like what lights make the most sense behind a bunch of tables. That’s something that I think is rare, and that you don’t get in a lot of other art forms. It’s like the same feeling as high school, even when you’re doing it in 1000-person theater.”.
